A tender coming-of-age story set in the Ohio flatlands that plays deftly with mystery and the wonders of female power and intuition. Jen Knox explores with insight and wisdom the “hysteria” that women were, and still are, often labeled with, and counsels us to connect with the “pulse of the earth” and to each other. A talented writer exhibiting her own intuition, Knox understands that our greatest fear is loneliness. In We Arrive Uninvited, she gifts us myriad ways to find a cure.

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—Tara Lynn Masih, National Jewish Book Award Finalist for My Real Name Is Hanna
 

In Jen Knox’s prize-winning novel, We Arrive Uninvited, the reader enters the world of dual narrators, two women, two generations apart, women grappling with the sometimes-alarming gifts of intuition, foretelling, and psychic receptivity—the goddess gifts interpreted by our culture as madness or worse, witchery. Amelia, the grandmother, relates her tragic yet touched-by-the-marvelous life story to her granddaughter, Emerson, a high school student whose mother has just died, and who shares her gifts. Both women struggle against a world in which the idiosyncratic is penalized and originality is medicated. Both experience love denied and love realized. Knox is an exceptional writer and a compassionate one, her finely wrought prose like Tolstoy’s becomes that pool of clear water you see through to the bottom, so flawless nothing encumbers the story’s realization.  We Arrive Uninvited compels us to turn pages and to consider what it is we’ve read.

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—Stephanie Dickinson, author of Razor Wire Wilderness and Blue Swan Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries

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Jen Knox creates a tale spun on the wishes, dreams, and revised visions of a girl who comes into her own abilities while facing down a family history of madness. Her passionate voice lends authority and insights to Emerson's first-person journey to create a compelling read highly recommended for readers interested in a very different kind of coming-of-age story.

 

—Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review
 

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