Debra Thomas is a magician. Her artistry, empathy, and gentle humor allow Josie and Vic, a novel grounded in the deepest of grief, to shine with hope, with compassion, with the reminder that connection and service offer us paths toward healing. An unforgettable, heart-filled, heart-filling novel.

In this beautifully crafted novel, tragedies test family bonds while revealing the power of love and the strength and resilience of the human spirit.

Josie and Vic encompasses personal love, human love beyond borders, and, ultimately, global love, as Madre Tierra's Turtle Islands slowly move together to create a new Pangaea. A new form, and a new hope—the future re-imagined.

Mesmerizing and deeply affecting. Debra Thomas is a master at creating complex and believable characters who deal with abandonment issues, tragedy, starting over when all seems lost—and the soul connection between animals and humans. Like the late great Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Carol Shields, who was drawn to explore family dynamics in her stories, Thomas picks up the torch and carries on the tradition in her second novel, Josie and Vic.

With an authentic sense of place and time, Josie and Vic pulls the reader into the emotional depths of  familial relationships and the pain of generational secrets. Author Debra Thomas has created characters who illuminate the essentials of the human heart in this story of love, loss, and renewal.

Josie Serafini—tough yet tender—wins us over from the first page in award-winning Debra Thomas’s second novel, Josie and Vic. Dealing with layers of anxiety, grief, and loss, Josie shows us that sometimes the longest road home teaches us the most about ourselves. For fans of Ann Patchett, Joyce Carol Oates, and Barbara Kingsolver. A lovely book.

JOSIE & VIC is a rare gift to thoughtful readers. In our cynical times, Debra Thomas lingers with everyday people—people who struggle, confront tragedy and loss, yet rise above it by connecting with each other. This is a novel of connection. Something I richly needed.

The tectonic plates that have undergirded siblings Josie and Vic are shattered by unspeakable loss, and each must make sense of their lives in order to find their way back home. All things are bound together, Chief Seattle says, and they are in Thomas’s exquisite telling and crystalline prose. Each member of this multi-generational family must seek forgiveness and reconciliation, as we too must do within ourselves, as well as across regions, countries, and continents. Thomas’s story-telling gift is one of empathy for her characters, both human and animal, and love of family in all its complicated conditions.

Josie and Vic is about transcending tragedy, finding the way back, or the way forward, with the help of those you love—or those who care enough to leave “blue flags” along the way. An incredibly touching, heartbreaking story, filled with heart and soul.

Against a Southern California backdrop, shifting dynamics in a family are brought into focus in a sensitive story of people set adrift from life's great tragedies. A clear-sighted, moving, contemporary story of the familial support it takes to bravely move forward, Josie and Vic explores what it takes to heal a shattered self in favor of joining a greater whole.