Rebecca Ballard

Tiny Alice Rebecca Ballard

Tiny Alice is a multi-generational story about three women and a girl, about mothers and daughters, about choices and consequences. They are on a collision course to becoming a great, joyful, rollicking circus called "family". When Bert's best friend dies, Bert becomes the guardian of her sullen preteen daughter, Kelly. Bert never wanted to be a mother, and there is no place in her ordered life for Kelly. She wants to be free of the obligation, yet longs to know if she is capable of mothering a challenging girl like Kelly. How could she work reluctant motherhood into her busy life? Kelly opposes going to live with Bert, but wants to avoid being forced into the foster care system. She wants to have a voice in the decisions made about her life. Chick, Bert's mother, a free-wheeling spirit who came of age in the later sixties in San Francisco, yearns for more intimacy with Bert, but her attempts are clumsy. Love offers a bridge between the two, but both are hesitant to cross. Ninety-year-old Tiny Alice longs for relief from the boredom and loneliness of old age. She has a lot of wisdom to share from through stories of living through the twentieth century, but no one to share her lessons with. Both her children are gone, one dead and the other disappeared. Then she finds a friend in Bert. Four women from different generations stumbling across the divide of loneliness, expectations, guilt, and grief. Can they each start over and come together as a loving family?