Book Spotlight: Words for Patty Jo by Jill Arlene Culiner

About Author Jill Arlene Culiner

Writer, artist, and teller of tall tales, Jill (J.) Arlene Culiner, was born in New York and raised in Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived on the Great Hungarian Plain, in a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, and a haunted house on the English moors. She now resides in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village where she protects spiders, snakes, and weeds. She delights in hearing any nasty, funny, ridiculous, or romantic story, and when she can’t uncover gossip, she makes it up.

She has won the Tanenbaum Prize in Canadian Jewish History, the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Memoir, was shortlisted for the Foreword Magazine Prize, and twice for the Page Turner Awards.

This is a spotlight on “Words for Patty Jo” by Jill Arlene Culiner

A Small Town in Ontario: An Unlikely Love Story

The summer romance between Patty Jo Lovelace and David Buckley Jr. is an unlikely one. He’s a star student; she’s the class dud. He’s programmed for success; she plans to drop out of school, work at the local greasy spoon. But recognizing her natural intelligence and love of books, David begs her to aim higher—education can take her out of her milieu.

Patty Jo listens to no one. With another way of seeing the world, she has to find her own way, even if that means making terrible mistakes. Besides, she has a secret life: she roves through the night streets when everyone is asleep; and she reads plays, memorizes the lines, then becomes someone else with a different life.

From Canada to England, Hungary and France, this is a story that spans over fifty years. The themes are social class, the search for identity, and finding the courage to break rules, defy society, and choose your destiny.

Words for Patty Jo is a literary romance, a women’s fiction, but also a reminder that we should never stop dreaming.

Words for Patty Jo Blurb

A passion for books creates a lasting bond between teenage Patty Jo and David, but small-town prejudice and social differences doom their romance.

After a summer of reading and falling in love, David heads for university, foreign adventure, and a dazzling career; Patty Jo marries slick, over-confident Don Ried.

Yet plans can go horribly wrong. The victim of her violent husband, Patty Jo abandons her home and children to live on the streets of Toronto. David, a high-ranking executive in Paris, is dismayed by the superficiality of corporate success.

Forty years later, Patty Jo and David meet again. Both have defied society; both have fulfilled their dreams. And what if first love was the right one after all, and destiny has the last word?

Purchase “Words for Patty Jo” here.

**An excerpt from Words for Patty Jo…**

Nik is an artist, although what he paints is not what she’d ever call art, with him standing up on a ladder and throwing acrylic colors onto a sheet of paper down on the floor. But because he’s the fashionable painter of the moment, everyone oohs, ahs, and calls it Art.

It’s like the super-cool music performed in the coffeehouses. Everyone likes it and she’s supposed to enjoy it, too, but none of it touches her. That gives her distance. Why accept everyone else’s idea of what is good? She can make up her own mind. An observer, she won’t fall into any easy conventional trap.

What touches her are the paintings seen in one gallery window, not squares, circles, and splotches, but long, almost clotted figures. Faceless, their paint bodies seep, are blurred, undefined. Aren’t these portraits of herself, slipping into roles easily? She’s a blank canvas onto which anything can be stretched and smeared.