FICTION
THE INDIGO
FINALIST, BOOK EXCELLENCE AWARD, 2023
HONORABLE MENTION, 2017 LEAPFROG PRESS FICTION CONTEST
"I loved this book. I really, really did... "
- Sally Altass, Reedsy
Whatever you do - stay connected.
Jett Hart, a 16-year-old girl from New Jersey, refuses to accept the diagnosis that her mother is brain-dead. Yes, Mom's long-comatose body seems like an empty shell. But there was that split-second, weird time Jett swears she lifted out from her own body and travelled to an indigo-colored, starry space, where she felt Mom's presence.
Now, as Jett's caretaking Aunt threatens to pull Mom's life support, Jett must find this mysterious indigo place again and return her mother to her body before it’s too late. The bad news is that only her schoolmate Farold -- who may or may not give off a more-than-friends vibe -- believes she can do this. The good news is that he's an amateur quantum physicist in training and has some ideas about how to help Jett get back “up there.”
Even if Jett manages to find Mom in the "indigo," can she bring her back to her body? While also staying connected to her own “empty shell” below? And, what if . . . someone is trying to stop her?
A teen thriller offering astral projection cosmology, life cords, parallel universes, and wormholes, THE INDIGO is a wild trip through one person's consciousness "above," her interconnected reality "below," and the psychological and potentially fatal dangers of being disconnected from both.
MEMOIR
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THE KING & THE QUIRKY
WINNER, NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS, WOMEN'S ISSUES, 2020
GOLD MEDALIST, READERS' FAVORITE BOOK AWARD, 2020
"Fantasy meets reality in this charming, funny, true-life memoir, propelled by the vivacious, utterly engaging voice of our compulsively honest narrator. A real page-turner."
- Phillip Lopate
Should we believe in the true love narrative?
Thirty-four-year-old Heather Siegel is eccentric, artsy, and independent, and she doesn't believe in romantic fairy-tales. At least not until she meets her opposite in Jon, a man of science, logic, and kingly ego. Not only does she fall for the idea of love and "soulmates," she goes one step further—she moves to the suburbs of Long Island and invests wholeheartedly in marriage and motherhood. Naturally, it doesn’t take long before she finds herself lost and adrift. To regain a shred of her old self, she embarks upon a series of quirky and painfully humorous entrepreneurial and health adventures. Can you be a stay-at-home mother and still be a feminist? Should we believe in the “true love” narrative? These are questions posed within this high drama of the mundane, in which (spoiler alert) no murder happens, no affair unfolds, and no death, illness, or trauma is suffered.
MEMOIR
OUT FROM THE UNDERWORLD
FOREWORD REVIEWS INDIES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD, FINALIST 2016
READERS FAVORITE FIVE STARRED REVIEW, SILVER MEDALIST 2015
EAST TEXAS WRITERS' GUILD BOOK AWARDS, 2015
"Heather Siegel has taken the raw material of an unusually deranged childhood, and done with it what very few can do: fashioned a piece of writing so smart, funny, and insightful that, as we read, we see the narrator growing from a street-smart little cynic into a remarkably understanding woman. More one cannot ask of any memoirist."
- Vivian Gornick
A heartbreaking, uplifting, and darkly humorous coming-of age memoir set in the 1970s and 1980s, exploring resiliency and parentification.
Heather Siegel was six years old when her mother disappeared, sending her funeral director father into a tailspin that took Heather and her siblings down with him—from a comfortable suburban home to a barely habitable basement apartment. It was a dark world they soon found themselves fighting to return to from the exile of foster care, then fighting even harder to escape. Forty years later, middle child Heather Siegel tells the remarkable story of how she and her siblings, Jaz and Greg, banded together to find out what happened to their mother and fight their way Out from the Underworld with nothing but their wits, determination, unbreakable bonds and gifts for humor and compassion to sustain them. A wrenching, inspiring story filled with heartbreak, hope and love, Out from the Underworld will move you to laughter and tears.