Thirteen-year-old Beatrice Danzig has terminal cancer. When her junkie mom checks into rehab, she’s sent to live with her aunt in the quiet suburban town of Saxon Hills, where she fits about as well as her baggy button-down and thrift-store plaid.

In honor of her impending death, Beatrice changes her name to Christmas and plows into the town like a wrecking ball. She is an enigma: a project for the bored wife of a senior softball slugger, a ghost haunting a socialite with a glitter fixation, a cracked mirror for the young runaway entangled with a strange cult. And an unfathomable mystery for her Aunt Nikki, the town planner, who sleeps in a closet to keep her demons, real and imagined, at bay.

A novel in ten stories told by ten people, Christmas in July charts the whirlwind of a troubled teen in a small town, exposing the residents’ secrets and their all-too-human hearts.