TROWBRIDGE

ROAD

marcella pi x ley
 In a stunning novel set in the 1980s, a girl with heavy secrets
awakens her sleepy street to the complexities of love and courage.

TROWBRIDGE ROAD
marcella p i x ley
It’s the summer of ’83 on Trowbridge
Road, and June Bug Jordan is hungry.
Months after her father’s death from com-
plications from AIDS, her mother has
stopped cooking and refuses to leave the
house, instead locking herself away to
scour at the germs she believes are every-
where. June Bug threatens this precarious
existence by going out into the neighbor-
hood, gradually befriending an imagina-
tive boy who is living with his Nana Jean
after experiencing troubles of his own. But
as June Bug’s connection to the world
grows stronger, her mother’s grasp on re-
ality weakens, pushing June Bug to choose
between truth and healing and the only
home she has ever known.

a b o u t t h e au t h o r On sale May 12, 2020

Marcella Pixley is the author HC: 978-1-5362-0750-7 • $17.99 ($23.99 CAN)
photo credit: Jill Goldman Photography

of three highly praised books Age 10 and up • 336 pages

for young adults that have
received multiple starred
reviews, including Ready to
Fall. She has been nominated
for a Pushcart Prize for poetry and earned a master’s
from Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury
College. She teaches writing to middle-schoolers in
Massachusetts, where she lives with her family.
 a n o t e f ro m t h e au t h o r

I grew up in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, in a neighborhood that looked

perfect on the outside. Victorian houses. Big lawns. Educated people. Excellent
school systems. Families that ate dinner together and always seemed sane and
safe and satisfied. The thing is, you never really know what’s happening inside
those houses once the doors close. Even families that look perfect can have
secrets that they hold inside like poison. Even people who look sane and strong
and satisfied can be in pain.

The novel Trowbridge Road comes from my own experience with mental
illness within a complex and imperfect family. I have suffered from obsessive-
compulsive disorder since early childhood. In that, at least symbolically, I can
empathize with June Bug’s mother, Angela. I know how it feels to be so afraid
of the world outside that you can barely move. Perhaps even more impor-
tantly, though, because my own mother suffered from depression when I was
eleven years old, I was also quite a bit like June Bug Jordan. I know how it feels
to be a child who yearns to be nurtured by a parent who is suffering. I know
how bewildering and lonely that yearning can feel when you look onto the
perfect street in your perfect neighborhood and it seems like you are the only
one in this world who is hurting.

It’s essential for young people to realize they are not alone. We need books
that remind us that there are lots of different kinds of families who sometimes
struggle to get what they need. Children have the right to see reflections of
their own imperfect families in the literature they read. They need permission
to be brave and tell the truth, even when telling feels scary. They need to know
that even people who are imperfect can love one another with all their heart.
Despite the pain behind the doors of 28 Trowbridge Road, there is tenderness,
there is creativity, there is music, there is bravery, there is love, and, of course,
at last there is hope.