Praise for Martian SchoolgirlReaders Digest Assn. is proud to present Reminisce Magazine/LifeRich Publishing’s Grand Prize Winner in its inaugural Memoir Contest. Our judges found Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl an easy read of an honest story, with fine detail of growing up in the 40s and 50s on the Midwest prairie. Humor abounds amidst dark moments in an entertaining coming-of-age tale. — Courtenay Smith, Executive Editor, Reader’s Digest and Reminisce magazines
As a little girl, author J.R. Nakken was precocious, precognitive, left-handed, and wall-eyed; her grandmother thought she was a witch. In Confessions of a Martian Schoolgirl, Nakken shares a recounting of a period of twelve years beginning in 1940 when, almost four years old, her mother and new stepfather left her in Osceola, South Dakota (pop. 50), and drove off with her little sister to begin their new life. In this memoir, Nakken tells how she soon learned to retreat from the real world into books and fantasy, a beneficial lifesaving technique when she was reunited with her stepfather a little more than a year later.