Annika Rose - by Cheri Johnson (Paperback)

About the Book

Ancient and contemporary myths--including both Ovid's Metamorphoses and Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby--overlay a coming-of-age story set in remote northern Minnesota.

Book Synopsis

Seventeen-year-old Annika Rose and her father Wes have spent the years since the death of Annika's mother in self-imposed social isolation on their farm on the edge of the woods. When a young woman named Tina moves into a house down the road, the result is a sudden explosion of feelings in both father and daughter and a fierce rivalry. At stake in the competition is not only their relationship, but the life of the vulnerable young woman at the center of it all.

Review Quotes

"Cheri Johnson's novel Annika Rose is a marvel of invention whose always knowing prose, alternately heartbreaking and hilarious, simultaneously glimmers and cuts. A magician with character, Johnson's most artful alchemy comes in her protagonist Annika, who, if there is a meritocracy, will become as memorable a first name in literature as Holden or Huckleberry as teenagers choked and befuddled by angst, adventure, and an ever-encroaching and frightening very real world. Annika--an eighteen-year-old post-modern Laura Ingalls inhabiting a little trailer on the prairie--is a breathing contradiction, both an old soul and a doe-innocent naif. Yet her battle--to speak when uncomfortable truths finally outweigh convenient myths--is as ageless as both life and death."--Neal Karlen, author of This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey On + Off the Record

"Part coming-of-age story, part ode to the landscape of northern Minnesota, this is also a horror story that reflects the larger horror of adolescence, of a girl's fight for integrity in the face of demolished innocence. How could we forget Annika after we meet her? Her character is seared upon my brain. She is reminiscent of other stubborn, opinionated characters who struggle in the limbo between childhood and adulthood: Huckleberry Finn, Laura Ingalls, and Scout Finch."--Amanda Coplin, author of The Orchardist

"Johnson
has painted a compelling portrait of a parent whose over-involvement
with, and consequent dependence on, a child threatens that child's
developing autonomy. Johnson's novel anatomizes this complex but
familiar dynamic, showing how newly independent behaviors, even very
tiny and unremarkable ones, of one member of a family can create waves
of disturbance that touch all the rest."--Diane Josefowicz, West Trade Review

"... Johnson generously lets the reader into Annika's inner angst, suppressed grief, and a physical desire the young woman doesn't quite know what to do with... There's a lot [Johnson] has to say in the story about power, survival, resilience, and the moments in life we can't get back." --Sheila Regan, MinnPost