Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell | 2007 | Laurie Notaro | Buy |
| 2 | Spooky Little Girl | 2010 | Laurie Notaro | Buy |
| 3 | Crossing the Horizon | 2016 | Laurie Notaro | Buy |
Laurie Notaro’s three standalone novels show a wider range than her essay collections. There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell (2007) is a comic novel about Maye, a former reporter who moves with her professor husband from Phoenix to a small town in Washington state. The town’s quirks and a local beauty pageant provide most of the humor.
Spooky Little Girl (2010) follows Lucy Fisher, who loses her job, her fiance, and then her life in quick succession. She ends up in ghost school, learning how to haunt people, and has to complete a spectral assignment to move on to the afterlife. Crossing the Horizon (2016) is a different kind of book entirely. It tells the true story of three women in the late 1920s who each wanted to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic: Elsie Mackay, an English aristocrat and pilot; Ruth Elder, a beauty pageant winner from Alabama who used her prize money for flying lessons; and Mabel Boll, a society figure known as the “Queen of Diamonds.” The novel draws on original research and period photographs.