The Assigned Visit - Shelley Fraser Mickle

Fiction
ISBN 10: 1-57966-056-8
ISBN 13: 978-1-57966-056-7
Trade paper
6x9
350 pp.
$16.95

Twenty-two-year-old Susan Masters travels from Holly Springs, Mississippi, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study writing. There she meets Caleb Montiel, and while studying in the same Harvard class, they make a pact: if either of them lives out a story they know they are too emotionally close to handle, they will give it to the other to write. However, life intervenes and Susan and Caleb lose track of each other.

Twenty years later, after Susan has become a successful novelist, she receives a box of journals, from Caleb. They tell of his social service on the Mississippi Gulf Coast following Hurricane Camille. There, Caleb meets Grayce Chadwick—Mississippi bred, a wife and mother, extraordinary and irresistible—and is transformed by love. When the town of Pass Christian forces Caleb to flee in order to preserve the Chadwick family, his life becomes a metaphor for the complicated shame the nation suffers over the Vietnam years.

Using the journals as a starting point, Susan embarks on writing his story—eventually leading to their reunion, and a way for her to love him as she always wished she could. The Assigned Visit is an extraordinary love story not unlike Dr. Zhivago in its portrait of how powerful emotion transforms two lives.

"Beginning in Boston in the disruptive early l960s, this vividly-told love story moves south to the Gulf Coast, encompasses attraction, lust, torment and seeming exhaustion, only to flame up again over the years in an impassioned renewal. Shelley Mickle understands these fascinating complicated people of hers, and their discoveries and dilemmas become ours."
–Louis Rubin, author or editor of more than fifty books, recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Book Critics Circle.

"Shelley Fraser Mickle’s skillful juxtaposition of time, place and voice pulled me immediately into the lives of an ambitious Mississippi belle, a handsome young idealist, a famous antiwar protestor, a smoldering beauty, and a community determined to protect its own. This believable and complex story has stayed with me, long after the surprising and gratifying ending."
-Cassandra King, author of Making Waves, The Sunday Wife, and The Same Sweet Girls.

"In luminous language and transcendent imagery, The Assigned Visit evokes the raw innocence and passion of our collective youth. More important, it summons a message of hope for our ravaged times. 'There is nothing lost, but may be found, if sought.'"
—Laurie Viera Rigler, coauthor of He Rents, She Rents and Popping the Question.

"This unique novel grabs your attention right at the beginning and never lets go. The characters are real, and the situations are real—a fascinating read."
—Patrick D. Smith, five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the beloved novel, A Land Remembered.

About Shelley Fraser Mickle

SHELLEY FRASER MICKLE is an energetic, modest person who sees the good in the world and tries to make it even better. A commentator for Florida Public Radio since 1995, she has read many humorous essays on NPR’s Morning Edition, which have been published in a collection titled The Kids Are Gone, the Dog Is Depressed, and Mom’s on the Loose. Many other essays of hers have been published in the Orlando Sentinel.

She is the author of three previous novels: The Queen of October, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Replacing Dad, which was made into a CBS television movie; and The Turning Hour, which has been taught in classrooms across the state of Florida. Mickle is the mother of two grown children and lives on a farm in Alachua County, Florida.

Her website is www.shelleymickle.com