Staring at Medusa
by Natali Clarke

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Emma Jarvie is your typical teenager—sure, she’s an Iranian American immigrant living in Santa Ana, CA, a neighborhood becoming notorious for its growing violence. But like every teenage girl, she worries about boys, tries to keep her grades up in school, and shops for makeup with her best friend, Julie. All right, so things aren’t as they seem. So she doesn’t have a father in the picture, and her mother is slowly losing a battle to something unseen. So her older sister says she’ll be applying to a distant university, leaving Emma to take care of their mother alone. So she’s turned to the streets to try and make something out of nothing from her riches-to-rags life. She can still handle this. But when she turns to Julie for support, she encounters Julie’s seductive ex-boyfriend, Joseph, and everything she’s worked so hard to build starts crumbling apart. Danger is closer to her than ever—but with building frustration about her constant struggles at school and at home, she’s willing to risk it all. Based on true events and infused with tenderness and dark humor, Staring at Medusa is a meditation on family and friendship, isolation and belonging, violence and care, as Emma navigates being a typical teenager against a backdrop of unique circumstances.

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Natali Clarke has been an avid reader since childhood, eager to escape her difficult home life and disappear into other worlds. As a teenager, reading morphed into endless hours of journaling which sparked her dream to become a writer. But ever the pragmatist, she pursued a “sensible” path, getting a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from the University of Southern California. She previously worked on the business side of mental health until 2020, when both global and personal changes in her world prompted her to take the leap of faith and pursue her dreams. Staring at Medusa is her debut novel, based on true events in her childhood and teenage years, and is the first of a planned trilogy. Natali resides in Los Angeles, CA and is raising two lovely children, three dogs, two geckos and one very talkative guinea pig.

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Contributors

Author

Natali Clarke

Illustrator

Frankie Hargreaves

Photographer

Shahram Yassini

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