Ai is a Three-Toed Sloth

About the Book

Ted has always considered lies to be a conventional and convenient tool for daily living. This time, however, he has outdone himself.  Because he wants to marry Margaret, because Margaret demands a financial “nest egg” before marriage and because he is not apt to satisfy this demand on his meager salary as astronomy instructor, he has led Margaret, his parents and his colleagues to believe that he is away on a fellowship to Greenwich, England.  He actually is among the redwoods of Mendocino County in northern California, where he plans to grow a highly profitable (and illegal) crop of marijuana--of choice Mendocino sinsemilla.

Because he has never grown anything, “not even a tomato,”  he recruits, as partner, a stranger, Cissy Brown, homeless folk musician of good will and Quaker ancestry, who responds to his “help wanted” ad. She prides herself on never telling an untruth, but she can slant an exact truth in such a way as to imply something entirely different--”a Quaker lie”--as Ted soon discovers.

They plant their crop on land belonging to Honour Baldwin, rich recluse and fiercely independent but psychologically vulnerable woman, housebound for a long period following an accident. She hires Cissy to give her the help her doctor says she must have. Cissy becomes genuinely fond of her, even while guarding against any possibility that Honour might become aware of their plot--"plot" in two senses of that word.

No one of these three viewpoint characters wants to hurt the others, but the web of deceit they weave entangles them and the varied neighborhood characters in complications that are full of unexpected hazards that lead to changes they never contemplated, least of all in themselves.

Please read the excerpt and meet Honour as she is introduced in Chapter 2.

About the Author

The published works of Phyllis Sterling Smith include short stories, articles, prize-winning poetry and translations of Portuguese poetry. This is her first novel. She is a longtime resident of Berkeley, California, where her husband is a professor at the University of California; she and he have traveled widely and have lived for extended periods in Brazil, Australia, Rumania, Germany and the Netherlands. They also have a summer home in northern California near the setting of this novel.