What would you do if you were thirty-seven,
good-looking, and single with no family ties and a bad girl rep that you can’t
live down? That’s exactly the situation Elle McLarin finds herself in as my new
novel, A Girl Like That (112,000
words) opens. Mean girl Elle
McLarin desperately needs to reinvent herself. Growing up with her grandparents
in their small North Carolina mountain community after her teenage mother, who
named her for a fashion magazine, ditched the idea of motherhood and
disappeared, Elle found her upbringing to be tougher than most. Add to that a
near-tragic mistake—drugging high school hunk Kyle Davis at a party, which
landed her in prison for a year—and Elle has long since paid her debt to
society. Nineteen years after being dubbed Badass Barbie in high school, and
with her grandparents now passed away and her illegitimate son joining the
Army, Elle is ready to pull up her bootstraps—and her roots—and go where no one
will know her, or what she did.
In coastal Wilmington,
Elle opens a bakery called Bake My Day with the proceeds from selling her
grandmother’s cabin. Bent on turning her life around, she is constantly driven
by her comical Good Elle/Bad Elle inner dialogue. But Elle’s budding
relationships with a handful of eclectic and unlikely new friends help her to
move outside of her head to grow the possibilities that surround her if she can
prune away her transgressions. Nate, an unexpected white-hot neighbor and
fishing show producer appears with just the kind of naughty smile Elle likes,
reminding her too vividly of the past she’s left behind. Then, right when her
new life begins to take root, and love could be a tenuous possibility for Elle,
a remarkable event brings Elle into the limelight, causing a jealous bystander
to uncover her sordid past, threatening to expose her and drag her under once
more. But has this woman met her match? Sometimes, in situations like this, Bad
Elle is needed and it’s a good thing she hasn’t gone far!
Told in the
first person, readers will get to hear Elle’s side of the story that began in
the pages of my first novel, The One.
Elle makes cameo appearances in the next two books of the series, though A Girl Like That is a stand-alone novel.
If you are meeting Elle for the first time, you may hate her initially, and
possibly grow to love her, but it is quite likely that you will not forget her!
