CORA STRYKER
Serial Founder of ClimateJusticeIncubator.org and GirlBlazer.org. Writer.
Every mother has a murderer in her. Few of us will admit it, but none of us can deny the truth of it. I could not say this to another human being, even my husband. If he knew who I was, he would be afraid of me. I am afraid of myself sometimes.
TOO BRIGHT TO SEE
TOO BRIGHT TO SEE is the story of an ambitious young archaeologist driven to make her mark on science and to discover the truth about her sister’s mysterious death on Machu Picchu. Part coming-of-age novel and part literary thriller, it is a family saga in the vein of Celeste Ng’s EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU meets the unreliable but earnest first-person narrators of THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN and THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, only my narrator is dangerously blind, not by substance abuse, but psychological self-delusion.
When CORDELIA FEINMAN discovers a hominid jawbone at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, she thinks she has made the discovery of her life, finally living up to the impossibly high expectations of her father, a brilliant and troubled physicist nominated for the Nobel Prize. But when her Land Rover breaks down twenty-some miles from camp on her way to the National Museum, she must survive alone in the Serengeti by her wits. This pushes her to the brink psychologically and her carefully-constructed self-mythology begins to unravel, setting in motion a literary psychological thriller in which one woman simultaneously searches for, and is blind to, the truth. Convinced her sister’s death on Machu Picchu was not an accident, she will search for answers across three continents, from Tanzania to Peru to Northern California where her mother lives at a Zen Center to her childhood home outside Boston where her father is convalescing in a mental hospital. There, she will try to be a good Cordelia, nursing him back from the brink of madness, and ultimately unearthing a dark family secret that will change everything she thought she knew about her sister and herself.