A Girl Like That Wins Literary Book Award!

I am so pleased to announce that A Girl Like That has won an honorable mention in the 2015-16 Reader Views Literary Book Awards in the General Fiction category. Thanks to my editor Tyler Tichelaar and graphic designer Shiloh Schroeder, along with others who have contributed to this book's success! Thank you also to all my readers for reading Elle's side of the story. Your kind words of praise and five-star reviews have been gratifying to see on the sales sites. 



If you wish to purchase an autographed copy of A Girl Like That, 
please visit the Buy the Book page on my website at 
www.TheOneNovel.com.

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Spring 2016 Book Signing Events

Look for Mary Flinn at the following Spring and Summer events in 2016:

April 30 Springfest, Southern Pines, NC  9am  – 4pm

May 1 MADE 4 Market, Greensboro, NC, Farmers Market, 501 Yanceyville St. 11am - 4pm

May 7 Spring Folly, Kernersville, NC  10am – 8pm

June 4 Reynolds High School Arts Festival, Winston-Salem, NC, 9am - 3pm

July 16 Cricket’s Nest Craft Show, 4401 Country Club Rd, Winston-Salem, NC,  10am - 4pm

July 29-31 Summer Craftsmen's Classic, Myrtle Beach, SC  

Fri. 10am – 6pm, Sat. 10am –6pm, Sun. 11am – 5pm

Fall Holiday Book Events

Meet Mary Flinn at the following locations for your holiday book-buying:

Christmas Made in the South, Concord, NC, Cabarrus Convention Center, October 23-25

Holiday Market, Charleston, SC, Charleston Area Convention Center, November 13-15

The Craftsmen's Christmas Classic, Greensboro, NC, November 27-29


St. Francis Holiday Market, St. Francis Episcopal Church, Greensboro, NC, December 5 from 10-3:00

Made 4 Market, Greensboro Farmers Market, Yanceyville St. Greensboro, December 6 from 11-4:00

Barnes & Noble, Friendly Center, Greensboro, NC December 19 at 1:00

Summer Book Signing Events

Join Mary Flinn for author readings and signings of A Girl Like That.

Purchase your five-star summer beach read today on Mary's website or at sponsoring Barnes & Noble Booksellers and at Scuppernong Bookstore. Books make excellent gifts!

Friday, July 10 at 7 pm Barnes & Noble, 906 Mall Loop Road, High Point, NC

Wednesday, August 12 at 7 pm Scuppernong Bookstore, 304 S. Elm St, Greensboro, NC

Tuesday, August 18 at 7 pm Barnes & Noble, 3102 Northline Avenue, Friendly Center, Greensboro, NC

Tuesday, September 29 at 6:30 pm Hosted by Friends of the Library at Northeast Regional Library, 1241 Military Cutoff Road, Wilmington, NC

All events are free and open to the public.

Kirkus Review Just in:

TITLE INFORMATION
A GIRL LIKE THAT
Flinn, Mary
Self (366 pp.)
$18.75 paperback
ISBN: 978-0990719779; May 25, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A breezy romance about a single mother who tries to reinvent herself after her young-adult son leaves the nest.
Flinn (The Nest, 2015, etc.) has created a memorable, multidimensional heroine in Elle McLarin, a lonely middle-aged woman stuck in small-town North Carolina, where she can’t escape her criminal past. During her teenage years, Elle spent 12 months in prison as punishment for slipping her high school crush a roofie and taking advantage of him. She was pregnant with another man’s child at the start of her incarceration, and by the time of her release, she had an infant son and a scandalous reputation that she couldn’t live down. As the book opens, her son has turned 18 and left for the Army. Elle, now 37 years old, is finally able to leave town and start fresh. She drives across the state and settles on the North Carolina coast, where she opens a bakery and begins making new friends for the first time in nearly two decades. It’s not long, however, before her past catches up with her. After she finally begins to enjoy her new successes and even explore a relationship with her handsome neighbor, an odd sequence of events lands her in the spotlight on national news. Her new beau, Nate, learns all about the inglorious woman she used to be, and she worries that their budding relationship won’t survive. The strengths of this engaging, plot-heavy page-turner are in its character development of Elle and the perfect pitch of its narrative voice. Flinn depicts Elle as a complicated woman with constantly conflicting emotions. As the first-person narrator, she’s initially quite unlikable but gradually reveals that beneath her seemingly uneducated persona is an intelligent, pragmatic, and bighearted woman who’s worked hard to improve herself. Readers won’t be able to help rooting for her to find happiness as the story winds its way to its conclusion.
An uplifting tale of love and redemption that’s perfect for fans of stories of rehabilitated youth and second chances.
Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Rd., Austin, TX 78744 indie@kirkusreviews.com 

Book Launch Event

You are cordially invited to join me for the launch of my seventh novel, 

                                 A Girl Like That

                            Sunday, May 31, 2015

                                     4:00-6:00 p.m.

                        St. Francis Episcopal Church

                                3506 Lawndale Drive

                               Greensboro, NC 27408

This event is free and open to the public. Autographed copies will be available for purchase.

A Girl Like That To Be Released In May, 2015

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!