By Sandra J. Schumm
Girl in a Cage
After a novelist moves to Kansas in 2018, she is visited by a ghost who wants her to rescue a young, Mexican immigrant girl he saw with a brutish man; all the while, her deported mother awaits any word of her daughter.
Girl in a Cage is a novel of hope for our time about journeys—replete with anger and confinement—to find personal freedom. Five main characters intersect and cross boundaries of different of different types: between nations, between life and the world of spirits, between truth and fiction, freedom and entrapment. Ana López de Domínguez and her daughter Anita migrate from Mexico, the gambler Jack Collins becomes entangled in juvenile sex trafficking, and Antoine Benet is transformed into a ghost who enlists novelist Claire Schmidt’s help to liberate Anita.
About the Author
Sandra J. Schumm
Sandra J. Schumm has lived in Kansas or Missouri all of her life—except for sojourns, studies, and sabbaticals in other countries. The only time she ever skipped school was at age twelve, when she sneaked back into her house through an unlocked window to hide in a closet and finish reading a novel. After three of her four children were born, she entered graduate school at the University of Kansas to earn her MA and PhD in Spanish with a concentration on twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American narrative. She taught university Spanish classes for more than twenty-five years and is now Professor Emerita of Spanish at Baker University. Her previous publications include two books of literary criticism—Reflection in Sequence: Novels by Spanish Women, 1944-1988 (Bucknell University Press) and Mother and Myth in Spanish Novels: Rewriting the Maternal Archetype (Bucknell University Press). Sandra is a certified yoga instructor and an excellent seamstress. She lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her husband, Robert, and cat, Arjuna. Girl in a Cage is her first novel.
