- Norris Church Mailer

Windchill Summer

By Norris Church Mailer

From Norman Mailer’s wife, the powerful story of a group of girlfriends coming-of-age in small town, bible-belt America in 1969 and the horrific murder of one of their group that shatters their illusions of peace.

It is the start of a long, hot summer. Cherry and Baby are working at the pickle plant – everyone in Sweet Valley does this sooner or later – saving for the final year of their art degrees. As the machines hum and pulse with heat, the only relief is the wind-chill factor, the occasional breeze that evaporates the skin’s film of sweat and draws the heat off for a few seconds. Cherry is over six foot, thin as a reed with pale skin and wild blonde hair. She has been brought up in the Holiness Church, as innocent and naive as it is possible to be. Baby is beautiful and petite, an Oriental jewel, sassy and damaged – and Cherry’s protector. But nobody can protect Cherry from real life this summer and it begins when Carlene is dragged murdered from the lake. And when the boys come home from Vietnam, in an indefinable way the war comes back too, seeping into everyone’s lives as the awful truth begins to unravel about who killed Carlene and why.

Author: Norris Church Mailer
Format: Paperback
Release Date: 01 Jun 2000
Pages: 400
ISBN: 978-1-84115-148-9
Norris Church Mailer now lives in Cape Cod with Norman Mailer, her husband of twenty years. Born and raised in Atkins, Arkansas, she had a Freewill Baptist childhood and worked in the Atkins pickle plant. She was an art teacher and married her high school sweetheart who had been to Vietnam. She divorced her first husband and met Norman Mailer in 1975. She became a Wilhemina fashion model in New York, has had nine one-woman shows as a painter, acted in soaps, held an actors’ studio and written plays. Windchill Summer is her first novel.