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Cicely has got problems.

Stuck working a crappy job to take care of her deadbeat father, she’s living just a step above homelessness in a town ruled by a remote, affluent elite and stricken with a catastrophic outbreak of red tide. But then Cicely makes a friend, perhaps her first, and she starts dreaming of a way out of her predicament. It’s a scheme that involves stolen placentas and a dangerous outlaw doula that leads to a confrontation with the malignant forces around her and the mother who abandoned her as a child.

In this grim, comic debut novel, author Cooper Levey-Baker tells a bizarre coming-of-age story in prose that is lyrical, gross, tragic, goofy, and maybe even a bit tender.