New Coming-of-Age Novel With Unusual Setting

'Dancing Within the Song' is an intriguing new novel about growning up mentally and emotionally. As Rashia's environment changes, she must make choices about how she wants to live her life. She wrestles with how much she has to give up, what she can keep, and what new experineses await her. This novel enables the reader to feel the joy, the sorrow, the elation, depression, the nothingness, and the peace and contentment of a young girl finding her way.

Medford, OR (PRWEB) August 16, 2004 -- "The thwack thwack of the windshield wipers beats a steady cadence as Daisy drives me to my death." This opening line in Shawn M. Davis' coming-of-age novel Dancing Within the Song proves to be more prophetic than her 14-year-old protagonist Rashia could ever have imagined. Daisy is Rashia's mother, who gave birth to her at a Grateful Dead Show. Rashia was raised on a communal farm that grew its own organic food, taught its kids Kerouac, Huxley, and Thoreau to read, taught them to smoke pot, and took them on tours with The Dead.

Rashia abruptly loses the only life she's known when her father decides it's time to join the real world and transports the family to a small Oregon town where he buys a house and opens a store. Dancing Within the Song explores the wrenching rite of passage that all too many of today's young people go through and does so in the context of an unusual setting as Rashia runs away from home and goes back to following The Dead, now a much harder and more dangerous world.

Ms. Davis currently lives in Southern Oregon. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of Guam, and she holds a Masters in Arts & Letters from Southern Oregon University, where she occasionally teaches fiction and haibun classes. She was editor of an on-line flashfiction magazine for two years and her fiction, haibun, and haiku have been published in print and on-line journals.

'Dancing Within the Song' is a fresh new way to view the growing up process. As Rashia's environment changes, she must make choices about how she wants to live her life. She wrestles with how much she has to give up, what she can keep, and what new experineses await her. This novel enables the reader to feel the joy, the sorrow, the elation, depression, the nothingness, and the peace and contentment of a young girl finding her way.

To receive a review copy, please send an e-mail to the author or fax a request to 301-631-9073.

The official release date of the novel is September 12, 2004, but the book is available for pre-order now through the publisher (www.publishamerica.com), and through on-line booksellers

CONTACT INFORMATION:
Publish America
Phone: (240) 529-1031
Fax: (301) 695-9073

or
Shawn M. Davis
http://www.angelfire.com/space2/dancing

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