Today I'm so excited to be bringing you another fantastic offering from Mira, The Wrong Kind of Woman a debut by Sarah McCraw Crow. I was so hoping to have already read and reviewed this but like what happens with best intentions, life got in the way. So be sure to be on the lookout not too far in the future for my review. For now read my conversation with Sarah be sure and enter to win a copy of your own. Details below.
Enjoy!
ISBN-13: 9780778310075
Publisher: Mira
Release Date: 10-06-2020
Length: 320pp
Buy It: Amazon/B&N/IndieBound
ADD TO: GOODREADS
Overview:
In late 1970, Oliver Desmarais drops dead in his front yard while hanging Christmas lights. In the year that follows, his widow, Virginia, struggles to find her place on the campus of the elite New Hampshire men’s college where Oliver was a professor. While Virginia had always shared her husband’s prejudices against the four outspoken, never-married women on the faculty—dubbed the Gang of Four by their male counterparts—she now finds herself depending on them, even joining their work to bring the women’s movement to Clarendon College.Soon, though, reports of violent protests across the country reach this sleepy New England town, stirring tensions between the fraternal establishment of Clarendon and those calling for change. As authorities attempt to tamp down “radical elements,” Virginia must decide whether she’s willing to put herself and her family at risk for a cause that had never felt like her own.
Told through alternating perspectives, The Wrong Kind of Woman is an engrossing story about finding the strength to forge new paths, beautifully woven against the rapid changes of the early 1970s.
Read an excerpt:
Chapter One
November 1970
Westfield, New Hampshire
Oliver died the Sunday after Thanksgiving,
the air heavy with snow that hadn’t fallen yet. His last words to Virginia were
“Tacks, Ginny? Do we have any tacks?”
That morning at
breakfast, their daughter, Rebecca, had complained about her eggs—runny and
gross, she said. Also, the whole neighborhood already had their Christmas
lights up, and why didn’t they ever have outside lights? Virginia tuned her
out; at thirteen, Rebecca had reached the age of comparison, noticing where her
classmates’ families went on vacation, what kinds of cars they drove. But
Oliver agreed about the lights, and after eating his own breakfast and
Rebecca’s rejected eggs, he drove off to the hardware store to buy heavy-duty
Christmas lights.
Back at home, Oliver called Virginia out onto the front
porch, where he and Rebecca had looped strings of colored lights around the
handrails on either side of the steps. Virginia waved at their neighbor Gerda
across the street—on her own front porch, Gerda knelt next to a pile of balsam
branches, arranging them into two planters—as Rebecca and Oliver described
their lighting scheme. Rebecca’s cheeks had gone ruddy in the New Hampshire
cold, as Oliver’s had; Rebecca had his red-gold hair too.
“Up one side and down
the other,” Rebecca said. “Like they do at Molly’s house—”
“Tacks, Ginny? Do we
have any tacks?” Oliver interrupted. In no time, he’d lost patience with this
project, judging by the familiar set of his jaw, the frown lines corrugating
his forehead.
A few minutes later, box of nails and hammer in
hand, Virginia saw Oliver’s booted feet splayed out on the walk, those old work
boots he’d bought on their honeymoon in Germany a lifetime ago. “Do you have to
lie down like that to—” she began, while Rebecca squeezed out from between the
porch and the overgrown rhododendron.
“Dad?” Rebecca’s voice pitched upward.
“Daddy!”
Virginia slowly
took in that Oliver was lying half on the lawn, half on the brick walk, one
hand clutching the end of a light string. Had he fallen? It made no sense, him
just lying there on the ground like that, and she hurtled down the porch steps.
Oliver’s eyes had rolled back so only the whites showed. But he’d just asked
for tacks, and she hadn’t had time to ask if nails would work instead. She
crouched, put her mouth to his and tried to breathe for him. Something was
happening, yes, maybe now he would turn out to be just resting, and in a minute
he’d sit up and laugh with disbelief.
Next to her,
Rebecca shook Oliver’s shoulder, pounded on it. “Dad! You fainted! Wake up—”
“Go call the
operator,” Virginia said. “Tell them we need an ambulance, tell them it’s an
emergency, a heart attack, Becca! Run!” Rebecca ran.
Virginia put her ear to Oliver’s chest, listening. A flurry of
movement: Gerda was suddenly at her side, kneeling, and Eileen from next door,
then Rebecca, gasping or maybe sobbing. Virginia felt herself being pulled out
of the way as the ambulance backed into the driveway and the two paramedics
bent close. They too breathed for Oliver, pressed on his chest while counting,
then lifted him gently onto the backboard and up into the ambulance.
She didn’t notice that
she was holding Rebecca’s hand on her one side and Eileen’s hand on the other,
and that Gerda had slung a protective arm around Rebecca. She barely noticed
when Eileen bundled her and Rebecca into the car without a coat or purse. She
didn’t notice the snow that had started to fall, first snow of the season.
Later, that absence of snow came back to her, when the image of Oliver lying on
the bare ground, uncushioned even by snow, wouldn’t leave her.
Aneurysm. A ruptured aneurysm, a balloon that had burst, sending a
wave of blood into Oliver’s brain. A subarachnoid hemorrhage. She
said all those new words about a thousand times, along with more familiar
words: bleed and blood and brain. Rips and tears. One
in a million. Sitting at the kitchen table, Rebecca next to her and the
coiled phone cord stretched taut around both of them, Virginia called one
disbelieving person after another, repeated all those words to her mother, her
sister Marnie, Oliver’s brother, Oliver’s department chair, the people in her
address book, the people in his.
At President Weissman’s house five days later,
Virginia kept hold of Rebecca. Rebecca had stayed close, sleeping in the middle
of Virginia and Oliver’s bed as if she were little and sleepwalking again, her
shruggy new adolescent self forgotten. They’d turned into a sudden team of two,
each one circling, like moons, around the other.
Oliver’s department
chair had talked Virginia into a reception at President Weissman’s house, a
campus funeral. In the house’s central hall, Virginia’s mother clutched at her
arm, murmuring about the lovely Christmas decorations, those balsam garlands
and that enormous twinkling tree, and how they never got the fragrant balsam
trees in Norfolk, did they, only the Fraser firs—
“Let’s go look at the Christmas tree, Grandmomma.” Rebecca
took her grandmother’s hand as they moved away. What a grown-up thing to do,
Virginia thought, glad for the release from Momma and her chatter.
“Wine?” Virginia’s
sister Marnie said, folding her hand around a glass. Virginia nodded and took a
sip. Marnie stayed next to her as one person and another came close to say
something complimentary about Oliver, what a wonderful teacher he’d been and a
great young historian, an influential member of the Clarendon community. And
his clarinet, what would they do without Oliver’s tremendous clarinet playing?
The church service had been lovely, hadn’t it? He sure would have loved that
jazz trio.
She heard herself
answering normally, as if this one small thing had gone wrong, except now she
found herself in a tunnel, everyone else echoing and far away. Out of a clutch
of Clarendon boys, identical in their khakis and blue blazers, their too-long
hair curling behind their ears, one stepped forward. Sam, a student in her tiny
fall seminar, the Italian Baroque.
“I—I just wanted
to say...” Sam faltered. “But he was a great teacher, and even more in the
band—” The student-faculty jazz band, he meant.
“Thank you, Sam,” she said. “I appreciate
that.” She watched him retreat to his group. Someone had arranged for Sam and a
couple of other Clarendon boys to play during the reception, and she hadn’t
noticed until now.
“How ’bout we sit,
hon.” Marnie steered her to a couch. “I’m going to check on Becca and Momma and
June—” the oldest of Virginia’s two sisters “—and then I’ll be right back.”
“Right.” Virginia
half listened to the conversation around her, people in little clumps with
their sherries and whiskeys. Mainframe, new era, she heard.
Then well, but Nixon, and a few problems with
the vets on campus. She picked up President Weissman’s voice, reminiscing about
the vets on campus after the war thirty years ago. “Changed the place for the
better, I think,” President Weissman said. “A seriousness of purpose.” And she
could hear Louise Walsh arguing with someone about the teach-in that should
have happened last spring.
Maybe Oliver would appreciate being treated like a dignitary.
Maybe he’d be pleased at the turnout, all the faculty and students who’d shown
up at the Congregational Church at lunchtime on a Friday. Probably he wished he
could put Louise in her place about the teach-in. Virginia needed to find
Rebecca, and she needed to make sure Momma hadn’t collapsed out of holiday
party–funeral confusion. But now Louise Walsh loomed over her in a shapeless
black suit, and she stood up again to shake Louise’s hand. “I just want to say
how sorry I am,” Louise said. “I truly admired his teaching and—everything
else. We’re all going to miss him.”
“Thank you,
Louise.” Virginia considered returning the compliment, to say that Oliver had
admired Louise too. Louise had tenure, the only woman in the history
department, the only woman at Clarendon, to be tenured. Louise had been a thorn
in Oliver’s side, the person Oliver had complained about the most. Louise was
one of the four women on faculty at Clarendon; the Gang of Four, Oliver and the
others had called them.
Outside the long windows, a handful of college boys tossed
a football on a fraternity lawn across the street, one skidding in the snow as
he caught the ball. Someone had spray-painted wobbly blue peace signs on the
frat’s white clapboard wall, probably after Kent State. But the Clarendon boys
were rarely political; they were athletic: in their baggy wool trousers, they
ran, skied, hiked, went gliding off the
college’s ski jump, human rockets on long skis.
They built a tremendous bonfire on the Clarendon green in the fall, enormous
snow sculptures in the winter. They stumbled home drunk, singing. Their limbs
seemed loosely attached to their bodies. Oliver had once been one of those
boys.
“Come on, pay
attention,” Marnie said, and she propelled Virginia toward President Weissman,
who took Virginia’s hands.
“I cannot begin to
express all my sympathy and sadness.” President Weissman’s eyes were magnified
behind his glasses. “Our firmament has lost a star.” He kissed her on the
cheek, pulling a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, so she could wipe her
eyes and nose again.
At the reception, Aunt June kept asking Rebecca
if she was doing okay, and did she need anything, and Aunt Marnie kept telling
Aunt June to quit bothering Rebecca. Mom looked nothing like her sisters: Aunt
Marnie was bulky with short pale hair, Aunt June was petite, her hair almost
black, and Mom was in between. Rebecca used to love her aunts’ Tidewater accents,
and the way Mom’s old accent would return around her sisters, her vowels
stretching out and her voice going up and down the way Aunt June’s and Aunt
Marnie’s voices did. Rebecca and Dad liked to tease Mom about her accent, and
Mom would say I don’t know what you’re talking about,
I don’t sound anything like June. Or Marnie. But especially not
June.
Nothing Rebecca
thought made any sense. She couldn’t think about something that she and Dad
liked, or didn’t like, or laughed about, because there was no more Dad. Aunt
Marnie had helped her finish the Christmas lights, sort of, not the design she
and Dad had shared, but just wrapped around the porch bannisters. It looked a
little crazy, actually. Mom hadn’t noticed.
“Here’s some
cider, honey,” Aunt June said. “How about some cheese and crackers? You need to
eat.”
“I’m okay,”
Rebecca said. “Thanks,” she remembered to add.
“Have you ever
tried surfing?” Aunt June asked. “The boys—” Rebecca’s cousins “—love to surf.
They’ll teach you.”
“Okay.” Rebecca wanted to say that it was December and there was
snow on the ground, so there was no reason to talk about surfing. Instead she
said that she’d bodysurfed with her cousins at Virginia Beach plenty of times,
but she’d never gotten on a surfboard. As far as she could tell, only boys ever
went surfing, and the waves at Virginia Beach were never like the waves
on Hawaii Five-0. Mostly the boys just sat on their surfboards
gazing out at the hazy-white horizon, and at the coal ships and aircraft
carriers chugging toward Norfolk.
“You’ll get your
chance this summer—I’ll bet you’ll be a natural,” Aunt June said.
Things would keep
happening. Winter would happen. There would be more snow, and skiing at the Ski
Bowl. The town pond would open for skating and hockey. The snow would melt and
it would be spring and summer again. They’d go to Norfolk for a couple of weeks
after school let out and Mom would complain about everything down there, and
get into a fight with Aunt June, and they’d all go to the beach, and Dad would
get the most sunburned, his ears and the tops of his feet burned pink and
peely...
“Let’s just step outside into the fresh air for a minute,
sweetheart,” Aunt June said, and Rebecca stood up and followed her aunt to the
room with all the coats, one hand over her mouth to hold in the latest sob,
even after she and Mom had agreed they were all cried out and others would be
crying today, but the two of them were all done with crying. She knew that the
fresh air wouldn’t help anything.
The jazz trio, the only ones who’d said yes to
this strange gig, started their second set with a Coltrane-ish “My Favorite
Things,” Sam playing the clarinet, Stephen on the baby grand and Larry Quinn on
drums, half a beat too slow. At least they were out of the way of the funeral
guests; Mrs. Weissman had directed them to set up in the big glassed-in porch,
with its view of the town pond.
The other Clarendon guys who’d come to the
reception clustered nearby with their plates of food, pretending to listen to
their poor imitation of Coltrane, their lame solos. Sam let himself listen too,
as Stephen began a Bill Evans number, the slow “Waltz for Debbie,” on his own.
The front door opened and a scrap of what sounded like “Purple Haze” flew in
from across the street, the KA guys already deep into their weekend partying. President
Weissman poked his head into the porch, gave them a smile and two thumbs-up,
then disappeared into the blur of dark suits and black dresses. President
Weissman liked for Clarendon guys to come over to the president’s house, to
attend the receptions for visiting lecturers, or to stand around in the big
kitchen with its two fridges, eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate. As if
their presence could reassure President and Mrs. Weissman that yes, Clarendon
was a wholesome school and they were wholesome guys, out snowshoeing on a
Friday night, instead of getting wrecked or baked, the weekend having started
on Wednesday. But even guys like Sam would get wrecked later.
Go and tell the family that you’re sorry for their loss, Sam could hear his mom saying, the kind
of thing she always said, and he’d done so during their set break. Just as bad
as he’d imagined: he’d stuttered, barely getting any words out, and Professor
Desmarais’s eyes had welled up. She was teaching his art history class this
fall. In class, once she started the slideshow part of the lecture, she grew
more animated in the dark. He thought he knew that feeling. If only jazz band
concerts could be in complete darkness too. When Professor Desmarais turned the
lights back on, she tended to address only the one exchange girl in the class.
Sam kept playing.
There was something wrong with all these people, the other Clarendon guys, the
crowd of faculty in the big front parlor, the buzz of voices rising and falling
as the faculty talked about whatever they usually talked about, campus gossip,
probably. To the faculty, this was just another reception at President
Weissman’s house.
Sam let himself
remember jazz band rehearsals, sharing sheet music with Oliver whenever Sam
played clarinet rather than guitar. He’d made Oliver laugh about Schuyler
DePeyster’s trumpet playing. Oliver had thought Sam was funny, even talented.
Oliver had been a friend. The weirdness of being here now was too much. He had
to get out of here, he needed a joint, a drink, something.
“Some gig, huh,”
Stephen said. They were in between songs, and nobody was paying any attention.
The other Clarendon guys had left, back to their frats and Friday afternoon
beers. “Let’s take a break,” Sam said. “Maybe pack it in.” They could help
Larry take down his drum kit and slip out through the porch door. No one would
notice, or care.
Virginia woke in the dark to a sour, fuzzy
mouth. She reached across the bed, but the sheets were blank and cool: no
Rebecca. This day hadn’t ended yet. After Virginia’s family and friends had
come to the house for ham sandwiches and bourbon, her mother had put her to
bed, a cool hand to her forehead as if she were a feverish child, and she’d
slept.
As ripples of talk
drifted upstairs, Virginia lay there listening. June’s voice rose above the
others, strident and bossy, and the house smelled like Norfolk, salty, fatty
ham and tomatoey Brunswick stew. She made herself get up. Oliver’s soft
windbreaker lay draped over the armchair, where he’d thrown it a few days ago,
and she slipped it on.
Downstairs, she heard the TV—in the den, Rebecca sat with
Molly from next door watching The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. The
show’s cheerful background music soothed her, and she sank down next to
Rebecca, willing her brain to say the things a mother said to her child on a
night like tonight, but nothing came. She took in that Rebecca’s and Molly’s
eyes were full, tearing up at Bill Bixby and his darling little boy. Rebecca
rested her head on Virginia’s shoulder and Virginia put an arm around her. But
after only a few minutes Rebecca scooted away. “Can you go brush your teeth,
Mom? Your breath is really bad.”
“Okay.” Virginia
pushed up to standing and headed to the kitchen. At the kitchen table, her
mother and sisters turned to look at her, all of them smiling too much, and
June stood to pull her into a hug. Momma was still in her funeral suit, an
ancient black thing with a peplum, a party apron protecting it, and she leaned
over a memo pad, pen in hand: when in doubt, make a list.
“Ah, my little
baby Ginny,” Momma said.
June and Marnie
bustled around Virginia’s small kitchen, pulling things out of the fridge and
the oven. June was small and nimble, and an early white streak ran through her
dark hair. Like June, Virginia had Daddy’s dark eyes, but her own hair was
mousy, not black-Irish dark like June’s. Marnie, bigger and blonder than June,
set a plate in front of Virginia—ham, broccoli casserole, rolls, butter—and a
cup of coffee. Virginia took a bite of the casserole, pushed the plate away.
“You’ve got tons
of food here,” June said. “I’ve got some Brunswick stew going for the freezer.
Between that and the ham and all these casseroles, you’ll have dinners for
weeks.”
Virginia nodded.
June and Marnie
started in on Norfolk gossip, filling her in while entertaining themselves. Oh,
and had she heard about Jimmy Burwell? “You know he’s a lawyer, UVA law, that’s
right. Well, get this, he left his wife for another lawyer, yes, a woman lawyer!
Doesn’t that beat all!”
Her sisters’
gossip washed over her and made her feel sick to her stomach.
“We’ll go to the
store in the morning and pick up some more supplies, whatever you need,” June
said. “But why don’t you come on home for a while?”
“Jesus, June,”
Marnie said. “Give her a minute, would you?”
“It just seems
like you don’t fit in here, Ginny,” June said. “Your friends seem—” She paused.
“I mean, who are your friends?” “Oh, she fits in fine,” Marnie
said. “You’re afraid of the North, June, that’s what.”
“I am not,” June
said. “It’s just too cold here. And now it’s snowing. There are camellias
blooming along the side of my house. Camellias! Blooming. No snow.”
“I like the snow.”
Virginia’s voice came out thin and squeaky. She wanted to say something about
the snow softening up winter, which made her think of the hard ground, which
made her think of Oliver, who’d loved the New Hampshire cold and the snow far
more than she did. Tears gathered and stung.
“I will say that
it’s kind of hard to get here,” Marnie said. “That tiny airplane, my God.”
“You used to love
to watch the cardinals and the orioles,” June said. “Remember how we watched
them together in the backyard when we were little?”
She nodded. They
had birds in New Hampshire too, maybe even better birds. Purple finches,
bluebirds, yellow-black-and-white bobolinks swooping over the hayfields north
of town.
But she was too tired to say anything. Maybe her mother and
sisters could carry her home to Norfolk, and she’d stay wrapped up in gossip and
mild weather. Rebecca could go to the academy, where her sisters’ kids went;
the academy had started admitting girls ten years ago, and her sisters said it
was a wonderful school, rigorous and traditional. And Rebecca could go to the
beach in the summer and dance to swing-band music at night, as Virginia used to
do. Lose a husband, change a life, was that it? Oliver had been fascinated, in
a kind of anthropological way, by Virginia’s family, and how they did things
down there, and how Norfolk couldn’t decide if it was a small town or a city.
She tried for a second to imagine finding someone down there, maybe one of
those lawyers that her sisters had just gossiped about, although Jimmy
Burwell—there was nothing to recommend him. One of her brother Rolly’s old
friends? God, no. She started to cry again; she was thinking about the wrong
things.
“Oh, honey.”
Marnie scooted her chair close, pulling Virginia’s head onto her lap.
Virginia let her head rest on Marnie’s wide leg, trying to sort
her jumble of thoughts into some kind of order. Oliver. Rebecca. Her mother.
Her sisters. Her brother. Oliver. Where did she belong? She swallowed a sob,
took a breath, wiped her eyes with the handkerchief that President Weissman had
handed to her. Weeks ago, it seemed, but the reception had only been this
afternoon.
“I—” She was about
to say yes, all right, maybe she and Rebecca would come home to Norfolk—but
something stopped her.
“It’s okay,”
Marnie said. “It’ll be okay.”
Virginia heard the
plaintive strains of a Simon & Garfunkel song coming from the den; Rebecca
and Molly were listening to music on Oliver’s hi-fi. Now Simon or maybe
Garfunkel sang about how he was gone, how he didn’t know where. Virginia wanted
to hear more of those shimmery harmonies, but the song had finished.
My Interview with Sarah:
Sarah
Hi! Welcome to The Reading Frenzy.
Your new book looks fantastic.
Tell my readers a little about it please.
Thank you so
much! THE WRONG KIND OF WOMAN follows three characters: Virginia, Rebecca, and
Sam. At the heart of the novel is my character Virginia, who’s trying to get
over the death of her husband, Oliver. Oliver was a history professor at
Clarendon College, which is a fictional all-male, liberal arts school, loosely
based on Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire.
The novel is set in 1970 and 1971, so
this story takes place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, student strikes
and protests, radical groups like the Weather Underground, and the second wave
of the women’s movement. And a lot of political division nationwide, kind of
like today, actually.
So as she’s trying to get over her husband’s too-early death, my main character, Virginia, starts to become friends with the four women on the Clarendon College faculty, who were women that her husband Oliver really did not like, and one of these women was definitely Oliver’s nemesis. But with these new friends, Virginia finds new purpose in helping to bring the women’s movement to their small town and to this very traditional college, but at that point all hell kind of breaks loose.
How
timely that this book debuts on the 100th anniversary year of the 19th
Amendment and is set 50 years after.
What brought you to tell this story?
Yes, it
is, although that’s a lucky coincidence! When I first started writing this
novel, I thought I was writing about grief, how a group of characters might all
be grieving the same person, and how they’d get through it in different ways.
That said, I’ve always be interested in the women of my mom’s generation and a little older, women who’d be in their 80s and 90s now, and how they navigated the limited set of choices that were open to them. If you wanted to be something other than a teacher, nurse or secretary, there was a lot of pushback, both from within families, and from society at large. I think a lot of us have heard that anecdote about Ruth Bader Ginsburg being asked why she thought she deserved to take a place from a man at Harvard Law School—that’s what the world was like for young women back then.
I
actually came of age in the 1970s and I remember the NOW movement but I never
realized that there were violent protests. Perhaps the volatility of the 60s
overshadowed this or maybe I was just too busy being a college coed studying.
How closely to the current events of the time is your novel based?
I tried
to stay fairly close to real events, except for an incident that happens on
campus late in the novel—I don’t know of any real incidents like that. Still,
Weatherman/Weather Underground was a radical group that split off from SDS and carried
out bombings in cities, including at the US Capitol, to protest the war, and
more specifically the invasion of Cambodia. I think it’s something a lot of us
never learned about, or have forgotten about.
Let’s
chat about Virginia your main protagonist for a moment.
Did she stay to the script you always imagined for her or did she do a bit of
misbehaving?
Good
question, but one that’s hard to answer, because I didn’t have a script
imagined for Virginia at the beginning, I just knew that she was lost, and
grieving, and realizing that she doesn’t have any close friends.
The book
describes Rebecca, Virginia’s 13 year-old daughter as being adrift without her
father and not happy with the woman her mother is becoming. Wow she sounds like
a handful.
Did you have trouble putting your adult self in the mindset of an obviously
troubled teen?
I’d say
that Rebecca is an ordinary almost-fourteen-year-old, with ordinary adolescent
troubles and mood swings. Her dad’s death throws her for a loop, and leads her
to do some things she wouldn’t have done if he’d lived, but I think her
responses are, if not healthy, then at least normal. And I had no trouble
remembering what it was like to be thirteen—the worst age, as I recall!—and to
take on her mindset. Middle school is an age that no one wants to go back to!
Do you
think women’s lives are a little better, a lot better or not better at all than
when your book is set?
I think
women’s lives are much better than they were fifty years ago—there are many
more women in all realms of working life than there were fifty years ago. Young
women today probably don’t know as much as they should about the women’s
movement, although maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has illuminated some of
how the laws used to be, fifty years ago, how the two genders were not treated
equally under the law.
Now I’d
like to get a little personal. I see you have an extensive background in
writing, magazine, essays, short fiction and even book reviewing.
What led you down the path to writing a full-length novel?
Well,
the short answer is I’ve always loved to read novels, and always wondered if I
could write a novel. The longer answer is that I’ve been writing fiction more
seriously for about thirteen years now, and like a lot of other writers, I have
a couple of other novels shut away in the drawer. So this novel is the first
one that sold, but not the first one I wrote.
I
personally love and am constantly impressed by Harlequin and all their
imprints. And if you visit my blog on a regular basis you’ll know that I often
refer to them as the Publisher that makes the world go round.
What made you say yes when Mira offered to publish your novel?
That’s
so interesting! They do have a ton of great books and authors! But to be
honest, I didn’t know that much about MIRA when I first heard about the offer.
But I loved what my editor said about my characters and the novel when first we
spoke on the phone. I also learned how the Harlequin imprints work together, and
how happy other authors were with them.
Sara
thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions.
I know that in this new normal book tours aren’t happening but will there be
any virtual events to celebrate the release?
Yes, I
have several virtual launch events. The first will be hosted by Gibson’s
Bookstore, on my pub day, October 6. Here’s a link, if any readers are
interested: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/author-sarah-mccraw-crow-with-the-wrong-kind-of-woman-tickets-120432457723
Thank you so much for
asking the questions, and for all your work with books!
About Sarah:
Sarah McCraw Crow grew up in Virginia but has lived most of her adult life in New Hampshire. Her short fiction has run in Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Good Housekeeping, So to Speak, Waccamaw, and Stanford Alumni Magazine. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Stanford University, and is finishing an MFA degree at Vermont College of Fine Arts. When she's not reading or writing, she's probably gardening or snowshoeing (depending on the weather).
This sounds like a fascinating story! You always find such great reads! Hugs, RO
ReplyDeleteThank you my friend xo
DeleteWonderful interview as always Debbie!
ReplyDeleteThank you Ali xo
DeleteThanks for this captivating and wonderful feature and giveaway.
ReplyDeleteLove the interview. The story definitely sounds it would be enjoyable. Looking forward to reading your views.
ReplyDeleteThanks Nadene I'm looking forward to reading it!
DeleteMmm I saw this book somewhere and it looked interesting. I love stories of women finding themselves and this seems like one of those.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree Kathryn and I can't wait to start my copy sometimes I wish I could clone myself :)
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