Joliet Girl

Joliet Girl is a deep and complex pleasure, like a rainstorm or a saxophone playing the tone of a lost afternoon. Tolf writes of childhood's grip on our lives, of loyalty, disappointment, and most beautifully, the particular joy that is laughter between sisters. This intense love has its echo in the power of these oldest bonds to break us, too. I felt I'd been allowed to slip in the back door of a life, watching how sisters, not so different from my own, lose one another and find their way. Francine Tolf writes with fierce, inquiring love and honesty, but it is the poetry in these pages her observant eye and the beauty of her languagethat gives this memoir resonance and haunting power. -Patricia Weaver Francisco, author of Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery