Spotlight & Giveaway: The Half of It by Juliette Fay

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Juliette Fay to HJ!

Hi Juliette and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Half of It!

 
Hello, fellow booklovers!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Helen Spencer’s life has been veering off course since she was a teenager, a domino effect of regret that began after a romantic night in the woods with Cal Crosby. Now 40 years later, Cal wants to talk about what happened. He has no idea of the can of worms he’s about to open. In fact, he doesn’t know the half of it.
 

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

It’s really hard to choose, but here’s a moment that I think is at the crux of the story. They’re sitting in his kitchen 40 years later, realizing how much they lost:
Cal gazes at her, his chest rising and falling, hands clasped in front of him, and Helen sees that boy he once was. And she knows he’s seeing that girl. Helen has never let herself envision what might have happened if either one of them had been brave enough to alter the course of events. But for a brief moment in Cal Crosby’s kitchen nook, she can see that boy and girl and how happy they could have been. It’s heartbreaking.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

The Half of It by the Numbers:

• 58 – Helen’s age and the age I was when I wrote it. I did this for two reasons: first, because there are so few novels with protagonists in this age group, much less attractive, smart, funny ones. And second because when I wrote about Helen as a teenager, I wanted to take my own trip down memory lane with the songs, movies, hairstyles, etc. of my high school years.
• 7 – The months it took me to complete the first draft. This is a speed record for me! It was the first year of the pandemic, and I had nowhere to go and nothing to do but write.
• 3 – Miles Helen now runs every day.
• 1 – Her rank on the track team as a teenager.

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

When Helen and Cal first meet, they are 15 years old, new to the cross country team, and both pretty dorky. Cal is short and scrawny with a huge mane of red hair. Helen is quiet and doesn’t have a lot of friends. Cal gets made fun of a lot by the other kids, but Helen is kind to him and coaches him to be a better runner. Cal is a good friend to Helen, drawing her out, making her laugh, and singing to her. Their friendship grows. By senior year, Cal is tall and athletic, the star player on the football team. And he still loves Helen.

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

I really enjoyed writing the scenes with Helen and her childhood best friend, Francie. They are very different, but they truly get each other, and they have a way of always making each other laugh. Here’s a scene where Helen is worried that Cal is going to ask her to Homecoming Dance:

“I’m not going out with him.”
“Why not?” asked Francie.
“He’s like a foot shorter than me! How would we slow dance? He’d have to be on stilts or something.”
Francie affected a suave tone. “Or he could just lay his head on your heavenly bosoms.”
“Oh, yes,” cooed Helen, smoothing her hands down the front of her almost flat chest. “So heavenly!” And they cackled like teenaged witches.

Readers should read this book….

•  if they like characters who feel like real people – with flaws and poor decisions, but also who might live down the street – people they’d want to know and have as friends.
• if they think that life is messy and you can’t always know how a decision you make today will impact the future.
• if they believe in redemption and forgiveness, but not without a bit of yelling first!

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

I’m working on revisions to a new novel that’s currently without a title. (Titles are so hard!) It’s about three people who’ve each lost their person – one to death, another to a brain injury, and the last to untreated mental health issues. The story follows each of them and how they befriend and challenge one another.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 1 print copy of The Half of It by Juliette Fay

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Who is your favorite male character and why – what is the one characteristic that makes him better than all the rest?

 
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Excerpt from The Half of It:

Chapter 1
2021

Helen sits on her favorite bench in the woods by the river, boot heels dug into the stony New England earth, body hitched forward slightly to accommodate the baby backpack. Limp, fleece-swaddled legs dangle by her hips.
Fall is in full profusion here in Belham, Massachusetts. Yellow leaves glint like gold off the surface of the water as they glide by; afternoon sun casts bright but diminishing rays that bounce against the ripples.
Helen doesn’t see the beauty. Her blank stare conjures only the wrong turns; regret is a thing with teeth. There’s movement out of the corner of her eye, and for the briefest moment she’s sure it’s an animal that will chew her to bits.
But it isn’t. Not this time.
A small child—maybe two and a half or three years old—running. His little-boy legs paddle at the dirt path with the delightful inefficiency of limbs that have only recently learned to accomplish this feat of anatomical engineering. Chubby fists clench as his body concentrates on propelling him forward. Grinning to himself.
The sight of her catches him unawares and he stops smiling, eyes suddenly round in fear. Gaze locked on hers, his foot hits a root in the path, and he spills forward onto his belly, his neck not yet strong enough to keep his lovely little face from smacking into the dirt.
Helen is up and running to him as he lets out a wail of pain, the sleeping one-year-old on her back jostling against her so that she almost falls right on top of him.
“Hey,” she coos, squatting down next to him, “hey, there.” She doesn’t want to touch him—children are so well-versed in stranger danger these days, and she doesn’t want to fuel his panic. But he can’t seem to lift himself out of the dirt, and still crying hard, he only manages to roll over onto his back like a baby turtle.
“Can I help you up?” she asks.
“Yessssss!” he wails and reaches up to her. She slides her hands into his little armpits and lifts him, intending only to right him onto his feet, but he clamps his arms behind her neck and wraps his legs around her waist like a baby monkey, nearly destabilizing her. She gets a better grip on him and stands up.
“Where’s your grownup?” She gently wipes at the dirt on his cheeks with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
“I runned away!” he says, and this precipitates a whole new round of sobs.
“You ran away? From who?”
“My grandpa!”
Helen immediately pictures an evil old man hitting the boy—or worse—but she warns herself against jumping to conclusions. “Why did you run away from him?” she asks mildly so as not to further inflame the situation.
“I played a triiiiick!” He wails with remorse. “Grandpaaaaa!”
“Okay, okay,” Helen croons, trying not to laugh. Her daughter Barbara was emotional and dramatic like this as a child, and Helen had often marveled at the girl’s ability to allow feelings (any feelings, good, bad, or indifferent—the girl could make indifference dramatic) to erupt like flames from an unpredictable volcano.
Jim was always so perplexed by Barb’s emotional outbursts, as if she were an alien species with whom, try as he might, he couldn’t quite communicate. Helen had told him countless times, “She’s young. She just feels what she feels.” And he would chuckle and say, “Apparently.” But to this day, Barb still felt what she felt. It was a wonder.
She pats the little boy’s back and says, “Don’t worry, we’ll find Grandpa.”
She’s just turning to head up the path when she hears a man’s voice in the distance booming, “Logan! Logan, where are you? Logan!” The panic in that voice makes Helen’s heart hurt. She’s occasionally lost track of a child and knows there is nothing more terrifying.
“He’s here!” she calls back. “Logan’s here! He’s okay!”
“I’m okay!” the little boy echoes in his high, sweet voice. “I’m okay, Grandpa!”
Helen feels the man’s thumping footsteps coming toward her before she catches sight of him rounding a turn in the path. His face is ashen with worry—either that or he has alarmingly bad circulation. His shoulders hunch forward as he jogs toward them in a strange, ungainly lope. As he gets closer, Helen sees the reason for his galumphing gait: he, too, has a baby on his back, a little pink-capped head bobbing up and down, in and out of view from the oversized pack.
“Hi Grandpa!” Logan sings out, suddenly happy and excited, as if this is a pleasant surprise rather than a mildly traumatic event that he himself set in motion. He leaps to his grandfather’s arms before the man has gotten quite close enough to get a good hand on him, and the guy stumbles forward, gripping the kid and pressing him into his chest a little too tightly.
His face somehow sets off a ping of memory, a long-buried familiarity, but before Helen can study it further, tears form in the man’s eyes, and his face contorts into a barely controlled sob. Helen is a bit taken aback. Jim never cried. She’s only seen men cry at funerals. Except for Barb’s father-in-law, who cried at their wedding.
“Jesus, Logan,” he chokes out. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Dat’s a bad word,” says Logan from inside the man’s nearly smothering embrace.
“Sorry.” The man shifts the child into one arm and puts a hand up to pinch the tears out of his eyes. “Don’t tell Mommy, okay?”
“Dat’s okay. Jesus is good.”
A laugh bursts out of the man then, and he catches Helen’s eye, and they both start to laugh. Helen puts a hand up to her mouth. She wants to keep this feeling.
With his face relaxed and smiling, the memory comes clear. Cal Crosby.
Cal fucking Crosby.
With no sign of recognition, eyes still twinkling with humor, he pulls the child back to look at him. The little boy puts his hand up to his grandfather’s cheek, finger pressing on an errant tear. “Is it raining?”
“A little,” he says, though the sky is a cloudless crayon blue, “but it’ll pass.”
Helen continues to stare. How does he not recognize her? But he’s focused on Logan, and she can almost feel the ebbing panic of his pounding heart pulsing through the crisp air against her own body. Fear can blind you. She knows that.
There’s a squawk from the pink cap behind him, and he kisses the boy and attempts to lower him to the ground. But Logan isn’t having it.
“Hold me!” he begs.
“McKenzie needs her bottle, buddy.”
“My legs hurt,” he whines.
It’s her escape hatch. Let him deal with the bruised toddler and hungry baby. No one wants other adults bearing witness to the inept handling of unhappy children. Because it’s always inept. Child wrangling is rarely elegant, and by the looks of him Logan is summoning the demons of a five-alarm tantrum.
Barb and Danny had loved to throw fits in public. A two-year-old Danny once howled like he’d been hit with a hammer because she wouldn’t let him hold the steak knives in her shopping cart at Target. On a trip to Ben & Jerry’s, Barb had hurled her ice cream to the ground, convinced that someone had licked it (and who would that have been—the bespectacled scooper? Helen? Aliens?) and wailed for another. Sam was the gentle bookish child. He never complained on his own behalf. But he could become utterly distraught if he thought a passerby was holding a dog too tightly on its leash, and no amount of explaining about puppy training could console him.
She has a brief vindictive wish for Logan to throw a good fist-and-foot-flailing thrasher. Something to make Cal fucking Crosby really cry …
But honestly, does she even care anymore? It was all so long ago. Oceans of water have passed under countless bridges. She’s brought three humans into the world. Buried a husband in the enforced emptiness of a pandemic. Moved to a little town where she knows no one except her daughter and son-in-law, who are utterly engrossed in the endless blessing of this baby, and the endless exhaustion of new parenthood. At fifty-eight, Helen Spencer somehow finds herself relegated to solitude at the edge of other people’s lives.
Maybe she’s due for a good fist-and-foot-flailing thrasher herself.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

One perfect night. Forty years of buried hurt. One chance to make it right. Can the past ever be fixed? With humor, heart, and grace, USA Today bestselling author Juliette Fay delivers an immensely satisfying page-turner, perfect for fans of Josie Silver and Jojo Moyes.

“I’m wondering if we can be friends again.”

When fifty-eight-year-old Helen Spencer reviews her life, what she sees are the mistakes. Over the years, things seemed to go sideways incrementally, one little wrong decision at a time. She can even pinpoint where it all started to go awry: a wonderous, romantic night in the woods her senior year of high school with a boy named Cal Crosby. A night she would soon work hard to forget.

Forty years, one marriage, three children, and one grandbaby later, suddenly there he is—Cal Crosby!—right in front of her with grandchildren of his own in tow. The chance to finally get some answers and sort out what happened is within reach. But Helen would much prefer to keep that night and all the fury, hurt, and sorrow that followed tightly locked away where she doesn’t have to face it.

Cal Crosby, however, is ready to talk. He has no idea of the can of worms he’s about to open. In fact, he doesn’t know the half of it.

A warm, poignant, propulsive novel about settling the past, rekindling lost friendships, and discovering love when you least expect it.
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Meet the Author:

Juliette Fay is the bestselling author of seven novels, including THE HALF OF IT, CATCH US WHEN WE FALL, CITY OF FLICKERING LIGHT and THE TUMBLING TURNER SISTERS, a USA Today bestseller and Costco Pennie’s Book Club Pick. Previous novels include THE SHORTEST WAY HOME, one of Library Journal’s Top 5 Best Books of 2012: Women’s Fiction; DEEP DOWN TRUE, short-listed for the 2011 Women’s Fiction award by the American Library Association; and SHELTER ME, a 2009 Massachusetts Book Award “Must-Read Book” and an Indie Next pick.
Juliette is a graduate of Boston College and Harvard University, and lives in Massachusetts with her family. Visit her at www.juliettefay.com, Facebook: Juliette Fay author, Twitter: @juliettefay, and Instagram: Juliette_Fay.
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