ABBY BARDI

Inspiration has struck Julie – all it took was her mother's secret.

When thirty-seven-year-old slacker-chef Julie Barlow’s mother dies, her older sister Pam finds a cache of old letters from someone who appears to be their mother’s former lover. The date stamped on the letters combined with a difficult relationship with her father lead Julie to conclude that the letters’ author was a Native American man named J. Fallingwater who must have been her real father. Inspired by her new identity, Julie uses her small inheritance to make her dream come true: she opens a restaurant called Falling Water that is an immediate success, and life seems to be looking up. Her sister Norma is pressuring everyone to sell their mother’s house, and her brother Ricky is a loveable drunk who has yet to learn responsibility, but the family seems to be turning a corner. But when tragedy strikes, Julie and her siblings have to stick together more than ever before. In the process, Julie solves the mystery of J. Fallingwater’s identity and finds out what love and family really mean.

Filled with soulful humor and quiet pathos, Abby Bardi’s boldly drawn first novel marks the debut of a joyfully talented chronicler of the quest for connection in contemporary life.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF FRED

"The Book of Fred is one of the most engaging and original novels I've read in ages. Laugh-out-loud funny, deeply compassionate, frighteningly real, it is that rarest of all modern novels: a book that actually gives you hope."
Sheri Holman, author of The Dress Lodger


"Please make a reservation on a long-distance train, just to read this novel! With rare insight, acerbic wit, and a bold storytelling voice, Abby Bardi brings a group of marginalized folks into the center of our imaginations. The Book of Fred is an edgy, hilarious family story, and even manages quiet wisdom within all its wild incidents, and general cacophony. Every character could easily speak Henry James' wonderful sentence: "Live all you can." Abby Bardi writes with brilliant pathos —she's got a dramatic and comic genius."
Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and The Haunting of L.


"Quirky, timely, warm-hearted and wise, The Book of Fred offers an original take on a timeless question: what does 'family' mean? Abby Bardi answers with the many small moments of grace that illuminate her tale, as the four unforgettable characters move through divorce, alienation, bureaucracy and high school, breaking apart, falling down, and emerging stronger than ever."
Jennifer Weiner, author of Good In Bed
Mary Fred Anderson, raised in an isolated fundamentalist sect whose primary obsessions seem to involve an imminent Apocalypse and the propagation of the name “Fred,” is hardly your average fifteen-year-old. She has never watched TV, been to a supermarket, or even read much of anything beyond the inscrutable dogma laid out by the prophet Fred. But this is all before Mary Fred’s whole world tilts irrevocably on its axis: before her brothers, Fred and Freddie, take sick and pass on to the place the Reverend Thigpen calls “the World Beyond”; before Mama and Papa are escorted from the Fredian Outpost in police vans; and Mary Fred herself is uprooted and placed in foster care with the Cullison family. It is here, at Alice Cullison’s suburban home outside Washington, D.C., where everything really changes—for all parties involved.

Mary Fred’s new guardian, Alice, is a large-hearted librarian who, several years after her divorce, can’t seem to shake her grief and loneliness. Meanwhile, Alice’s daughter Heather, also known as Puffin, buries any hint of her own adolescent loneliness beneath an impenetrable armor of caustic sarcasm, studied apathy, and technicolor hair. And the enigmatic Uncle Roy is Alice’s perennially jobless and intensely private brother. As Mary Fred struggles to adjust to the oddities of this alien world, from sordid daytime television and processed food to aromatherapy and transsexuality, she gradually begins to have an unmistakable influence on the lives of her housemates. But when a horrifying act of violence shakes the foundations of Mary Fred’s fragile new family, she finds herself forced to confront, painfully, the very nature of the way she was raised.

With a knack for laying bare the absurdities of daily life, Abby Bardi captures, with grace and authority, all the ambivalence and emotional uncertainty at the heart of these quirky characters’ awakenings.

Double Take

All those people - were any of them who they seemed?

Set in Chicago, 1975, Double Take is the story of artsy Rachel Cochrane, who returns from college with no job and confronts the recent death of Bando, one of her best friends. When she runs into Joey, a mutual friend, their conversations take them back into their shared past and to the revelation that Bando may have been murdered. To find out who murdered him, Rachel is forced to revisit her stormy 1960s adolescence, a journey that brings her into contact with her old friends, her old self, and danger.
Surprising and haunting, this is an insightful reminiscence of a time of naivety, danger and renewal.

Goodreads Reviews for Double Take

  • "I enjoyed a previous book by Abby - who wouldn't love "The Book of Fred" but I am afraid the style of this one did not mesh with my reading style. I tend to juggle multiple books, both fiction and non and this book tended to bounce around in time from her earlier hippy druggy days to a more recent period so made it difficult for me to pick up the story line. Came across as a rather jumbled telling but can't totally blame the author for my issues. I also tend to judge women who bail out of perfectly good relationships for no discernible cause as a bit unbalanced so tend to find them unsympathetic as protagonists (think Cheyl Strayed hiking the Cascades, for example)."
    Fred Forbes's review
    I've read many mysteries in my life and this didn't read like any other mystery. Rachel aka Cookie has come back to her parent's home in 1975 and finds out that perhaps one of her friends did not commit suicide and perchance he was murdered. This causes a flood of memories from the late 60's to early 70's of her life at that time and the hippie lifestyle she seemed to lead. It took getting used to with the back and forth between various years and memories. It might have made for a more fluid read to start at the present and then start at the beginning of the previous years and work through the years consecutively. I also could not really relate to any of the characters due to the drug and alcohol use. Yes, this was the years of the hippies, but there did not seem to be any redeeming characters. I thought this book was just ok. It wasn't great and it wasn't so bad I couldn't finish the book.
    Leslie aka storeybook reviews
    Double Take moves between two time periods: 1975 when Rachel has returned home to her old neighborhood in Chicago, moving in with her parents and waitressing while she waits to figure out what to do next. She has abandoned a loving relationship for reasons that are not clear to her and all she knows is that she needs to understand something. That something is rooted in her turbulent past: 1969, when everyone knew her as Cookie. She waitressed then too but it was a different time. As the author writes, “Like you’d be on the train and you’d see someone with long hair and by the time you got downtown you were old pals with them. It was like some kind of osmosis.” In 1969, Cookie is optimistic, naïve and idealistic, even though the times are full of menace. The draft threatens every young man, the Chicago cops “were always cornering some poor little hippie and slamming him up against their car. I been frisked so many times I still got fingerprints all over me.” And someone is a narc, informing on the lucrative drug trade that operates out of the restaurant where Cookie works. As the novel progresses, Rachel is drawn further and further into her past, trying to unravel how and why her dear friend died. Was it suicide or not? And had her actions somehow caused his death? Abby Bardi creates such a compelling pace that I read the entire book in one evening, immersing myself in Rachel’s drive to know the truth, no matter how painful. And I was rewarded with evocative passages like: “I have always loved this moment when you leave the tunnel and enter the station, with its unintelligible loudspeaker noises, the faint sounds of trains below, and the little sparkly things embedded in its floor.” And a description of posters on a bedroom wall: “The psychedelic Beatles looked down on us like kindly gods.” It was often said about Woodstock that if you remembered it, you weren’t really there. If you recall the late 60’s and early 70’s, Double Take will remind you of how challenging, fearful and inspiring those times were. But the reader doesn’t need to have lived through that era to appreciate Bardi’s gritty tale of friendship, forgiveness, and adventure. Full disclosure: My path crossed slightly with Abby’s while I was growing up in Chicago. She was one of my older sister’s crowd: those teenagers who seemed to me to be self-assured, competent, glamorous, sexy. I yearned to someday be like them, listen to their music, to be able to hang out with people as cool as they were. Double Take is set in our old neighborhood, so I had the extra pleasure of recognizing the taverns and street corners, the icy lakefront and the fancy towers that looked down upon it."
    Anara Guard's review
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    Loise S.