“In a risky but successful style, Fischer… illustrat[es] Abby’s lack of breathing space as she strains to hold herself together and move from one moment to the next.” ―Kirkus Reviews

“The author does a fine job of capturing Abby’s point of view, from adolescent angst to denial then anger at her mother’s-and family’s-condition and finally all-out rebellion. And she does it in an interesting way.” ―Children’s Literature

“You can’t stop reading An Egg on Three Sticks once you start it. Three pages in, I was hooked.” –Billie Letts, author of Where the Heart Is

“An Egg on Three Sticks, Jackie Moyer Fischer’s absorbing first novel, is as genuine as the voice at its center. Abby, one of the most engaging young narrators since Elizabeth Berg’s Katie in Durable Goods, tells her story with honesty, toughness, and a vulnerability that carries the reader along with a sense of suspense and deep emotional investment to its heartbreaking conclusion. In an impressive and rewarding writerly feat, Fischer manages to make Abby’s story funny, entertaining, devastating, and redemptive, all at the same time.”
–Stephanie Rosenfeld, author of What About the Love Part?

“Fischer’s novel is a spare, unflinching picture of a nuclear family’s disintegration. At the same time, it’s a nostalgic ride through the goofy, vulnerable years of early adolescence, when stolen hallway kisses, forbidden pulp novels, and super-short miniskirts are of monumental importance.” –Emily Jenkins, author of Mister Posterior and the Genius Child

“In prose both fresh and piercing, Fischer brings us so close to her narrator that we feel what it’s like to be thirteen . . . and to be tormented by a potent mixture of love, anger, and guilt as you start to face the hard truths of the adult world. Abby’s voice is unfaltering; its honesty and pure tone animates a story of immediate and affecting emotional power.”
–Anitra Sheen, author of Things Unspoken

“An Egg on Three Sticks is a step into the bewildering world of adolescence. . . . Profound, fresh, funny, it will make you laugh as it breaks your heart.”
–Tom Spanbauer, author of In the City of Shy Hunters

“The voice and flow of this funny, sad, life-loving work are so note-perfect that taking in An Egg on Three Sticks feels less like reading a novel than hanging out with its unforgettable teenage protagonist Abby Goodman as she lays it all out to you. Fischer’s remarkable debut will keep you up at night whizzing through its pages, and will haunt and delight you long afterwards.” –Fred Pfeil, author of White Guys and What They Tell You to Forget

“With her poetic writing and honest voice, Fischer has captured a twelve-year-old’s description of her mother’s breakdown. I’m very much looking forward to Fischer’s next book.” –Jasmine Paul, author of A Girl, in Parts

“You can’t stop reading An Egg on Three Sticks once you start it. Three pages in, I was hooked.” –Billie Letts, author of Where the Heart Is

“An Egg on Three Sticks, Jackie Moyer Fischer’s absorbing first novel, is as genuine as the voice at its center. Abby, one of the most engaging young narrators since Elizabeth Berg’s Katie in Durable Goods, tells her story with honesty, toughness, and a vulnerability that carries the reader along with a sense of suspense and deep emotional investment to its heartbreaking conclusion. In an impressive and rewarding writerly feat, Fischer manages to make Abby’s story funny, entertaining, devastating, and redemptive, all at the same time.”
–Stephanie Rosenfeld, author of What About the Love Part?

“Fischer’s novel is a spare, unflinching picture of a nuclear family’s disintegration. At the same time, it’s a nostalgic ride through the goofy, vulnerable years of early adolescence, when stolen hallway kisses, forbidden pulp novels, and super-short miniskirts are of monumental importance.” –Emily Jenkins, author of Mister Posterior and the Genius Child

“In prose both fresh and piercing, Fischer brings us so close to her narrator that we feel what it’s like to be thirteen . . . and to be tormented by a potent mixture of love, anger, and guilt as you start to face the hard truths of the adult world. Abby’s voice is unfaltering; its honesty and pure tone animates a story of immediate and affecting emotional power.”
–Anitra Sheen, author of Things Unspoken

“An Egg on Three Sticks is a step into the bewildering world of adolescence. . . . Profound, fresh, funny, it will make you laugh as it breaks your heart.”
–Tom Spanbauer, author of In the City of Shy Hunters

“The voice and flow of this funny, sad, life-loving work are so note-perfect that taking in An Egg on Three Sticks feels less like reading a novel than hanging out with its unforgettable teenage protagonist Abby Goodman as she lays it all out to you. Fischer’s remarkable debut will keep you up at night whizzing through its pages, and will haunt and delight you long afterwards.” –Fred Pfeil, author of White Guys and What They Tell You to Forget

“With her poetic writing and honest voice, Fischer has captured a twelve-year-old’s description of her mother’s breakdown. I’m very much looking forward to Fischer’s next book.” –Jasmine Paul, author of A Girl, in Parts

Jackie Moyer Fischer grew up in Saratoga, California, and McMinnville, Oregon. She graduated from Oregon State University (English) and Lewis and Clark Northwestern School of Law (J.D). She now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and too many cats. She has made peace with the rain and now prefers it to sunshine.

An Egg on Three Sticks

By Fischer, Jackie

St. Martin’s Griffin

Copyright © 2004 Fischer, Jackie
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0312317751
Excerpt from An Egg on Three Sticks by Jackie Moyer Fischer. Copyright © 2004 by Jackie Moyer Fischer. Published by St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

So I’m walking home from school by myself because it’s Thursday which is my late day because of Girls’ Glee Club after school which most other days I walk home with my best friend Poppy Cordesi who lives across the street and which her mom’s divorced and no one knows where her dad is. I get to the top of our street which is a little hill and I look down on the ten houses, eleven if you count the Pierces’ but they have their own private driveway which goes right out onto the highway. I look down at all the houses and they look normal as day but when I look at our house there’s something different.

Not a big different, just a little different, almost like how toast smells a little different right before it burns.

I look at our dark brown house.

We have the only dark brown house on the street. Every other house is white or beige or pale green but ours is dark brown with red trim, whoever heard of that, plus the red is faded to icky pink and which I have one word for that: grossamundo.

Which is this sort of language Poppy and I made up but I’ll get to that later.

I look at the dark brown and the icky pink, and something is not right. It’s not just that our car is gone, which it is, and which it shouldn’t be on a Thursday at four-fifteen. Everything looks weird, the sun and the sky and the clouds and it’s too warm for April which by the way is my favorite month because I just had my thirteenth birthday last week so I am now officially a teenager which it’s about time.

I walk down the hill and I tell myself I’m just making this up.

There’s nothing wrong.ar
Except there’s this thing in my stomach, this thing I get sometimes that I call the big clench only right now it’s a little clench and I tell it to shut up, go away, there’s nothing wrong.

I walk past the Sullivans’ house, then past the five peach trees that belong to the Sullivans but we can pick peaches whenever we want because there’s just Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan and they can’t eat all those peaches by themselves and there are four of us, Mom and Dad and me and Lisa who’s seven, but really it’s more like three and a half people because Lisa is such a puny little thing and really more like three because Mom hasn’t been eating much lately.

I get to our driveway and I stop and look at our front yard because even it looks weird.

The clench in my stomach gets clenchier but I tell it to shut up.

I tell myself it’s just our plain old green lawn with the apricot tree and some flowers and six junipers along the fence, which Dad is threatening to take out the whole lawn and put in all junipers because he doesn’t want to be a slave to that lawn anymore but then Mom always has to go lie down when he says that, but then she has to lie down a lot these days.

I get to our front walk and there’s someone in our front window who is not Mom.

Which is weirdamundo.

Now I definitely have the big clench.

It’s Mrs. Sierra in the window, Mrs. Sierra from next door who lives in a beige house with nothing but gravel for a driveway and who used to be a nurse with Mom in the olden days before Mom married Dad. Mrs. Sierra is this enormous woman with yellow skin who wears these tent dresses but is awfully, awfully nice, I mean you just have to like her because she’s just so nice, plus you have to feel sorry for her because her son Jimmy is at this very moment over in Vietnam getting shot. I mean shot at.

Mrs. Sierra sees me and opens our icky pink front door and her little black eyes look at me all serious and concerned, and her forehead goes into a deep V and she says, Oh Abby, and her voice is so low and sad that the big clench in my stomach is turning into a very big clench.
16
Because even though I’m pretending to myself that I don’t know what’s going on, I really do.

No doubt about it.

I know.

I walk in and I say, Where’s Mom?

Like I don’t know.

Mrs. Sierra puts her big yellow arm around me and squeezes real tight and now I know for sure that something is wrong because it’s one of those kinds of arm-hugs, the kind where there’s something really, really wrong.

So now I know for sure, that thing I knew at the top of the hill.

Continues…
Excerpted from An Egg on Three Sticks by Fischer, Jackie Copyright © 2004 by Fischer, Jackie. Excerpted by permission.
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