Life Cycle of a Nondescript Iguanoid

This is the story of a young girl and her pet lizard growing up in the San Gabriel valley of Southern California. Spanning her age between 11 and 25 (the years from1992 -2007) the narrative is driven by her growth from childhood through adolescence to adulthood amid all the love, terror, hope , confusion and fear those times held for so many.
Mary Smythe and her friends and family people the Homefront of the War on Terror as they progress from football to war; from cheerleading to motherhood; from first love to the despair of adultery and pregnancy; as they rehab from war wounds and witness the various maladies of age. From cradle to hospice they live out their lives and speculate on their meaning when they have a chance to do so.
Part Mildred Pierce, part pet story and mostly unlike anything else at all, this is not a 'juvenile' or genre 'young adult' novel, though it is certainly relevant to that demographic as well as the General Adult readership. There are scenes of sex, violence, drug use and so forth. This is not a fantasy; no shapeshifters or monsters are to be found. For them, check out the author's other novels.