Spotlight & Giveaway: The Big Finish by Brooke Fossey

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Brooke Fossey to HJ!

Hi Brooke and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, THE BIG FINISH!

 
Thank you! So glad to be here. I love love.
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

THE BIG FINISH is about an 88-year-old man named Duffy who lives (peacefully) in an assisted living home until a young woman climbs through his bedroom window looking for her grandfather. She’s all sorts of trouble, and threatens Duffy’s existence in more ways than one. It’s a dramedy. You will laugh. You will cry.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“You get to tell one story here, and you don’t get a rewrite. So what do you want it to say?”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

There are love stories in this book for every age. Yes, 88-year-old Duffy has a crush.
The main setting is an assisted living home based on my grandfather’s place.
Writing from the perspective of an old man who tells it like it is was very freeing.
My dog Rufus makes an appearance, as does my alma mater (Texas A&M).

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

The hero, Duffy, was an incredibly fun hero to write. I had his voice nailed from page one – sarcastic, painfully honest, impatient, yet very loving beneath it all. As for the heroine of the story, there are actually a few. Alice, a resident at the assisted living, is Duffy’s foil. She’s proper, sweet, well mannered. She makes him want to be a better man. Josie, the young woman who climbs through Duffy’s window, is more like him except she feels unloved inside. She makes him tap into all that love he’s been hiding and share it. Then there’s Nora, a nurse, who doesn’t take any of Duffy’s lip. She makes Duffy behave. Truly, it’s takes a number of ladies to groom Duffy into the man he’s meant to be.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I think the funniest scene in the story is when Josie takes Duffy for a drunken, wild ride in a wheelchair in the middle of the night. I giggle every time I read it.

As for tears, there are a few. I always cry when Duffy’s roommate talks about his stillborn son, and when Josie talks about her aimlessness since her mother’s death. But hands down, I cry at the end, without fail. You will too, I think. I hope.

Readers should read this book….

Because right now, in the middle of an epidemic that separates us from our loved ones, especially our older loved ones, we could all use a way to connect. This is the perfect cross-generational read. It celebrates the elderly, who are the most vulnerable to COVID-19. They deserve to have their stories told in some other way than stats.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

What am I working on? You mean besides trying to launch a debut novel in the middle of an epidemic and homeschooling four kids unexpectedly? Ha! Well, I’m working on my next book. I can’t say too much yet, but I can say that it’ll pay homage to soap operas!

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: NetGalley pre-approved download link THE BIG FINISH by Brooke Fossey. (US Only)

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Ah! I shall borrow one from THE BIG FINISH readers’ guide. It has to do with love…
In your mind, is there an age limit to romantic love?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from The Big Finish:

The morning started like always, with Nurse Nora rapping on my door, and me hollering at Carl to get his sorry ass out of bed so we didn’t miss breakfast. And then there was Nora again, with her coffee breath and her hum of gospel songs, helping me stand and pulling up my trousers and shushing me and winking at me and telling me to let sleeping dogs lie, and why can’t you be nicer Mr. Duffy, and me telling her if I were both nice and handsome, people wouldn’t want to be friends with me.
And then sure as the sunrise, Nora smiled despite herself, because I have that effect on people, and said, “Who went and told you that you’re handsome?”
“A man simply knows these things,” I said, sliding my shoes on, using her shoulder as leverage. “Hey Carl, did you hear Nora calling you a dog?”
“I heard her call you ugly.” Carl’s walker squeaked on the green linoleum floor as he made his way around his bed, smoothing the wrinkles out of the covers. “She’s right, too. I’ve said before that I can’t tell the difference between you and Margaret Thatcher, but I think you take it as a compliment.”
“I do,” I said. “Old Maggie had bigger balls than me.”
“Who doesn’t?” Carl said, snickering at his own little joke.
Oh, how I loved our daily spar. There was no better way to sharpen the knives and start the day. “Those are fighting words, sir. If the lady of the house wasn’t here, I’d set you straight.”
“Boys,” Nurse Nora reprimanded, or rather, as I called her, my Nora—my beautiful, honey-skinned, big-breasted, long-nailed, hard-nosed Nora. She was a songbird built like a spark plug, like any good nursemaid should be.
She said, “The scrambled eggs go cold fast, and I know it’s gonna take you a good ten minutes to get down that hall—”
“We move faster than that,” I said.
“Mmhmm. Not if you squeeze in your social hour on the way.” She ran a hand over my cowlick and floated over to Carl to dust off his shoulders where he kept a never-ending collection of dandruff.
“You are simply the best, Nora,” he said, chin tucked so she didn’t miss a spot. “Do you want to take another one of my books? Or maybe some saltines? I saved them from yesterday.”
“What’ve I been telling you, Mr. Carl? If you keep on giving things away, you’re gonna go broke.” She kneeled to Velcro his shoes, then wiped her hands on her pants and stood. “Listen now. I’ll be seeing you boys down there. I’m gonna help Miss Zimmerman bathe this morning.”
Carl let out a low, catcalling whistle, while I pretended to gag.
“You’re awful,” Nora said to me on her way out, which was true.
I turned to Carl and regarded him, with his spindly legs and his cardigan hanging on him like he was a little kid who had borrowed the sweater from his old man. “Why on earth are you whistling? You have something going with Ms. Zimmerman I don’t know about?”
Carl fidgeted some, then fixed his watery-eyes on me. They were set deep, no lashes; he always looked half surprised.
“Well?” I said.
“Of course not, and you shouldn’t make fun of her like that.”
I waved off the suggestion and set about closing all the half-open dresser drawers. In the meantime, I could feel Carl’s gaze boring into my back. He was trying to force his sense of decorum onto me because he knew my tasteless impersonation of Mrs. Zimmerman was brewing. He never did like when I pretended to have a bout of dementia, which required me to holler obscenities in my falsetto while following him around like he was my long-lost love.
After slamming the last drawer shut, I turned to find Carl’s face pinched up in worry. Like he thought I might eternally doom myself if I didn’t behave.
“Relax already,” I said. “I won’t clown around today.”
“Thank you.”
“But perhaps you shouldn’t have started it with your whistling.”
“You’re right,” he said. “No more jokes at her expense.”
“Fine.”
“Especially since she has no idea where she is most days,” he added, as if I hadn’t already obliged him.
“Right.”
“Have you heard her yelling out her daughter’s name?”
“Yep.”
“She sounds possessed. It’s such a shame.”
“It is.”
“She has no clue what’s about to happen to her either. Imagine what it would be like if she realized that she’s headed to—”
“Christ, Carl,” I said. “Would you shut the hell up?”
Silence followed, cold and injured.
For a second I regretted being an ass, but the moment passed, like it does. And anyways, he’d made the mistake, not me. He knew better. He knew we never talked about what it meant to be put out to pasture. Not that, or being put in a box.
Yes, Mrs. Zimmerman was on the tail end of her thirty-day notice, and yes, she was fixing to be dumped at that infernal nursing home I refused to name, and yes, I felt bad for her. But I sure as hell didn’t want to make it part of my morning chinwag. I preferred sleeping tonight in lieu of staring at the ceiling, imagining the wasteland beyond this place. Remembering the little peek my uncle had given me while rotting away in his piss smelling bed. It would take me days to recover from the thought, to shove it back into its dark corner where it would bide its time, waiting for the next opportunity to eat its way out and keep me wide-eyed and wrestling with my sheets in the middle of the goddamn night.
So no, we would not discuss Mrs. Zimmerman’s fate. Living it would do.
Carl straightened up. Cleared his throat. “Shall we go eat?”
“As if you need to ask,” I said, relieved.
Together, we turned to the door and prepared to meet our constituents for breakfast. And this is not an overstatement. Carl and I, we were the benevolent rulers of Centennial, crowned because we were able-bodied for the most part, intellectually sound, and as I point out to my Nora whenever I see her, movie star handsome. Never mind that Carl’s face was back-end ugly when he didn’t have his dentures in; he always remembered them, and that’s what’s important. And truthfully, between the two of us, Carl preferred to be the brains in the background while I served as the bullhorn. Which is how come I wanted him to get his ass into gear. Our people needed to hear from us, lest they think us dead.
I motioned impatiently for him to go in front of me, on account of him having a tendency to throw his walker into my heels if I didn’t keep pace. He motioned back, equally annoyed, then made his way by.
In between his walker squeaking on the linoleum, and me saying, “Any day now,” there came a rapping on the outside of our bedroom window—an inquiring tap, tap, tap. Jorge, probably, the lawn care man. He and I had a long-standing relationship through that window—pounded hellos in either direction, exchanged waves between my newspaper and his weed whacker, and occasionally if I was bored, a hand written “Gracias” which I taped up for him to read. As for right now, I was closer to the door than not, so we’d have to catch up some other time.
But that knocking came again, and this time it was not Jorge-like at all. It was harder, sharper. It left the air quivering and stopped me in my slow tracks. I tugged on Carl’s shirttail and pointed to where the mini blinds were drawn.
As Carl fumbled his walker back around, the window’s sash squealed against the sill. Metal on metal. Carl cringed and cupped his hearing aids. I started toward the noise, but froze when somebody’s shadow overtook the whisker-thin slices of sun wrapping our bedroom walls.
Carl slowly dropped his hands from his ears and looked at me, mouthing, who’s that? I shook my head and put my pointer to my lips. We waited, listening. Everything went dead quiet, except for a sparrow calling through the open window.
And then all at once, the dusty aluminum blinds went off like live wires. They clanked and rocked and flapped, and from under this ruckus came a foot—one bare, pink-toenailed foot with a sole black as tar. Another foot entered to match, followed by legs with turnip-looking knees. And then more: smooth thighs, cut-off jeans, a cocktail apron, a bare belly, a cropped shirt, a neck, and a mess of straight black hair. So came a girl, no more than twenty years old, slithering from the opening as if the window had birthed her.
Once through, she landed like a sack of taters, though everything else she brought in scattered like marbles. She must’ve been punch-drunk from the fall, too, because without even looking up, she got on all fours to chase down her bits and bobs and shove them back into her apron pockets. She stopped only when she reached for a half-eaten candy bar lying near the toe of my shoe. Her gaze crept up my leg and eventually landed on my face. I stared back, mainly at the shiner that had swollen one of her eyes shut.

Excerpted from THE BIG FINISH by Brooke Fossey, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2020

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Meet Duffy, an old curmudgeon who lives in an assisted living home.

Meet Josie, a desperate young woman who climbs through his window.

Together, they’re going to learn it’s never too late—or too early—to change your ways.

For Duffy Sinclair, life boils down to one simple thing: maintaining his residence at the idyllic Centennial Assisted Living. Without it, he’s destined for the roach-infested nursing home down the road—and after wasting the first eighty-eight years of his life, he refuses to waste away for the rest. So, he keeps his shenanigans to the bare minimum with the help of his straight-laced best friend and roommate, Carl Upton.

But when Carl’s granddaughter Josie climbs through their bedroom window with booze on her breath and a black eye, Duffy’s faced with trouble that’s sticking around and hard to hide—from Centennial’s management and Josie’s toxic boyfriend. Before he knows it, he’s running a covert operation that includes hitchhiking and barhopping.

He might as well write himself a one-way ticket to the nursing home…or the morgue. Yet Duffy’s all in. Because thanks to an unlikely friendship that becomes fast family—his life doesn’t boil down the same anymore. Not when he finally has a chance to leave a legacy.

In a funny, insightful, and life-affirming debut, Brooke Fossey delivers an unflinching look at growing old, living large, and loving big, as told by a wise-cracking man who didn’t see any of it coming
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Meet the Author:

Brooke Fossey was once an aerospace engineer with a secret clearance before she traded it all in for motherhood and writing. She’s a past president and an honorary lifetime member of DFW Writers’ Workshop. Her work can be found in numerous publications, including Ruminate Magazine and SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut novel, THE BIG FINISH, is forthcoming in 2020 from Penguin/Berkley (US), and Piper/Pendo (DE). When she’s not writing, you can find her in Dallas, Texas with her husband, four kids, and their dog Rufus. She still occasionally does math.
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