The Utterly Unacceptable Atrocity of Isabelle Marsden

Isabelle Marsden moves from Chicago to Kansas wanting somewhere to stop, take stock and get her life back under her own control after a MeToo experience that went badly for her.

What she gets instead is a chance meeting with a free-spirited artist who carries a wallaby in a baby sling and makes assemblages out of roadkill, and from there a whole community of eccentrics. Within weeks Belle is campaigning to save the Summer Solstice parade, running surveillance on a roadside zoo, and visiting an outsider artist's sculpture garden.

Inspired by it, she starts an assemblage of her own and becomes convinced it is what will put her back together. It puts her at odds with her landlady, the zoning department and eventually the police. Nan Sanders Pokerwinski writes about creativity and breakdown as the same process viewed from different angles, and about a found family of oddballs as the thing that actually helps.