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Welcome to my stop for Finding Lisa by Sigrid Macdonald. Which fork would you take? I love book covers and often grab a book for that reason alone. Sometimes it works against me. LOL Let’s send out a big welcome to Sigrid Macdonald.

TOPIC: MY BOOK COVER

Dear Sherry:

Thank you for having me on your blog and for asking about my book cover. It took me a long time to choose this cover because I wanted it to represent so many things.

Tara, my protagonist, has a dilemma. Everything is going wrong in her life, with her marriage, on the job, and with her moody teenage son. And, to top it off, she’s about to turn 40, and the thought terrifies her. The only thing right in her life is her best friend, Lisa. One night the two women have a typical night out on the town watching a flick at the foreign film theater and going for a snack at the deli afterward. It’s status quo. They do this all the time. But this night is different. This night Lisa tells Tara that she is pregnant, and her partner, Ryan, may not be the father. Tara is worried because Ryan has a history of domestic violence and was incarcerated for assaulting his first wife. Tara doesn’t think Ryan will handle this news well. But there is no time to find out because right after that night at the movies, Lisa goes missing. Tara has no idea what to do.

The cover illustrates Tara’s indecisiveness. A woman is standing, looking out into an empty field. She is at a crossroads where she could go left, or she could go right, or she could walk straight across the grass without a path at all. But Tara has no idea what to do. She’s never been in this situation. It’s possible that Lisa could have broken her sobriety and gone on a drinking binge. If that’s the case, Tara doesn’t want to embarrass her by attracting publicity. Or maybe Lisa was too afraid to tell Ryan about a baby that might not be his. But deep down, Tara knows that Lisa would never take off without contacting her boss, her parents, or Tara. She might not tell Ryan where she’s going, but she would let the others know so they wouldn’t worry. So, now Tara is worried!

Eventually, Tara will make several decisions, for good or for bad. It’s up to the reader to decide whether Tara does the right thing in her search for her friend, along with her own shaky sense of self-identity. As Charles Dickens said in the first line of David Copperfield, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” The same can be said for Tara.

Thanks so much.

Best,

Sigrid

PS I had a midlife crisis and pretended to be 39 for several years! It was so much easier for me to turn 60 than 40, so I wanted to give this particular issue to my character because we live in such a youth-oriented culture that I think this magic number of 40 affects a lot of people, especially women who are told that they need to stay young to be relevant.

Finding Lisa by Sigrid Macdonald  

GENRE:   Mystery/women’s fiction

BLURB

Finding Lisa is a character driven story about a quirky Canadian woman named Tara who is about to turn 40. She dreads the thought. Everything is going wrong in her life from her stale marriage to her boring job to her hopeless crush on a 24-year-old guy. The only thing right in Tara’s life is her best friend Lisa who has just confided that she is pregnant and the baby does not belong to her partner Ryan, who has a history of domestic violence. Then Lisa disappears and the search is on to find her.

EXCERPT

All the carts were taken at the supermarket on Tuesday. I found one off to the side of the vegetable aisle. It had a defective wheel, which resulted in me almost overturning a display of cantaloupes. The cart was also enormous. No doubt this was a deliberate ploy on the part of the supermarket to encourage excess shopping. 

“I feel as though I’m driving a school bus,” I announced to the frail, pale orange-haired woman to my left, who was squeezing the small, unappetizing looking cantaloupes. 

She smiled faintly and nodded. I wondered how she had the strength to push the heavy cart through the long aisles of the grocery store at her age.

“Mum, I’ll go with you to one of those Women against Rape meetings if you want?”  Devon said to my astonishment, his voice rising at the end of his sentence. “There’s only one condition. You have to watch 8 Mile with me.”

“8 Mile? Isn’t that the movie based on the book by Stephen King?”

“Nah, you’re thinking about The Green Mile,” Devon replied. “8 Mile is the story of a rapper in Detroit. It’s based on the life of Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers. Eminem even stars in it,” he said with increasing enthusiasm.

“I think it’ll give you a better idea of where he’s coming from. You know, you’re always talking about these girls who’ve been, like, abused and what horrible lives they’ve had. You even feel bad about boys who were taken advantage of by priests or their hockey coaches. So why don’t you have any sympathy for Marshall? His mother was abusive. She was mean to him, and she did drugs! Also, she, like, gave him something called Munchkins syndrome,” Devon added uncertainly.

“Munchausen syndrome?” I asked, trying to picture the tough guy with the tattoos and bad attitude as a small child with a manipulative and controlling mother.

“Yeah, that sounds right. She made him feel sick when he was totally healthy. And, Mum, I know you would respect the way Em felt about his little brother, Nathan. He, like, didn’t wanna leave him alone in the house with his mother when he finally split from Detroit. He’s also really keen about his daughter, Hailie Jade. He talks about her all the time in his songs and on TV.”

I pushed the buttons on the radio. The Steve Miller band was singing, “Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future.” I had a sense of motion. The car was moving forward, and with every traffic light I passed, I was moving farther away from Lisa and our routine evenings at the ByTowne Theatre. The rest of us were going ahead, and Lisa had been left behind. I wanted to go back, not just to last Thursday night, but to my university days, so I could live my life all over again.

I wanted to be sixteen or twenty-six again, making decisions based on what I knew now. So many lost opportunities. How had I managed to completely screw up my life? I’d done everything wrong except that I hadn’t become a street prostitute or a serial murderer. Too late for the former—who would want me? But there was still time for the latter. 

AUTHOR Bio and Links

Originally from New Jersey, Sigrid Macdonald lived for almost thirty years in Ottawa, Ontario, and currently resides in Weston, Florida. She has been a freelance writer for years. Her works have appeared in The Globe and Mail newspaper; the Women’s Freedom Network Newsletter; the American magazine Justice Denied; The Toastmaster; and the Anxiety Disorders Association of Ontario Newsletter. Her first book, Getting Hip: Recovery from a Total Hip Replacement, was published in 2004. Her second book, Be Your Own Editor, followed in 2010. Although Finding Lisa is written in first person, Macdonald only resembles her character in the sense that she once had a neurotic fixation on her hair, and she has always been called by the wrong name; instead of being called Sigrid, people have called her Susan, Sharon, Astrid, Ingrid and, her personal favorite, Siri.

Macdonald is a social activist who has spent decades working on the seemingly disparate issues of women’s rights and wrongful convictions; she has worked at the Women’s Center at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, and was a member of AIDWYC, The Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted. She owns an editing company called Book Magic. Sigrid is a public speaker and a member of Mothers against Drunk Driving, Ottawa Independent Writers, the American Association of University Women, and the Editors’ Association of Canada. Visit her website at http://bookmagic.ca/ or friend her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sigridmac.

Amazon / Barnes and Noble

GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE:

Sigrid Macdonald will be awarding a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Follow the tour and comment, the more you comment, the better your chances of winning. Follow the tour HERE.

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