Zuzu's Petals

It’s REEL. A concern for sincerity, and a new nostalgia, that will get inside your head and keep vividly playing itself back. This riff off It’s A Wonderful Life is the one-of-a- kind hope for love to rescue us that so many authors not named Jeff Jarot wish they could write and the sort of dreamy results rarely seen in reality or the world of fiction. —Ricardo Cortez Cruz, author of Straight Outta Compton and Five Days of Bleeding

Heartfelt and probing, Jeff Jarot’s Zuzu’s Petals illuminates the difficulty of living in a digital present while still longing for a receding, but more human, past. —Curtis White, author of We, Robots; The Middle Mind; The Science Delusion; Memories of My Father Watching TV; and others

Like Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Jeff Jarot’s Zuzu’s Petals is a freewheeling and inventive personal exploration that tries to come to terms with a cultural obsession, and in the process gives us new insights into a world driven by technology, pop culture, and consumerism. By turns nostalgic and philosophical, Zuzu’s Petals is a lively and fascinating meditation on who we are and why we always seem to be falling short of those cultural images that continue to shape us. —James Plath, author of Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway and Conversations with John Updike

Zuzu’s Petals earns our respect by tackling difficult and uncomfortable questions through an absorbing narrative and a cast of characters about whom we care. We follow the multi-genre story not only through traditional description and dialogue, but also through exchanges of text messages, a child’s school essay, photographs, drawings, and fantasy scenes rendered in the form of film scripts. In the end, Zuzu’s Petals makes us, in Zuzu’s words, “pay attention” in new ways.—Bob Broad, author of What We Really Value