The award-winning, widely praised author of Disappearing Ingenue is at the top of her form in this witty, wickedly funny novel about a romance writer whose real life begins to outpace the wildest flights of her imagination. After one failed marriage and numerous dating disasters, Prudence True Parker teaches Advanced Personal Journey at a community college in Arizona. Prudence’s own personal journey has led to a mountain of debts, and she is beginning to feel desperate. Salvation comes at the local library, where she meets Digby Deeds (alias Mildred Crawley), the author of the Savage Passion romance series. Nearing the end of his life, Digby is looking for someone to keep Savage Passion alive and offers Prudence the final forty plots of the wildly popular series. Moved more by financial desperation than literary aspiration, she reluctantly accepts the bequest. Just after taking on the project, Prudence’s friendly local psychic foresees the arrival of a romantic stranger in her life. The prediction comes true with startling speed: At a Native American charity event in Oklahoma, Prudence is swept off her feet by a mysterious young Comanche artist, Ray Chasing Hawk. A month later, Ray shows up on her doorstep. Fired by the irresistible desires their affair awakens, Prudence begins writing her first Native American romance. Real life gives her plenty of inspiration for her fictional plot and her home fills to overflowing with visitors, including Native American activists, medicine men, and wolves. In a hilarious, totally satisfying conclusion, the pieces of her life fall into place at the annual Romance Writers Convention in Houston, Texas. Smartly written and laugh-out-loud funny, Late Bloomer is a high-spirited tale of romance, captivity, and savage love women of all ages will relish. www.doubleday.com Arizonan Prudence True Parker teaches surprisingly effective touchy-feely writing classes at a community college. Divorced, 48, in debt, and excruciatingly lonely, she's also smart, funny, generous, spiritually inclined, and open to new experiences, of which there are many in this clever roller-coaster ride of a novel. First an enormously successful romance writer who specializes in romances about white women and hunky Native American warriors anoints Prudence his heir to the series Savage Passion. Prudence has no intention of writing such trash until she meets Ray Chasing Hawk, a gorgeous, young, and virile Comanche artist and model, and finds herself enacting a romance of her own. Or is she? Angry, difficult, and manipulative, Ray turns Prudence's life upside-down. Now truly desperate for cash, she starts writing Native American romances in secret, torrid, and cliched tales that play in ironic counterpoint to her increasingly complicated life. Pritchard overloads her otherwise wily tale with trivia, but her shrewd humor, canny insights, colorful characters, and intriguing plot prevail. Is this a romance? Yes, although by critiquing the genre, it transcends it. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Praise for Late Bloomer “When and under what circumstances does a woman come into her own? Late Bloomer will delight and horrify its readers as they see their own quests for authenticity mirrored in the life of Prudence True Parker, a two-time writer of romance novels. What can be learned from the ritual suffering of an androgynous Comanche warrior? Melissa Pritchard's latest novel dances out the answers in prose of strong originality—vivid, bold, and wickedly witty. A novel that illuminates our passages as lovers, daughters, mothers, and friends, Late Bloomer is an amazing romp of language and hard-won wisdom.” —Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Four Spirits and Ahab's Wife “ Late Bloomer is a full-bodied education in the spiritual and romantic condition of our brand-new century. Pritchard's characters channel the silly, the sublime, the eternal, the suburban, the mythic — a core sample, in short, of a set of interwoven and fascinating lives. I love how beautifully, seductively, hilariously, tenderly this writer blends genres to bestow on the world this new hybrid elixir.” —Antonya Nelson, author of Female Troubles and Living to Tell “Does love make sense? This book may have all four answers to that question. In Late Bloomer , Melissa Pritchard elegantly, effusively does what she has always done —channel the ages, this time bringing an intense corner of the modern West alive through the dear lens of Prudence True Parker, a thoroughly modern woman in a world larger than life — with prose to match. There is a sharp literary pleasure on every page of this ebullient up-and-down tour of one woman's search for love — and the sensible balance between power and submission.” —Ron Carlson, author of The Speed of Light and A Kind of Flying “An oddball, oddly moving coming-of-age (young, middle, old) novel that reads as if Shakespeare, Fielding, O'Hara,