She Writes Press - April 27, 2027

Pre-order available

Olive Grove, Who Are You?

A fiery bus crash, assault, abduction and rebirth into a secret cult—that’s just the beginning.

Olive Grove Who Are You? is a fun, fresh take on the sad/bad girl genre, at once hilarious and deeply moving. For fans of commercial/literary authors like Maria Semple, Gail Honeyman and Jen Beagin, the novel is a wild and colorful romp on the heels of 30-year-old Olive as she tries desperately to escape a bad marriage and dead-end job in California’s Bay Area by running away to Baja, Mexico. Olive’s sketchy idea gets worse the longer she refuses to face the source of her misery: guilt over her role in a long-ago family tragedy. She changes the scenery, changes her name, falls for a shadowy cowboy, and discovers her mission in life several times over while continuing to make the same bad choices, with increasingly nightmarish consequences.

If it sounds like the plot of a page-turning thriller, that’s because it is—written by another young woman whom we meet in Part Two. Rose, like her protagonist, Olive, is trying (and mostly failing) to find herself in Mexico—all while drafting a cliff-hanging novel called Olive Grove, Who Are You? Until Rose figures out who she is, she can’t envision an ending for Olive, happy or otherwise. Their mutual destiny: run for the border, hang over a cliff, repeat.

Both a propulsive read and a sensitive portrait of a young woman on the run from her traumatic past, it features a clever blend of humor, emotional depth, and themes of personal resilience.