Melanie Sumner Selected Works

Aristotle "Aris" Thibodeau is 12.5 years old and destined for greatness. Ever since her father’s death, however, she’s been stuck in the small town of Kanuga, Georgia, where she has to manage her mother Diane’s floundering love life and dubious commitment to her job as an English professor. Not to mention co-parenting a little brother who hogs all the therapy money.

Luckily, Aris has a plan. Following the advice laid out in Write a Novel in Thirty Days! she sets out to pen a bestseller using her charmingly dysfunctional family as material. If the Mom-character, Diane, would ditch online dating and accept that the perfect man is clearly the handyman/nanny-character, Penn MacGuffin, Aris would have the essential romance for her plot (and a father in her real life). But when a random accident uncovers a dark part of Thibodeau family history, Aris is forced to confront the fact that sometimes in life—as in great literature—things might not work out exactly as planned.

Polite Society resounds with unusual spirit and searing honesty. Darren, a not-so-nice young woman from Tennessee, joins the Peace Corps for lack of a better idea. Fitting in with Southerners was hard enough, but trying to understand friends, lovers, and herself while unemployed in Senegal sends Darren reeling. The world that spirals around her is full of outrageous encounters, interracial affairs, and nights of drunken revelry. Against the backdrop of a society that is governed by hospitality and good manners but is full of strangers and unfamiliar customs, Darren runs headlong into her own insecurities, fears, and desires. With sly humor and acuity, Melanie Sumner brings readers a youthful heroine who is stubborn and selfish, loving and libidinous, and, ultimately, unsparingly human.

The story of Ignacia Vigil Romero, a full Jacarilla Apache, and the two boys, Mister and Tomás, she raised to adulthood unfolds in a barrio of Taos, New Mexico—a mixed community of Native Americans, Hispanics, and whites. Now deceased, Ignacia, a curandera—a medicine woman, though some say a witch—begins this tale of star-crossed lovers. Mister and Tomás, best friends until their late teens, both fall for Rocky, a gringa of some mystery, a girl Tomás takes for himself. But in a moment of despair, a pledge between the young men leads to murder. When Ignacia falls silent, police reports, witness statements, and caseworker interviews draw an electrifying portrait of a troubled community and of the vulnerable players in this mounting tragedy. Set in a terrain that becomes a character in its own right, The Ghost of Milagro Creek brilliantly illuminates this hidden corner of American society.

In a daring novel that deftly fuses wild, satiric humor and deeply felt pain, Melanie Sumner tells the story of the Pepperses of Counterpoint, Georgia—a family that never raises their voices or honks a horn and "avoids discussing sex, politics, and religion, favoring the topic of the weather, which averages seventy-five degrees in Counterpoint year-round." Henry, a stoic businessman, vies for rule of the house with his flamboyant wife, Florida, a pertinacious Baptist and aspiring artist. Together, their clear mission is to protect and guide their children—asthmatic, hormonal Roderick and hell-bent Louise—and keep them well dressed. So when Louise flees the Maude Wilson College for Women to join the Arthur Reese Traveling Show, Henry and Florida will do anything to win her back.