Jeannie has a problem. Her mother wantes to leave precisely at midnight to take off for the fabled riches of California, and Jeannie wants to lose her virginity first. She does, with Bill the Hood, who makes her weak and points out the star Polaris and tells her she's his girl. That's about all that Jeannie has to hold on to as Daisy drives across the country in a white Cadillac she's supposed to deliver in San Francisco.
Jeannie knows nothing much will change: her mother will pass hot checks, pick up men, and mean every word of the promises Jeannie knows won't come true. En route, Jeannie encounters a lecherous truck driver who sings along to Barbra Streisand and an equally lecherous judge in a motel room at Lake Tahoe.
Before this engaging and sometimes heartbreaking novel comes to an end, Jeannie will live with her mother in a Sausalito apartment redolent of sewer fumes, find an unlikely friend in a married man, go back to Michigan for Christmas, and return again to Sausalito. More important, she is able to see that she's a "halfway decent girl" after all and that maybe, just maybe, the "sensible luck" that has kept her alive will offer her a chance at life.
Review: "Rhonda Talbot's Halfway Decent Girl is a winning debut of a natural storyteller. She is fully at home with her singular characters-careening and grappling through an uncertain world reaching toward light."
-Ann Louise Bardach, Talk Magazine
"A Halfway Decent Girl is a lovely debut novel about a mom and a daughter engaged in a fight to the death over who can be less responsible. It's smart and painful and funny as only the truest stories can be."
-Jim Krusoe, Author of Blood Lake
Bio: RHONDA TALBOT is a Los Angeles-based film executive. The graduate of countless writing workshops, her work has appeared in such periodicals as Ground Zero, and heard at "Spoken Interludes". One of her short stories was adapted into a short film that was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival and later aired on MTV. This is her first novel.
