Monday Book Feature: For the Love of Meat by Jenny Jaeckel

We're thrilled to be hosting Jenny Jaeckel's FOR THE LOVE OF MEAT blog tour today! Please leave a comment to let her know you stopped by!

Title: For the Love of Meat
Author: Jenny Jaekel
Publisher: Raincloud Press
Pages: 162
Genre: Short Stories/Light Romance/Historical

For the Love of Meat combines whimsical and surreal illustrations with engaging, intimate encounters that explore the depths of human experience. Unique and diverse in setting, and with touches of magical-realism, these nine stories will tug at the strings of the wandering, romantic heart, setting it delightfully ablaze.

In Wander the Desert, Sister Aurelia, a nun from the early 20th century, finds herself stranded in the Mexican desert with nothing but a few cobs of corn and a stray horse who becomes her faithful companion. In Stumble and Fall, we meet Dara, a young Londoner hungry for adventure who, unwilling to settle for the safety and comfort of home, travels to Vancouver, city of immigrants, where a handsome stranger entices her to take a leap into the unknown. The Two explores the tender bond between two young growing up in 1940s Philadelphia, who are as inseparable as light and shadow. As one of the girls tragically becomes ill, the impact on the other shows how true connections of heart and spirit are not bound to time and place. And Mémé, set in Haiti in the 1800s, is told from the stunning perspective of a slave who, as a child, witnesses the brutal murder of her mother, and survives through her connection to her brother and the natural world.

Jenny Jaeckel’s compelling storytelling takes us across the world and through the ages, with remarkable insight and soul-moving moments, when paths cross and time unfolds. Her language, imagery and attention to detail plunge the reader into these memorable lives, soaking us in tales of adventure, courage, love, loss, longing and all the hope in between. 

Purchase Information:

Amazon | B&N

Book Excerpt:

From the short story Stumble and Fall:

She’d been in the city six months. Her sojourn in the Colonies.

“Why do you want to go there?” her friend Elsie demanded when they met at the coffee shop round the corner from her North London flat. “It’s going to be decidedly provincial.”  Elsie never liked it when Dara went away.

Dara had been abroad several times. The first, not counting two family holidays in France, was a student exchange in Rio at age sixteen, which had shocked her every sensibility and every relative at home. Members of the family went off to Israel and often stayed forever, but that was a religious imperative. Rio was not the Holy Land; it was a riot. By the time her classmates finally succeeded in teaching her a cumbia, one night at a party, something staid in her had been made loose. When she returned home at the end of that year she had a bag stuffed with bootlegged cassette tapes and a secret restlessness in her heart. 

Lisbon had been her last adventure. She taught English for a year at a grammar school there and that was now five years ago. Coming back to London that time felt grey. Things hadn’t taken off in Portugal the way she’d thought they might. She’d kept up her Portuguese via a group on Tuesday nights, which was how she met Jeremy.

He had a samba collection, she had a samba collection. They fell into a kind of love, moved in together and developed a premarital routine that in three years’ time had begun to grow stale. Dara loved him, or she loved them, and she grieved when the thing began to die. The relationship survived their artificial resuscitations, nominally, for a time, until it was like a body neither of them could any longer pretend was alive.

She lay on the burial mound for a week, every surface rubbed raw. A month passed, two. Her grief shrank to a stone she carried in her chest. It had a way of rolling and rattling like a bottle on the floor of a car. It could disappear and then come clunking out of nowhere. She missed the comfort of Jeremy’s familiar smile and sandy hair and the way he wrapped her up in his arms at night. Then again, she didn’t miss his stupid laugh, or his long silences, or his constant consumption of cinnamon buns. Sometimes she thought if she ever had to open the cupboard and see cinnamon buns one more time she’d leap straight out the window.

Then one morning, alone in her bed, she awoke to a fresh rain slashing at the window, a rogue beam of sunlight spotting the corner of the curtain, and she knew it was time to go.

About the Author

Jenny Jaeckel grew up in Berkeley and Ukiah of Northern California, has lived in Mexico, Spain and currently lives in British Columbia with her husband and daughter.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from The Evergreen State College, a Master of Arts in Hispanic Literatures from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is a certified interpreter and translator, and has taught Spanish at three universities. She is the author and illustrator of three graphic memoirs. For the Love of Meat is her first book of fiction.

WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | GOODREADS