Last Days of a Toyshop — Annabel Johnson

Annabel Johnson is the author of twenty-three novels, the product of a long and interesting career, which began at a time when the country was young and full of pep and innocence. She had just turned twenty in 1941 when the world changed forever with the events of Pearl Harbor and the ensuing war. It is about that fateful year that she has chosen to write LAST DAYS OF A TOYSHOP. The story is completely fictional, but it draws on her own experiences which she remembers vividly.

From the age of twelve, Annabel was dedicated to a future as an author, so that by the time she was twenty she had begun to see the happenings of her life as material for books to come. In 1955 she and her husband Edgar began their co-authorship by writing historical novels of the old West, traveling the country, visiting the scenes of their stories and delving into the research while living in an eight-foot camping trailer, trying to make ends meet on an author's meager royalties. They had no home base, except a certain spot in the Mojave desert in winter, and another site in the National Forest in Wyoming in summer.

In 1966, with the growing success of their books, they settled in Denver, but after Edgar's death, Annabel has come home to Arizona, to continue her career in the desert setting she has always loved. With this new novel she has rekindled the memory of the America of her youth, telling the tale of a girl making the painful struggle into womanhood, dealing with a devastating family secret and learning the intricacies of relationships with the three men in her life. It is a story of personal upheaval, but more than that, the picture of a time that will never return.