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The House Uptown takes place in Uptown New Orleans in a house that has been in Lane's family for generations. It's not just the setting of the novel; it's also a physical embodiment of family history, memory, and past mistakes that circle back to affect Lane and her granddaughter Ava in the present. Fourteen-year-old Ava has recently lost her mother, and searches for her mother's presence in the house where she grew up. The past is alive here, and the living, in their grief, haunt the place like ghosts. We decided on The House Uptown because it is the focus of the characters' obsessions and the site of all the drama driving the book.
I wanted to highlight New Orleans in the title--another potential idea that we ended up discarding was Crescent, after one of New Orleans's many nicknames, Crescent City. We also considered Survived By, which...[read on]
Q&A with Melissa Ginsburg.
--Marshal Zeringue
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