Publication: May 1st 2014 by Real You Publishing Group
What choices would you make if you
knew you might die soon?
From the
multi award-winning, best-selling author of four books, including Here,
Home, Hope, a gripping and heart wrenching novel about a young mother
who has it all. The only problem is she may be dying.
In her
previous works including All the Difference, Rouda's
characters "sparkle with humor and heart," and the stories are
"told with honest insight and humor" (Booklist). "Inspirational and engaging" (ForeWord), these are the novels you'll
turn to for strong female characters and an "engaging read" (Kirkus).
In the Mirror is the story of Jennifer Benson, a
woman who seems to have it all. Diagnosed with cancer, she enters an
experimental treatment facility to tackle her disease the same way she tackled
her life - head on. But while she's busy fighting for a cure, running her
business, planning a party, staying connected with her kids, and trying to keep
her sanity, she ignores her own intuition and warnings from others and
reignites an old relationship best left behind.
If you knew
you might die, what choices would you make? How would it affect your marriage?
How would you live each day? And how would you say no to the one who got away?
"Kaira Rouda has created
relatable characters you'll care deeply about. Emotionally gripping and
heart-achingly beautiful, In the Mirror
will make you think about what's truly important."
~ Tracey
Garvis Graves, New York Times
bestselling author
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Rolling over
to get out of bed, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and cringed. My
reflection said it all. Everything had changed.
I looked
like death.
I blinked,
moving my gaze from the mirror, and noticed the calendar. It was Monday again.
That meant everything in the real world. It meant groaning about the morning
and getting the kids off to school. It meant struggling to get to the office on
time and then forcing yourself to move through the day. It meant the start of
something new and fresh and undetermined. But Mondays meant nothing at Shady
Valley. We lived in the “pause” world, between “play” and “stop.” Suspension
was the toughest part for me. And loneliness. Sure, I had visitors, but it
wasn’t the same as being surrounded by people in motion. I’d been on
fast-forward in the real world, juggling two kids and my business, struggling
to stay connected to my husband, my friends. At Shady Valley, with
beige-colored day after cottage-cheese-tasting day, my pace was, well –
I had to get
moving.
I supposed
my longing for activity was behind my rather childish wish to throw a party for
myself. At least it gave me a mission of sorts. A delineation of time beyond
what the latest in a long line of cancer treatments dictated. It had been more
than 18 months of treatments, doctor’s appointments, hospitalizations and the
like. I embraced the solidity of a deadline. The finality of putting a date on
the calendar and knowing that at least this, my party, was something I could
control.
I noticed
the veins standing tall and blue and bubbly atop my pale, bony hands. I felt a
swell of gratitude for the snakelike signs of life, the entry points for
experimental treatments; without them, I’d be worse than on pause by now.
I pulled my
favorite blue sweatshirt over my head and tugged on my matching blue
sweatpants.
Moving at
last, I brushed my teeth and then headed next door to Ralph’s. He was my best
friend at Shady Valley—a special all-suite, last-ditch-effort experimental
facility for the sick and dying—or at least he had been until I began planning
my party. I was on his last nerve with this, but he’d welcome the company, if
not the topic. He was paused too.
My thick cotton socks helped me shuffle across
my fake wood floor, but it was slow going once I reached the grassy knoll—the
leaf-green carpet that had overgrown the hallway. An institutional attempt at
Eden, I supposed. On our good days, Ralph and I sometimes sneaked my son’s
plastic bowling set out there to partake in vicious matches. We had both been
highly competitive, type-A people in the “real” world and the suspended reality
of hushed voices and tiptoeing relatives was unbearable at times.
“I’ve
narrowed it down to three choices,” I said, reaching Ralph’s open door.
“’Please come celebrate my life on the eve of my death. RSVP immediately. I’m
running out of time.’”
“Oh,
honestly,” Ralph said, rolling his head back onto the pillows propping him up.
I knew my time in Shady Valley was only bearable because of this man, his
humanizing presence. Even though we both looked like shadows of our outside,
real-world selves, we carried on a relationship as if we were healthy, alive. I
ignored the surgery scars on his bald, now misshapen head. He constantly told
me I was beautiful. It worked for us.
“Too morbid?
How about: ‘Only two months left. Come see the incredible, shrinking woman.
Learn diet secrets of the doomed,’” I said, smiling then, hoping he’d join in.
“Jennifer,
give it a rest would you?” Ralph said.
“You don’t
have to be so testy. Do you want me to leave?” I asked, ready to retreat back
to my room.
“No, come
in. Let’s just talk about something else, OK, beautiful?”
Ralph was
lonely, too. Friends from his days as the city’s most promising young
investment banker had turned their backs—they didn’t or couldn’t make time for
his death. His wife, Barbara, and their three teenage kids were his only
regular visitors. Some days, I felt closer to Ralph than to my own family, who
seemed increasingly more absorbed in their own lives despite weekly flowers
from Daddy and dutiful visits from Henry, my husband of six years. Poor Henry.
It was hard to have meaningful visits at Shady Valley, with nurses and
treatments and all manner of interruptions. We still held hands and kissed, but
intimacy—even when I was feeling up to it—was impossible.
So, there we
were, Ralph and I, two near-death invalids fighting for our lives and planning
a party to celebrate that fact. It seemed perfectly reasonable, at least to me,
because while I knew I should be living in the moment, the future seemed a
little hazy without a party to focus on.
“Seriously,
I need input on my party invitations. It’s got to be right before I hand it
over to Mother. I value your judgment, Ralph; is that too much to ask?”
“For God’s
sake, let me see them.” Ralph snatched the paper out of my hand. After a
moment, he handed it back to me. “The last one’s the best. The others are too,
well, self-pitying and stupid. Are you sure you can’t just have a funeral like
the rest of us?”
I glared at
him, but agreed, “That’s my favorite, too.”
Mr. & Mrs. E. David Wells
request your presence at a
celebration in honor of their
daughter
Jennifer Wells Benson
Please see insert for your party
time
Shady Valley Center
2700 Hocking Ridge Road
RSVP to Mrs. Juliana Duncan Wells
No gifts please—donations to
breast cancer research appreciated.
#
At first, I had been incredibly angry about
the cancer. Hannah’s birth, so joyous, had marked the end of my life as a
“normal” person. Apparently, it happened a lot. While a baby’s cells
multiplied, the mom’s got into the act, mutating, turning on each other. Hannah
was barely two weeks old when I became violently ill. My fever was 105 degrees
when we arrived in the ER. I think the ER doctors suspected a retained placenta
or even some sort of infectious disease, although I was so feverish I can’t
remember much from that time. All I remember was the feeling of being cut off
from my family—Henry, two-year-old Hank, and newborn Hannah—and marooned on the
maternity ward, a place for mothers-to-be on bed rest until their due dates.
That was hell.
At 33, I was
a pathetic sight. My headache was so intense the curtains were drawn at all
times. I didn’t look pregnant anymore, so all the nurses thought my baby had
died. That first shift tip-toed around me, murmuring. By the second night, one
of them posted a sign: “The baby is fine. Mother is sick.” It answered their
questions since I couldn’t. It hurt my head too much to try.
By the third
day, my headache had receded to a dull roar. Surgery revealed that there was no
retained placenta after all. I was ready to go home to my newborn and my life.
So with a slight fever and no answers, I escaped from the hospital and went
home to a grateful Henry and a chaotic household. I was weak and tired, but
everyone agreed that was to be expected. I thanked God for the millionth time
for two healthy kids and my blessed, if busy, life.
And then,
not two weeks later, I found the lump.
Not a
dramatic occurrence, really, at least not at first. I was shaving under my arm,
and I happened to bump into my left breast with my hand. I could feel an odd
mass that hadn’t been there before. When I pushed on the top part of my breast,
closest to my underarm, it hurt. I freaked out and called for Henry.
“I’m sure
it’s fine,” he reassured me while his eyes revealed his own fears. “We’ll make
an appointment to have it checked out first thing tomorrow, OK?”
Our eyes
locked then, and in that moment, I think we both knew.
It wasn’t,
of course, fine. When the radiologist at the Women’s Imaging Center read the
mammogram, she called my doctor right away. The solid, spider-webby mass had
tentacles spreading through my left breast. Deadly, dangerous tentacles full of
cancerous cells. Surgery confirmed that what I had felt was a malignant mass
that had already begun to metastasize to my lymph nodes. They moved me to the
cancer floor and began treatments immediately, and that’s where I’d been, in
body or spirit, for more than a year.
Ralph was
the one to describe them as “circle mouths”: the initial reactions of family
and friends expressing sympathy for our rotten luck. When the doctors finally
figured out what was wrong with me, my family was the first to respond with
their blank stares and circle mouths. “OOOOOO, Jennifer, we’re sOOOOOO sorry.”
But, really, what else could we expect? Before I had cancer, I know I probably
reacted the same way.
Excerpt from Uncorrected Advance
Reader Copy
About the Author
Connect with her on Twitter, @KairaRouda, and on
Facebook at Kaira
Rouda Books. And of course, on Pinterest! For
more about Kaira and her books, please visit her website KairaRouda.com.
The US/Canada giveaway on tour is :
A cozy throw
A scented candle
A coffee or tea mug
The International giveaway on tour is:
A signed copy of all of the authors novels, including In the Mirror
a Rafflecopter giveaway
I’m delighted to welcome
Kaira Rouda to Allthingsbookie, author of IN THE MIRROR – out May 1, 2014
Other novels include:
ALL THE DIFFERENCE, a Romantic Suspense, and HERE, HOME, HOPE, a Women’s
Fiction title.
1.
Can you tell us what prompted you to first start
writing? What was the first thing you wrote?
I’ve
been writing since I can remember. My sixth grade librarian helped me publish
my first book, called Scooter & Skipper. It was greeted with much acclaim,
in my household.
As a child, I loved books, loved writing,
loved poetry. I always knew this was the career for me. After college – I was
an English major – I began writing for newspapers and magazines, ending up
being the society columnist in the city for a number of years. Every type of
writing – and every marketing job I had – led to this. My dream career.
2.
Can you summarise your latest work in just a few
words?
IN THE MIRROR is the story of Jennifer
Benson, a woman who seems to have it all. Diagnosed with cancer, she enters an
experimental treatment facility to tackle her disease the same way she tackled
her life - head on. But while she's busy fighting for a cure, running her
business, planning a party, staying connected with her kids, and trying to keep
her sanity, she ignores her own intuition and warnings from others and
reignites an old relationship best left behind. IN THE MIRROR asks the
question: If you knew you might die, what choices would you make? And these: How
would it affect your marriage? How would you live each day? And how would you
say no to the one who got away?
3.
What was the inspiration for this book?
Unfortunately,
too many close friends who have been forced to face cancer, too young. Watching
them, their grace under pressure, inspired me and touched me very deeply. This
novel has been a decade in the making and I hope I got it right.
4.
What are you working on next? Do you have a WIP?
Yes!
I have two projects I’m really excited about. The first is a romantic suspense
novel, LINES IN THE SAND, that will be published by Tule Publishing Group in
August. I’m also excited about my WIP, but I can’t tell you about that one yet!
It’s a women’s fiction story and I really like how it’s coming together!
5.
What has been the best part of the writing
process…and the worst?
I
had major writer’s block last year – that was the worst! Almost a full year of
blech. So, now that I am back in the saddle, so to speak, I’m enjoying every
minute. The other worst part is how easily I am distracted by social media. I
need to get a system around that. Help me remember, ok? Some authors sign in
and spend an hour on social media and then go write. Others, like me, peek in
all day.
6.
Most writers have some quirks – what are yours?
My
most obvious quirk, if you were to visit, would be the fact I have three dogs!
Each time one of my kids leaves me for college I add a dog. My fourth and final
kiddo is a junior in high school. My husband says don’t even think about it…
but, well, it is a tradition now.
7.
Do you plot your novels or allow them to develop
as you write?
I
just let them flow. I usually start with a title, oddly enough, and the main
character. Setting is something very important to me as well.
8.
Do you have any advice for new writers?
Make
sure you are writing and reading, reading and writing. Read in the genre you
would like to write in, and then read everything else. The writing goes without
explanation, because showing up and putting words on the page are the best way
– and the only way – to get to The End.
No comments:
Post a Comment