BVC Presents Cover Stories: A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK

Greetings, genre fiction fans. Welcome to Cover Stories, in which an author shares a book, what’s on its cover, a hint of what’s inside and some insider info on their creation.

So, what’s the book of the day? 

A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

What’s on the cover?

Ganady Puzdrovsky has just followed the age old fairy tale custom of firing an object (usually an arrow, but in this case a “magic” baseball) in a random direction, hoping that it will lead him to the girl he is destined to marry. Imagine his consternation when he traces his baseball to an alley where he finds it in the possession of a gleaming cockroach.

Also on the cover is this teaser: Philadelphia. 1950s: A boy, a magic baseball … a cockroach. Unlikely place. Unlikely characters. Unlikely love story.

What’s inside?

The tale begins: “If Market Street ever flooded,” said Stanislaus Ouspensky, “South Philly would be an island. …Water on three sides; history on the fourth. All it would take is a little push and we’re cut off from the present. Because Time gets confused in South Philly.”

Set in Philadelphia in the 1950’s, A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK is a peculiar coming-of-age tale—a story of faith, love and magic set in an archipelago of immigrant neighborhoods. 

Ganady Puzdrovsky grows from boy to man on a quest for New World magic. He finds it in unlikely places: in his Baba Irina’s stories, in the imaginative ramblings of Stan Ouspensky, in the religious faith of a priest and a rabbi, in a pop foul at a Giants’/Phillies game, in love that goes beyond racial or religious boundaries, in Izzy’s Jewish deli.

Through the agency of a very special baseball, Ganady finds and falls for a peculiar and mysterious princess that no one else believes exists. But when the girl of his dreams vanishes, Ganady goes on a hero’s quest and confronts a Sausage King, a feisty crone, and a winsome bard in order to find her.

Where’d all that come from?

I grew up with tales of Old World magic. Fairy tales, ghost stories, legends of great Slavic heroes like Kralyevich Marko and his marvelous horse, Sharats. Living in the USA, I wondered where the magic went and if maybe just a little of it might have crossed the Atlantic from the Motherland.

A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK is my answer…

Okay, so my hero, Ganady Puzdrovsky, doesn’t ride a magical horse—but he does have a magic baseball. And he’s not a prince … exactly—but he does fall in love with a Princess … sort of. And he doesn’t slay magical beasts—but he does battle an angry Sausage King and a scheming Crone in order to complete a magical quest … in a manner of speaking.

Well, I guess you’ll just have to read it. Then I hope you’ll believe that there’s New World magic, too.

What else should I know?

My dad was a denizen of Philadelphia and, later, its sister city across the river, Camden, New Jersey. He grew up there in an earlier decade, but he was full of real virtue, Polish jokes, and stories about how he lost his hair. He was a first generation Polish-American—son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father (who went by Phillip, but whose birth name was Itzak). My dad was a lover of baseball, played catcher, and would have signed with a minor league team were it not for having already wrecked his knees (or so he claimed). He had no middle name (or at least none he’d admit to) but he adopted the middle initial T, which caused him to be called “Tex” and which everyone assumed was adapted from Theodore. Hey, at least it wasn’t Tiberius.

This book is, in many ways, a love letter to my dad, Chief Master Sergeant Henry Theodore Harber (aka, Tex and Hank) from his “Little Chief” who finally learned to love baseball as much as he did, though she couldn’t play it to save her life.

What have reviewers/readers said about A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK?

“The manuscript is literarily written and lovely—it gave me A Tree Grows in Brooklyn meets To Say Nothing of the Dog vibes” ~ Brit Hvide, editor Hachette Group

“O. My. God. This is such a great book!” ~ Jennifer Stevenson, author of the Hinky Chicago series