“You’d think she was an angel if she wasn’t always flying so close to hell.”

Released from prison on probation, 19-year-old Harper Haley returns to the brutal, sweaty, dogwood scented landscape of her youth. Chronicling her homecoming and struggle for rehabilitation, this is the story of one girl’s sin, guilt and resurrection.

At the heart of the novel is the dangerous, obsessive sisterhood between Harper and her childhood friends Collier, a seductively destructive debutante, and Caro, a jaded dreamer yearning for escape. As Harper backslides into a violent cycle of sex, drugs and abuse,
the sisterhood at the core of her identity, and of the story, begins to unravel.

Climaxing in the confession of the act that irreversibly altered her life and those closest to her, Dogwood is Harper’s story, the one she can’t forget and the one she cannot speak.

Dogwood is an extraordinary debut novel. Parnell writes in the pitch-perfect dialect of the American South as she tells the story of three girls growing up in Virginia. Crime, drug addiction, faith and — more than anything else — friendship, are the themes explored in the heat and dust of small-town Virginia.