Nine-year old, trickster, Mary Lee, loves to light campfires with her best boy buddy in their secret fort on the banks of Rexburg, Idaho’s irrigation ditch. World War II is over, but Mary Lee fights a new war. Her mother is sick, not nuts, lazy, a bad mother, or anything else the neighborhood bully, her dad’s aunt, and even her adored big brother might say. When Mary Lee overhears a doctor say Mother will never be her old self again and should go to the state mental hospital, Mary Lee joins Dad’s resistance. Never.

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FIREBUG, a middle grade novel, inspired by my mother's childhood in Rexburg, Idaho, just after World War II, combines my love of family history, historical fiction--and my mom.

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Thanks to Rachel Camacho for the beautiful cover.

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