"John Thorndike is an insanely good novelist. He writes gorgeously, and his characters take on lives of their own under his deft hand. Don't miss this one."  --Henry Shukman, author of Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening

"John Thorndike’s finely wrought prose gleams in this boldly intimate fictional account of his mother’s later years. In The Passionate Sister, Virginia Thorndike’s complex relationships with her lovers and family are driven by a restless, life-long passion that she struggles to fully understand and control. The fictional characters in this story are searing in their realism. This is the work of a gifted author revealing his soul.  --Raul Ramos y Sanchez, author of Mustang to Paducah and The Skinny Years

"In The Passionate Sister, John Thorndike illuminates the ordinary with astonishing force. The lucky reader gets to experience loss, loneliness, joy, and redemption through one of the most fully realized characters in recent memory. Whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, or a hybrid of the two, Thorndike writes beautifully about love and what it means to be human."      --Rob Wilder, author of Nickel and Daddy Needs a Drink    

"John Thorndike contains multitudes and one of the larger figures in his inner family is his mother. So he birthed another novel to give life to her soul. Virginia longs for connection to others, and for happiness which is somehow out of reach. For John, joy comes to hand from every direction. This is the engine of his prose."  --Paul Kafka-Gibbons, author of Love: Enter
       
"The Passionate Sister is a powerful, emotionally charged story of a mother’s love for her grown sons; one, a gay man living in the shadow of AIDS, and the other, a member of a commune and husband to an erratic schizophrenic. The novel is a testament to the healing powers of love in a family fraught with conflict."   ---John Kachuba, author of The Bottle Conjuror

"A deeply felt novel about two brothers who emerge from the sixties full of creative optimism and then run into the inevitable, random suffering of ordinary living.  Ginny, their mother, catches them and helps them bear up even as she wrestles with her own rehabilitation from the addictions that destroyed her life.  Their stories explore the strong undertow of happenstance and despair pulling against our strongest efforts to make it to shore.  Ginny is a memorable protagonist who heroically struggles with her past failures, the demands of her children, and the emptiness of her new sober reality.  Thorndike’s own mother, also Ginny, did not survive her moment of crisis, dying from a drug overdose at the age of 57, making this also a novel of redemption that grants her a different finish to her story."    --Eddie Lewis, author of Ray Had an Idea About Love

"Every word feels true in this extraordinary, wonderful, perceptive novel playing off the author's own family history. Thorndike explores how we all face personal tragedies, some random and some caused by our weaknesses, relieved by appreciation for what it means to be alive, the moments of weather on our skin, the look of the sea and the sky, our glances, our touching. Even with our many reasons to be sad, it's all lovely, and loving."
--Ray Ring, author of Montana Blues and Arizona Kiss

"John Thorndike confronts grief by reimaging his mother’s life beyond her premature death from addiction at 57. His compassionate narrative explores realms between memory and imagination, crafting an emotional testimony to maternal love and passion that transcends tragedy. He celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of second chances."   --Mark D. Walker, author of The Guatemala Reader

"In this unflinching novel taking on some of the hardest of life issues, Thorndike draws from a deep well of personal experience to show us through his characters how we might navigate such issues ourselves. The result is a poignant and engaging work that leaves one more inspired than defeated."   --Granville Greene, author of The Mezcal Rush