Alice Fantastic
"There is about Maggie Estep's work a directness, a clear determination--a drive to cut through, to break through, to claw through--that is impressive." --A.M. Homes, author of The Mistress's Daughter
"Maggie Estep is the bastard daughter of Raymond Chandler and Anais Nin. Her prose is hard-boiled and sexy; she turns a good phrase and shows some leg." --Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!
Alice Hunter is a thirty-six-year-old professional gambler living in Queens, NY. She is modestly successful as a horseplayer and enjoys her work. Though avidly pursued by her lover, Clayton, who she refers to as The Big Oaf, Alice's closest companion is Candy, a small, spotted dog, and Alice likes it that way. When Clayton's overzealousness leads Alice to ask one of her racetrack cronies to intimidate Clayton into leaving her, a few things go wrong and Alice turns to her half-sister Eloise, a toy maker, whose own lover has just been killed in a freak accident.
There is fierce love between Alice, Eloise, and Kimberly (their unconventional mother), but it takes Alice's accidental discovery of an awful secret Kimberly has been keeping to truly bring three eccentric women, seventeen dogs, and assorted lovers together.
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No one else writes sentences like Maggie Estep; hers zip and loop and poke at us like a flirt. The characters in Alice Fantastic lead lives of ragged and chaotic romance with men, women, and dogs, set against a backdrop of New York City's last remaining fringes--you know, the fringes where the rest of us all live. The result is a book as unexpected as it is strangely reassuring and familiar. I loved it, and my pit bulls did too.--Ken Foster, author of The Dogs Who Found Me
