In light of her impending death, thirteen-year-old Beatrice Danzig has changed her name to Christmas. She’s at the center of Christmas in July, a novel in ten stories told by ten residents of suburban Saxon Hills: the bored wife of a senior softball slugger, a socialite with a glitter fixation, a beekeeping hermit, a young runaway who can’t outrun her past. The novel explores each of these people’s lives before and after meeting Christmas—as well as Mr. Ramirez’s mustache, The Wizard of Oz, cults and terrorists, Brown v. Board of Education, a band named Wagawagawaga, and the mystery of Aunt Nikki, Christmas’s guardian, who sleeps in a closet to keep her demons, real and imagined, at bay. Through ten unique voices, veteran author Alan Michael Parker charts the wreckage of a troubled teen in a small town, exposing the residents’ secrets and their all-too-human hearts. Read Less