Fertile Soil: Stories of the California Dream

In Fertile Soil: Stories of the California Dream, Mary Smathers presents the light and dark sides of contemporary California, the perseverance of its residents and the richness of its culture across a grand sweep of history. Smathers focuses on those who demonstrate tenacious resilience as they tackle adversity, accepting challenges they could more easily shirk. The characters you'll meet in these pages include:

• an elementary school principal who provides leadership for his impoverished Central Valley neighborhood
• a teenager whose father locks her out of her own apartment
• a minimum wage earner with three jobs who battles the shrinking value of her dollar in the Bay Area
• a suburban working mom forced to add cancer treatments into her busy schedule
• a homeless man and a finance whiz whose lives intersect on the streets of downtown LA
• two little boys who confront wildlife danger on the way home from school

Smathers concludes with five intertwined stories, drawing a loosely connected line from Mexican era and Gold Rush pioneers to their descendants at the development of Silicon Valley and on to today. The collection portrays the state's innovative, hard-working residents and quintessential landscape, a never ending target for dreamers.

Author: Mary Smathers
Publisher: MKS Publishing
Published: 09/15/2016
Pages: 300
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.67d
ISBN: 9780997855715

About the Author
Smathers, Mary: - Mary Smathers grew up in Los Altos, California and graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Latin American Studies. She earned a Master's degree in Education and another MA in Educational Administration and Policy Analysis from Stanford University. From 1983 to 2013, she worked in public schools throughout California as a high school teacher, administrator, grant writer and educational entrepreneur, helping to found three education companies and a public charter school. Since that time, she has focused on writing, reporting for a bilingual, regional Costa Rican newspaper and publishing her first work of fiction, Fertile Soil: Stories of the California Dream, in 2016. Her debut novel, In This Land of Plenty, a family saga based on California history, was published in summer, 2020. She divides her time between California's Central Coast and the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica where she is at work chronicling the stories of subsequent generations in the Brennan/Castro family tree of In This Land of Plenty.