Mandy Houk began work on her first novel, Cloud Hunting, in the fall of 2004.  She completed the first draft in the winter of 2005, and the rewrites and final edits in the fall of 2008.  It is currently under review with select agents.

Mandy's characters will engage you, frustrate you, make you laugh, and capture your heart.  And the setting of Cloud Hunting, the fictional town of Ogden Falls, Georgia, will have you wishing you could visit, though you might not want to live there.

Cloud Hunting's themes of forgiveness, our own frequently faulty perceptions of others, and the eternal pull of family and home will appeal to readers of books that make them laugh and speak to their hearts.

 Overview

More than thirty years after leaving home by the light of a cold October moon, Luci Turner Malone returns to the small town of Ogden Falls, Georgia. She finds her little sister, Patricia, transformed into a bitter middle-aged woman, her parents buried under a willow tree, and the townspeople still occupied with cooking, pickling, and gossip.

Excerpt

Chapter One

Light from the wide October moon cut a path across the dining room table.  It fell on the page Luci had torn from her notebook, frosting the words.  Luci trembled as she signed her name and tried not to let her mind drift toward what might happen next.  A tear slid off the tip of her nose and splattered on her signature, feathering the blue dot on the i.

She yanked a napkin from the old rooster napkin holder and blotted at the dampness, smearing the ink even more.  She'd ruined it.  But the thought of starting again stirred up her stomach and brought new pools of tears to her eyes.

So she folded the page and propped it up against the rooster's faded wooden tail feathers, then stood and lingered there a moment, looking down into her empty chair.  Tissy would be alone now on this side of the table, with nobody to elbow at and whisper to.  Maybe Mama would take out the leaf, making the table small and round so the three of them would sit in a kind of lopsided circle.

Eddie was waiting.  The knowledge of it pricked at the back of her mind.  He'd parked up the road, far from the house so Daddy wouldn't hear the low grumble of his GTO.  But he'd have to wait a bit longer.

She made her way up the stairs and stopped at the top.  The hallway wall was christened with bright red hand prints, one of Mama's wild ideas from so many years ago.  Luci fitted her hand over one of her old prints, marveling at the length of her own fingers, how they swallowed up the print and hid it entirely.  From inside her head looking out, she still felt herself to be a child, but here was her hand, telling a different story.  She shifted and set her other hand over one of Tissy's prints: so tiny, so thin, so precisely placed there, Tissy being careful not to smudge.  Luci's own handwriting was underneath it since Tissy was too little then to write her name herself.  But not too little to be demanding.  "Don't put Patricia.  Put Tissy," she'd said.

Luci's hands slipped off the prints and she took a few more steps down the hall to Tissy's room.  Tissy slept with her door cracked open.  Luci moved her shoulders into the space and it widened soundlessly, the sliver of moonlight across the floor expanding until it slid up the side of the bed and onto Tissy's face.  She slept flat on her back, her mouth open wide.  "Catching flies," Daddy would say.  Luci smiled at how her sister looked, like some comical marble statue in the silvery light.  She allowed herself a few moments more in the doorway and then withdrew, watching her own silhouette pull the door back in place.

She had to clench her toes to keep still, to keep from walking down to Mama and Daddy's room, but she couldn't risk waking them up.  She just stood in the hallway, looked down at their door and then back at Tissy's.

"Bye," she whispered.