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Meet Cheri Johnson who will be at Zenith Bookstore signing copies of her new book Annika Rose. You might also know Cheri for her first novel The Girl in Duluth, written under the name Sigrid Brown.Ancient and contemporary myths — including both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby — overlay a coming-of-age story set in remote northern Minnesota.
Seventeen-year-old Annika Rose and her father Wes have spent the years since the death of Annika’s mother in self-imposed social isolation on their farm on the edge of the woods. When a young woman named Tina moves into a house down the road, the result is a sudden explosion of feelings in both father and daughter and a fierce rivalry. At stake in the competition is not only their relationship, but the life of the vulnerable young woman at the center of it all.
"Annika Rose is a coming-of-age story unlike any you’ve ever read. This novel peels back the skin of the genre’s tropes to reveal all of the sticky weirdness that exists beneath. Annika Rose’s narrative is a journey into deep psychic wildness where love, desire, envy, power, and violence collapse into one another. We open with what presents initially as a love triangle, but quickly reveals itself to be the face of a much more complex and multidimensional geometry of desire. The setting, at the edge of farm country in the age of supermarkets, is more than a backdrop. The creatures and hazards of the deep woods the characters still roam serve as an insistent reminder of the feral impulses powering our rational minds. Annika Rose is also a page-turner and compulsively readable, its sentences at turns as restrained and untamed as the country it describes." —Melanie Conroy-Goldman, author of The Likely World
Cheri Johnson has won grants and residencies from organizations such as the McKnight Foundation, the Bush Foundation, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She studied writing at the University of Minnesota, Hollins University, and Augsburg University. Her chapbook of poems FUN & GAMES was published by Finishing Line Press in 2009 and she’s written two series of nonfiction books for young readers for Full Tilt Press. Her novel The Girl in Duluth, published under the name Sigrid Brown, won a 2023 Midwest Book Award, and was a best-selling book for Zenith Bookstore last year. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
318 North Central Ave, Duluth, MN, United States, Minnesota 55807
