Peculiar People

About the Book

Double cousins Alice and Teresa Guthrie grow up among Okie relatives on the western tip of the Mojave Desert in the Lancaster Heights, a shabby area sparsely settled with house trailers, a Quonset hut, tar paper shack and a dugout, a storm celler type habitat with tamped dirt walls. Each dwelling had an outhouse and some had chicken coops with wire enclosures. Reared in the 1950s and 1960s by pious parents with big plans for their only daughters, the girls come of age and escape the high desert community for L.A.’s palm trees and begin lives in a wider world

About the Author

Quata Diann Merit worked for 20 years as a technical writer/editor in the Silicon Valley. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She grew up in the Mojave Desert but now lives in San Francisco’s East BayArea. This is her first novel.