Jetty Cat Palace Café

by Judy Keeslar Santamaria

Overview

Welcome to the Jetty Cat Palace Café where synchronicity and wonder abound!

Morgen, a quirky music teacher and pianist, is devastated when she learns that her mother, also a concert pianist, became pregnant with her after a sexual assault and abandoned her life as a performer.

Startled when a steel string explodes inside her piano, Morgen sees secrets long buried inside the music she and her late mother had cherished. Risking her career and heartbreak to rectify her mother's lost dreams, Morgen vows to find her mother's stolen cremation urn and track down her mystery father. Following an irresistible melody that resonates from her family's obscure past, she arrives at the Jetty Cat Palace Café where she finds offbeat locals, feral cats, and even a ghost. But a secret lies in wait for Morgen beneath the café's scarred wood floor, and though she hopes that a bittersweet spiritual connection will resolve her shared history with her mother, she must first reconcile her past and present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643882239
Publisher:	Luminare Press
Publication date:	12/13/2019
Pages:	338
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

Judy Keeslar Santamaria has a Bachelor's in Music (piano) and a Master's in Education (Creative Arts in Learning). She's enjoyed being a classroom teacher, music specialist, private piano teacher, and accompanist. Her debut novel, Jetty Cat Palace Café, showcases her penchant for family secrets and legacies, and eccentric heroines who outsmart their villains and thrive. Judy lives near San Francisco with her husband who shares her passion for travel. Please visit jettycatpalacecafe.com and Twitter @jettycatsanta

Editorial Reviews

"A stolen urn sparks a daring adventure for one autistic young woman, and winds up delivering a masterpiece debut novel by a very promising rising star. Highly recommended!"

...Jetty Cat Palace Café takes the reader from the sophisticated urban areas of Washington state to its remote cranberry coast, accompanying professor Morgen Marín on a life-altering quest...The cast of characters she meets are society's flotsam and jetsam who drifted in on random currents and found safe harbor in this isolated place...How these random people, in this unlikely place, are melded into parts of Morgen's past and future creates a story that stretches readers' credulity and imagination... Judy Keeslar Santamaria's often lyrical, meticulous writing, engaging characters, vivid imagery, and intricate plot work together to create a winner. - Chanticleer Reviews ★★★★★

From the Publisher

2020-10-27
A concert pianist searches for the truth of her mother’s death and learns her own self-worth in Santamaria’s debut novel.

In 2003 in Redmond, Washington, Morgen Marín,a teacher, painter, and pianist, often finds solace in music; she uses a Mozart quote as a mantra—“The music is not in the notes but in the silence between”—and even named her car Tutti, a term for when “the ensemble reunited after an extended solo passage.” One night, she prepares to play Fantasie for Piano by her abusive former teacher, Andras Bacon, for a future concert, but she finds herself flummoxed by the composer’s cryptic notes. Later, she finds out that her late mother became pregnant with her during a sexual assault and gave up on her own music career. Morgen also dwells on a dark moment 13 years ago when she drove past the scene of her mom’s fatal car accident, and she begins investigating her parent’s past. During all of this, she becomes director of chamber music at her alma mater, where everyone is welcoming and enthusiastic about her work. Toward the story’s conclusion, Morgen discovers family she never knew she had and confronts Andras. Although she grieves her mother’s death, she eventually learns to let go. Over the course of this novel, Santamaria offers readers characters that are vivid and memorable, and her prose carries itself with an easy, quick-reading cadence, as when Morgen recalls her mother’s sage wisdom: “Sometimes we don’t understand certain things, and all we can do is give life our best and keep moving forward. Maybe someday we’ll look back, and it’ll all make sense.” Morgen’s happiness at the end of the story also feels well earned—the recompense of a character who has learned to love herself, but only through long, hard struggle.

An encouraging later-life drama that offers its protagonist a “penny of hope.

Kirkus Reviews