I was at a conference last week and ran into a friend who knew I was a writer and he asked what I was working on. I told him I was putting the final touches on my novel Heather Girl.
“What’s it about?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s about a middle-aged woman who is fighting Huntington’s disease and she just learned that her father has been paroled for the murder of her mother.” As I was saying those words, I realized that it was not a very compelling summary of my novel. Yes, that’s what it’s about, but why would anybody want to read such an obvious bummer ?
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s a real feel-good story.”
I failed my elevator speech. I realized I needed a better way to summarize the story. How about this?
As her family falls apart and her health begins to fail, Heather Roth searches for answers, but instead finds hope and compassion that give her life meaning.
Ok, so it’s still not going to fly off the shelves like a James Patterson novel, but at least it’s not so ridiculously bleak.
Then, if they want to know more, there’s the cover blurb:
Heather Roth has little to look forward to. Her two sons, who have occupied most of her adult life, have grown and left her alone in the house in which she grew up. Her ex-husband, for whom she still has feelings despite his abusive nature, lives hundreds of miles away. And she’s being treated for Huntington’s, a disease that ravaged her mother, and for which she knows there is no cure.
Then the news she wasn’t expecting. Her father is being paroled from prison in Texas where he has been serving a sentence for the murder of his wife, Heather’s mother.
She’ll do anything to keep him out of her life, but when she is forced to take him into her home, she learns that the lives of her family weren’t what they seemed to be. A story of tragedy and heartbreak, Heather Girl, delivers a whisper of hope and an abundance of compassion, even in the darkest hours.
Joseph E Bird 