Here’s the story:

A top tech exec bolts from her life—leaving behind her narcissistic tech-bro husband and the illusion of control she built in Silicon Valley.

But when Mariella returns to her childhood home in Colorado to regroup, she finds a world unraveling. Her mom’s off storming the Capitol in full QAnon regalia while her nieces are disappearing into social media’s quiet damage and self-erasure.

The algorithms Mariella once helped push are no longer abstract. They’re personal.

“We thought we were connecting the world… But we forgot to connect families at the dinner table.”

As truth blurs into belief and the people she loves slip farther out of reach, Mariella is forced to confront everything she spent her lifetime avoiding: grief, family, belonging, and the cost of staying silent.

Sometimes when everything falls apart, we don’t just rebuild. We decide who we become.

Darkly humorous and deeply human, Valley High, Mountain Low is an intimate, timely story of love and loss that explores the surprising ways we can travel back to ourselves.

What rises when we let it all crash?

For readers of thoughtful fiction, family drama, and stories that ask hard questions with compassion.

And here’s something very special about this book:

As far as I can tell, Valley High, Mountain Low is the first novel to explore these very different consequences of the social media age within one family—a loved one radicalized by conspiracy theories and teenagers harmed by the algorithms shaping their social-media worlds. And then there’s what it must be like to turn on the news and see your mom storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

These stories have been documented in nonfiction. But I haven’t been able to find another novel that explores these topics—political polarization, QAnon, J6, and social media’s impact on teenage girls—much less brings them together this way, in one family’s story.

And that matters to me because this book was never really about politics. It’s about what happens to families when the forces dividing us come through the front door.

It’s about loving people across enormous divides. It’s about what technology has given us—and what it has cost us. And ultimately, it’s about whether we can find our way back to one another without having to agree about everything first.

That’s the story I wanted to tell. And along the way, it’s lighthearted, irreverent, and wildly entertaining too.

I truly hope you enjoy the journey.