Son of a Pitch Adult Entry: Improbable Girl

Title: Improbable Girl

Age and Genre: Adult Women's Fiction

Word Count: 82,000

Query:

Jane is sitting on the floor of a tiny New York City apartment that she hates, trying to put together a crib by herself.  There’s a problem though.  Jane isn’t pregnant—not anymore, at least.  Daniel, her hyper-logical, math teacher husband walks in on this scene and struggles with how to comfort his angry, grieving wife, especially since he’s the reason they can’t have a baby.   

IMPROBABLE GIRL is a dual narrator, dual-timeline love story that begins in the middle as a marriage cracks under the weight of infertility.  The story bounces back and forth in time, connecting the dots between the excitement of first dates and budding love to the turmoil of needles and ultrasounds.  In the present, Jane, a former dancer who’s always been in control of her body, is so consumed by getting pregnant that she neglects everything else in her life.  Daniel, a hyper-logical math teacher, can never say the right thing, so he retreats into silence.  Round after round of expensive fertility treatments brings their marriage to a breaking point.  Daniel is unfaithful and Jane packs a suitcase and walks out, barreling forward with her third egg retrieval.  She’s unsure of what she wants more, her marriage or a baby.  When doctors discover a tumor on Jane’s ovary, Daniel's fear of losing her for good impels him to find her and earn her forgiveness.  For Jane, more than a baby is at stake now, and she recognizes that she can’t do everything alone.  Reunited, they face the uncertain outcomes of Jane’s surgery together.   

First 250 Words: 

I counted the stairs on the day we moved in.  There are 60 steps to our apartment on the fifth floor, so every six steps is equal to 10% of the trip to the top.  That is, if you ignore the 6 steps on the stoop.  If I count those, then every 6.6 steps is 10%.  I’d have to break the steps into fractions, and therefore divide the rise of my foot as it travels between one step and the next.   After teaching three sections of sixth grade math, two of seventh, hall duty, and a faculty meeting, I can’t achieve that level of precision.  So we’ll disregard those first 6 steps. 

Tonight as I walk up, I count by ten percent as I always do.  It’s a nice rhythm as my foot strikes each step and my shoe scratches across the surface.  One, two, three, four, five, ten, one, two, three, four, five, twenty. 

I like to know exactly where I’m going and how long it will take to get there.  Beyond these stairs and their six-beat rhythm, I don’t know where Jane and I are going or how far away it is.  That distance is undefined. 

One, two, three, four, five, fifty.  Fifty percent is nice, but my legs are burning a bit.  By seventy-five, I’m getting close, and I normally start taking the steps two at a time.  Not tonight.  I just want to keep counting tonight.

Review: Inconceivable! by Tegan Wren

From Goodreads:
A popular, young royal couple can't produce an heir? INCONCEIVABLE!

When Ozarks native Hatty goes “whole hog” during karaoke, she catches the eye of Prince John. He isn’t what she expects the heir to a small European nation to be: he's affable, witty, and isn’t put off by her tell-it-like-it-is demeanor. Their flirtation should be short lived, but a force stronger than fate—Hatty’s newspaper editor—assigns her to cover the royals. After spending time together, she and John soon begin dating, and Hatty finds herself making headlines instead of writing them. 

But challenges loom that are even more complicated than figuring out how to mesh Hatty's journalism career with life at Belvoir Palace. Hatty and John soon find themselves embroiled in an unusual sex scandal: they can't produce an heir. Tabloids dub Hatty a “Barren-ess,” and the royals become irate. Hatty politely tells them to shove it. But beneath her confident exterior, she struggles to cope with a heartbreak that invades her most intimate moments with John. Pressured to choose between invasive medical procedures and abandoning John’s claim to the throne, the couple feels trapped until a trip to Ethiopia shows them happy endings sometimes arrive long after saying “I do.”

My Thoughts:
This is a fun, light read. It has a cute romance, but also has a powerful message that comes through in the second half of the book.

A couple of nit-picky things first: I felt like the political system was poorly set up. It came across like an Americanized presidential system, rather than a monarchy. With the countries supposed origins in England, moving away from the three tier parliamentary system, especially while still in Europe where this system grew to be the major political set up for Monarchies, felt off. 
Also, all the Australian references bordered on offensive with how cliche and stereotyped they were.
There were parts that were so cheesy I literally cringed.
Those things aside!
The story itself is kind of two stories coming together as one. In the beginning you have a great romance, well written, with a solid voice, even a little cheesy at times. The writing is good, with some telling, but not enough to be distracting.
Then the second part hits. The pace is... it feels like I'm skimming over things. Hatty and John are married, and suddenly their relationship is no longer important. Yes, she's struggling with concerns about infertility, but I have fertility issues, and although my husband frustrated me at times with his lack of understanding, our relationship remained central to our lives. The writing here didn't help it; it's almost like a different author stepped in to take over. The scenes became very clinical and moved in the blink of an eye. It was like I'd start reading a scene that I wanted to move me, and it ended a second later. I don't want to criticize, because the topic is something that's near and dear to me and I believe should be discussed, but the execution came up short in places. 
Then Hattie hit rock bottom and the writing and pace returned to how good it was in the beginning. It's probably debut author "jitters." But the last portion of the book definitely improved.
I will admit, going in I was very concerned about how the succession would be handled with throwing adoption in the works, since an adopted child cannot be next in line. Without giving out spoilers, Wren handled this very well, and I appreciated it enormously.

Quote that says it all for me:
To tell the truth, it was a punch in the gut... By rote, I squashed my grief, longing, and heartache, making them compact enough to bury in the recesses of my heart.

And:
Another punch. The grief threatened to erupt, but I suppressed it. At least... I wouldn't have to watch her body bloom into fertile fullness... But my line of thinking wasn't about them; it was all about self-preservation.

Those quotes are pretty much the anthem of infertile/limited fertility women. I have felt EXACTLY THIS while struggling through my own limits and fight with my body to conceive baby #2, and I've seen so many women I love feeling exactly this. I've seen it in their eyes when other women seem to glance at their husbands and fall pregnant. When teenagers fall pregnant. It's this deep pain that tears at the heart and makes it impossible to even LOOK at a pregnant woman without the pain resurfacing, or hear a pregnancy announcement and have to hide to cry your eyes out.

All up, this was an enjoyable read with a message that should definitely be talked about more. I wouldn't call it a "clean read" as there is some sex scenes, but they're not explicit, but rather tastefully handled.

I recommend it to all women, especially those who know someone who is struggling with having children, not just those in the throws of infertility.

An Experiment - Papina

So, I've wanted to self-pub something for a while, but never decided which manuscript I wanted to do this with... but now I've picked one! I thought it would be fun, low risk, and simply be something for my fans to enjoy. My "big" books I'm going to keep working through publishers and querying with agents.

At this point, I'm waiting for dates for The Cadence Anderson books before I publish this baby, but I am formatting/proofing/editing etc while I wait. I've been thinking and planning this for a while, and yes, I have a cover for it! Want to see?

Well....

Here you go!

Forrest and Braydon Miller moved to the small town of Papina to follow their dreams and start a family. Braydon loves her new life in the quiet town, kept alive by the prestigious boarding school overlooking the valley. She is so proud of her husband's work, helping the teens on the reservation.

Until one day, Forrest doesn't come home.

Scandal spreads when one of the teenagers is found missing, too. But Braydon refuses to believe her husband would leave her. When the teen is found, she isn't talking—literally.

While Braydon's heart is breaking, she needs to hold her crumbling life together, raise her son, and find a way to love the teenager enough to find the truth of what happened to her husband.

Goodreads

Review: Secret Sisters by Emelle Gamble

I've had this one sitting waiting for me for a while from NetGalley and I've finally got to it!

From Goodreads:

What if everything about you changed in an instant...
Nick & Cathy and Roxanne. Two best friends. One husband. An extraordinary twist of fate.

How much do you really know about your husband? Your best friend? Yourself? Cathy Chance knows she loves her husband, Nick, with the same passion she had when she married him seven years ago, and he adores her. She also knows that she and her best friend, Roxanne, are closer than most sisters. But on a sunny summer day, these three are hurled into an astounding new reality which forces each to reconsider everything they thought was true about themselves, and one another.






The first couple of chapters are great. They had me really interested and curious to see what happens next. But then while Roxanne couldn't remember anything it started to drag a bit while I wanted it to get to the point. When it finally did, the pace picked up again and I couldn't put it down.
The ending is not what I expected and definitely made the story go out with a bang.
The characters were all messed up in completely understandable ways. The things that happened definitely would mess with someone's head. I didn't like Roxanne one bit from the beginning, and although I did like Cathy, I couldn't understand her loyalty to Roxanne. But Nick was so human and so real and his love for Cathy was beautiful, despite his flaws.