About The Character Barb Donahue:
“Barb is elegant and powerful, she has arrived. She adores her skyline apartment and driving her sparkling SUV, she lives a private life. We would never know much about her except that she is Emmy and Ashley’s mother and she is mentoring Emmy’s friend Phoebe the artist. She doesn’t let people in. So the way we get to see, as the reader, what she is up to is quite satisfying.”
-Bunny Hammond
“For Barb dreams were like storm clouds building on a horizon that is out of sight. You still know they are there and wonder what is going to happen. She welcomed a new fight. Everything in her life had been firmly under her control long enough for boredom to creep in.
There were blue draft horses standing in the water in the corner of a fence line, in a hay field. Dark clouds overpowered the sky.
She could see the finished stacks, imposing in the distance.
The horses stood still and time stopped. The barbed wire fence was half way under the water so that the horses sloshed as they milled together. Her dad was standing among them in the water, his hand on a very blue blue roan.
His straw hat was bent low over his face but she recognized his iconic silhouette, his posture, the curve of the hat brim could only have been his.
“Dad-”
Barb never said goodbye before he died.”
-The Heartless Ranch Is Haunted, Chapter 4
“Ashley had never needed to waste time with common criminality. She had never needed to purchase controlled substances from terrorists with large sums of cash. She had never needed to illegally procure or steal uranium from government stashes to power her technology. Instead she made her own substances. It was too easy. She arranged for her materials to be exposed to her mom Barb, a strange and powerful woman. Barb’s body emitted radioactive waves and functioned as a sort of reactor. Exposure to her mom was enough to create radioactive substances from innocent materials.
Ashley assumed that something terrible had happened to her mom. Some sort of radioactive exposure incident. Or prolonged incident. Ashley had been just a kid when she figured out that her mom emitted radiation. She still had her first Geiger counter and the notebooks containing her first observations here in the lab. Her mom had been her first science project. Ashley knew she was smart but honestly everything she was and was able to do was because of her mom. Sadness eased in on Ashley’s adrenaline.
Ashley missed her mom.”
-This Is Dismal, Chapter 3