Spotlight & Giveaway: The Year of Second Chances by Lara Avery

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Lara Avery to HJ!

Hi Lara and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Year of Second Chances!

 
Happy Reading!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

For a year after her husband Gabe dies, Robin is a self-proclaimed hermit, grieving, healing, and not leaving her couch. When her husband reappears in the form of a pre-written email, Robin learns that not only does he want her to move on, he has set up a dating profile for her. It doesn’t work at first; with each date, Robin seems to fall more in love with the idea of Gabe. But through single dads, seances, nightclubs, and Shakespeare, the world begins to surprise her, drawing her out of her shell. And she begins to surprise herself, too.
 

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

Robin getting “Bubbl” (the app) guidance from her late husband’s best friend:

“I returned to the phone, my eyes darting across names, faces. I had thought my part of the game was over. Now, I was expected to bring out something magical and witty on the spot? I’d never made the first move in my life. Unless you count saying Gabe’s name in the courtyard outside the dorms as a ‘move.’ Strange little hidden parts of me began to wriggle out of decades of stillness—the sensation of standing in the Brokenridge cafeteria at my first middle school dance, Usher blasting, party lights pulsing, everyone waiting for the first brave soul to step out into the middle of the floor. I imagined holding out my chubby hand with its Bath and Body Works glitter lotion and messily-painted fingernails to an anonymous torso in poly-blend stripes.
I felt my heartbeat in my ears, Levi’s eyes on me from across the booth. I scrolled. Smile after smile. Wanting. Open. Ready. I was none of those things. The only words that came to me were lines from cardboard Valentines. Are you from Tennessee? Did it hurt, when you fell from the sky?
I put my phone down in a huff. ‘This is too embarrassing.’
‘It’s not. People do it every day. Someone in this very bar is doing it right now.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can. You just to have find something you like about them and say it. Or better yet, ask them a question.’ Levi put his warm, sweaty hands on my wrists, giving them a little shake. ‘What are you scared of?’
Being lost in the corn maze. The pressure of tears behind my eyes. The looks on people’s faces. The cold hands and voices in the dark theater and smell of foreign fabric softener. Gabe, sleeping on the couch because he’s too weak to move to the bed. The past. The future.
“‘Everything.'”

After one of Robin’s more disastrous dates:

“…He had told me to take care of myself. It wasn’t the most revolutionary statement—I had heard it before—but for some reason it was giving me permission I hadn’t yet given myself. Sure, I had wallowed, and sure, I knew how to avoid responsibility, but I didn’t think this was the full potential of what anyone meant by ‘care.’ In fact, I had no idea what it would look like to actually ‘care’.”

After Robin is visited by a medium:

“I still didn’t know if it was real, still couldn’t quite let my heart take the lead from my head. But I did know what it was like to live in an empty old farmhouse. What it was like to wake up in the middle of the night to creaks and bangs as the wood grew and shrunk, and wind with a vengeance, playing the columns of the porch like a fiddle. I knew the power of a lonely person’s imagination, looking out into the country dark and wishing so desperately for another human presence, shadows begin to form.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The premise of my novel is inspired by a 2017 New York Times “Modern Love” column called “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” It’s by the late author Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and it’s heartbreaking, funny, and absolutely beautiful.
• Robin’s online dates were drawn from a collected nine years (!) of experience I’ve had on dating apps. (Thankfully I found my person a couple of years ago.) Most of the dates I wrote for Robin are based on real situations, but I actually left out some of the crazier dates I’ve had! Tune in this summer because I’m going to be sharing them on Tik Tok (@laraaverybooks) and Twitter (@_WeBothLoveSoup).
• Robin’s last name, Lindstrom, is actually the name of a small town in Minnesota where my aunt and uncle live. Hi Aunt Barb!
• This is kind of the opposite of a fact: on Robin’s ice fishing date, she recommends the group move spots to catch more fish, but their big catch might have been dumb luck. My brother (an avid ice fisherman) recommends the shallows of a river, but on a lake, many folks say that deep water is the way to go. I honestly still don’t know…
• Levi’s band “The Hidden Beaches” is an easter egg for residents of the Twin Cities who go to the “Hidden Beach” at Cedar Lake. The spot is no longer “hidden” but it’s still the home of some of my favorite memories.

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

There are many “heroes” in this book, and I don’t want to give away who Robin ends up with at the end! But here are a few features that draw Robin to her various dates…

high cheekbones
a genuine smile that reaches his eyes
broad shoulders
thick hands
full lips
the confidence of rocking a shaved head
“A laugh followed most things he said, I was noticing, some of them small, some of them big. With anyone else, this might have been obnoxious, but with him, it seemed to mean that he genuinely thought life was a little bit funny. As the recipient of one of life’s cruelest jokes, I had to agree.”

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

I cried a few different times while writing these passages. While I haven’t had to mourn a spouse, I have had to let go of people close to me. This moment always got me:

“…I stared at the slideshow. Gabe from all angles, near and far. Politician Gabe, rollerblades Gabe, husband Gabe. Like I used to do when he spoke to crowds like this, I closed my eyes and savored the parts of him only I knew. Gabe on the couch that night in August, living and dying. Instead of going to the other room, in my mind I stayed. I nestled on the cushions beside his skinny body and made him look at me, drinking in the sight of his eyes, lively and loving me, scheming the years to come. The years for me. Thank you, hon, I said to him silently. I could feel him, his gangly arms around my waist, his chin on my shoulder. His fingers sliding between mine. Thank you, thank you.
At the chorus, the band dropped out and Levi stepped to the edge of the stage, cuing everyone to sing.
‘But you’re not gone,’ the voices rose together, disparate in tempo and out of tune and achingly beautiful. ‘No, you’re not gone, you’re not gone, you’re not gone, until we say so.’
You can go now, I told him in my brain as the chorus crescendoed around me. I’m going to find something of my own. I’m going to be all right.”

Readers should read this book….

• If you’re looking for an absorbing, realistic romance that burns slow but hits hard.
• If you want your heroine to fall in love with themselves as much as they fall for anyone else.
• If you don’t mind tearing up and laughing in the same sitting.

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

I just started working on my next novel! It will also be a tearjerker with a (hopefully) very satisfying ending. And the romance is going to be so unexpected… I haven’t seen it before in any book I’ve read, so I’m excited by the challenge of writing these two people coming together.

I’ve also got a personal essay on online dating coming out in Good Housekeeping in early August, so keep your eye out for that!
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: (1) A print copy of THE YEAR OF SECOND CHANCES

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Do you think Robin would have moved on without Gabe’s posthumous encouragement? Why or why not?

 
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Excerpt from The Year of Second Chances:

From Chapter 2:

“Read it aloud to me,” Theo said. He was sitting at my kitchen island, intent over his iced coffee and a half-eaten breakfast burrito. Last night I’d stared at the message for God knows how long, my eyes darting over the words until my back hurt from sitting up, hunched over the screen.
I’d Googled things like, “how do I know if my phone has been hacked” and “spammers messing with email display name” and “how do you know if a gmail has been deleted.” I’d texted Theo, told him to come over as soon as he was awake, and I sat in my bed, my phone in my lap, waiting for answers.
“Hi Robbie,” I read to Theo from my laptop screen, though I almost had it memorized by now. “Before you freak out, it’s really me. Your childhood dog’s name was Pogo. Mine were Lucy and Freddy. What else… You secretly still watch Fraggle Rock! This is an old Gmail I used to sign up for free trials online so I hope you didn’t find it and delete it. Ok, down to brass tax: The other night you told me you’d never love anyone else.” I stumbled as I read this part, just as I’d stumbled the first read-through, and every read-through after that. If he timed it correctly it would be a year, Gabe wrote, and it was time to start moving on. He knew I wouldn’t want to, so he was giving me a push: an online dating profile with my name on it. I felt my cheeks flush as I rushed through the words. “The app subscription lasts a year; USE IT!” I read aloud. “Odds are you’ll meet someone cool that you can enjoy for a while. Maybe forever. He won’t be hotter than me—” Theo snorted at that. “—but I don’t like the thought of you being alone. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it as a favor to me. Please!” The message ended with a password to his email inbox, which he had used to create “my” dating account.
“Let me look at it,” Theo said, his mouth full of burrito.
“Clean your hands first.”
Theo rolled his eyes and wiped his hands on his joggers. He reached for the laptop and began to study the screen, brow furrowed. After confirming that, yes, conceivably Gabe could have scheduled this message to be sent out last August or September, and no, neither my computer not phone had any secret spyware some troll had installed, Theo was getting giddy.
“Wait, so—he actually went through with the dating profile.”
In Gabe’s alternative inbox, we’d found two emailed promotions. Welcome to Bubbl, Robin L.! the first one said. Then, Take the next step toward true love, Robin L.! Log in to make your profile visible! “Yeah, but I haven’t even looked at it.”
Theo almost spit out his mouthful of iced coffee. “What? Why?”
“Because. I have no interest. No time.” I ripped a paper towel and wiped up the drops from Theo’s escaped coffee. “I wouldn’t even know how to go on a date.”
“All the more reason. You gotta get some practice for husband number two.”
“Gross.” I pulled out the leftover lasagna from the fridge, unfastened the lid, and took a fork to it. “God, it’s even good cold.”
“You’re going to go against Gabe’s, like, last wish?”
I looked up from my lasagna. “It’s not like that.”
“How is it not like that? Gabe clearly thought about this. He wanted this for you. He literally composed the email after a conversation with you about never loving anyone else.”
I avoided Theo’s eyes, focusing on the movements of my fork. “I guess.”
That night—the night we talked about after—he’d been recovering from dialysis. He’d started to go from skinny with a beer belly to marathon-runner skinny. I’d started talking about our Thanksgiving plans, about maybe rewarding ourselves for a hard year, going somewhere nice, and he stopped me. He probably wouldn’t be around for Thanksgiving, he’d said. That was a bullshit bad attitude, I’d replied. We argued until I went to bed. Soon, his weakened immune system would be fighting another kidney infection at Fairview. Soon, he wouldn’t be able to lift his arms to type anything. He saw how hard I could grip onto the reality I wanted. Now, after a year, he was trying to uncurl my fingers.
“I know life without him has to exist,” I said to Theo. “But I’m just not there yet.”
“Robin.” Theo said it quietly. The pain that came with it was quiet, too. “Life without him is already here.”
“Yeah, I know. But.” I had no but. I was regretting telling Theo about the email. I should have just savored it, let it sit with all my other Gabe-soaked things. The key rack, the worn shoes, the handwriting, and now this message. This was the world I wanted. “I just feel like I’m not supposed to do this.”
I put the top back on the lasagna and returned it to its proper place among all the other leftovers in the fridge.
“What, move on too quickly?” Theo said from behind me. “You’re worried what people will think?”
I shut the fridge, hard. “In my heart, it feels wrong. Like a violation.”
“A violation of who? Not of Gabe. Gabe is the one who wants you to do this.”
“No, like…” I gestured to the heavens, feeling heat rise to my face. “Nature.”
Theo took on a dramatic tone. “Like you’re doomed by the gods to walk this Earth in a burial shroud? You’re not. You need—”
“Don’t tell me what I need. I’m tired of people being up in my business about this, all right?”
Theo let out an exasperated sigh. “Fine.”
It was a cheap card to play, but effective. Theo had seen how Gabe’s death had been a public spectacle. A hometown boy, good-looking, progressive but still knew his way around his family’s sugar beet farm—he’d beat the incumbent mayor by a landslide, and he would have won again. Even before he was elected, we were the couple who hosted the dinners for everyone’s visitors, whose guest bedroom people used when they got in fights with their partners, whose advice people sought when their cars weren’t starting, their yard was dying. For Gabe, the hospital broke its own visiting hour rules. Somehow it felt like we were rarely alone, which was all the more lonely.
“People just need to let me do things on my own time,” I added in Theo’s silence.
Without looking up, Theo muttered, “If you do that, you’ll be doing this forever.”
“Doing what?”
“Tinkering around with all his old shit. Making his favorite noodle-based dishes.”
“Stop.” My voice was raised and clipped. He was joking, but I wasn’t.
“You stop,” he said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I pointed to the laptop. “Are you in on this? Is that why you’re pushing me?”
“No! Jesus!”
“Maybe you don’t understand because you’re young…”
Theo scoffed. “I’m an adult. I get it.”
“I don’t think you do. It’s just not physically possible for me. He was like a part of my body. It’s like an injury, like I’m limping everywhere, you know? I’m barely keeping myself upright. How am I supposed to flirt when I still feel him everywhere?”
“Hm.… Here’s an idea.” Theo was looking at the ceiling sarcastically. “Every once in a while, get out of his ancestral home. Try that.”
“That’s mean.” I dropped my tone. “How dare you.”
“I mean, I’m sorry, but am I right or am I right?” His cheeks were red, but he didn’t waver. “He took some of his precious time on this Earth for this. If you don’t at least look at it…”
“Fine,” I snapped. “You do it.”
“Seriously?”
“You look at it, and you can tell me if it’s creepy, is it a huge fucking joke, it there are dick pics, whatever. Just tell me the whole deal.” My mouth was suddenly dry.
“Are you sure?” Theo asked, but he was already turning the laptop toward him.
I was feeling it, what I had feared, this roller coaster swoop of no, not right, not yet. This feeling of unnatural. “Do it,” I told him, because the profile couldn’t just sit there. Maybe once the mystery was gone, he would drop it, and I could delete the damn thing.
To distract myself from the nerves, I slipped into my gardening clogs and opened the backdoor.
“Where are you going?”
“I just need to—I need to weed.” My stomach turned again.
Outside, wrens and warblers collected themselves for the journey South. I picked the last of the tomatoes and put them in an old Kemp’s gallon ice cream bin. Rain-faded vanilla from some distant Fourth of July. My clogs were splattered with memories, too—eggshell blue paint for the soon-to-be-nursery of one of our friends. Gabe had pulled his back that day and I’d tried to goat-carry him from the Volvo to our front door. We had collapsed on the lawn with laughter.
“Is this really what you want?” I said aloud to the cheeping yard.
A red-winged blackbird hopped onto the fence, looked at me, and flew away.
Damian R., Minneapolis, 28
My friends call me… Naruto because I run funny lol.
I dream of… Starting my own record label, shoutout to @mplshype on SoundCloud.
In Minneapolis, Gabe and I used to walk through the wealthy neighborhoods together and point out the houses we liked but could never afford. We ducked through alleyways to spy on people’s gardens, admiring the pea shoots in their raised beds, measuring rhubarb stalks, making friends with protective dogs. When we were still dating, we would propose to each other as a joke. He’d present me with a clump of my hair he’d pulled from his drain. Will you marry me? Marry me, I’d say as Gabe let out a particularly heinous burp.
Jens T., White Bear Lake, 35
A typical day…Working out, eating, work, working out, eating.
My secret is… I’m an open book. Just ask.
A couple of years after we’d graduated, we were on one of our walks, and Gabe was telling me about his parents’ decision to leave Brokenridge for Milwaukee, to sell off the land his family had farmed since the 1800s. Technically it was Lakota land, anyway, Gabe had insisted. It wasn’t theirs to sell. But as a temporary steward, did he want it? Do we want it? Gabe had paused, turned to me. My heart swelled simply to be asked. As we talked, we’d veered off the sidewalk and down the banks of the Mississippi, weaving through the leafless trees. The wide, lazy river had always been our refuge from the backfiring buses on University Avenue, the crowded sidewalks of the campus neighborhood where we lived, and that day in February, the river was silent and frozen solid.
Thomas A., Saint Paul, 30.
Why I’m here… Trying to find someone to fuck me before we all die.
Currently binge watching… This app is a hellhole, I want to die, seriously kill me.
Gabe and I clutched mittened hands as we shuffled across the ice, heads on the swivel for any passerby who might report us, giddy with an edge of fear. We knew not to go too far out into the center where the current still moved, and when we’d gone as far as we could go, I looked up at the giant old trees lining the sweeping banks, the lecture halls and museums and theaters on either side jutting above the treetops into the gray sky. It would be suffocating to go back home, I told Gabe, to be surrounded by people who’d known us since we were children, farmers and mechanics, many with big hearts but narrow minds. But my mother had begun struggling with the restaurant. Maybe if we were close by, I wouldn’t worry about her being alone so much, wouldn’t worry about Theo’s safety as one of only a few openly gay people in town. Together we imagined Saturday nights eating sausage and sauerkraut, listening to people talk about where they were going ice fishing that weekend, building fires under the cloudless, frozen sky, the wood crackling in the quiet. Maybe we could do some good.
Devansh M., Minneapolis, 38
Favorite recipe… My mom’s daal or hot wings, depends on my mood.
At a wedding, I’ll be the one… Why don’t you bring me as your plus-one and find out???
When I had looked back at Gabe that day, his pink-tipped fingers had pressed a simple gold band into the woven palm of my glove.
“We should do it together, then,” he said. “We can go back and grow something.”
I had wept with happiness. Gabe wiped my tears before they could freeze.
Now, I plucked wayward grass from the soft soil surrounding the zucchini, added six gourds to the pile of tomatoes. We had recorded the growth of our little backyard garden meticulously, made decisions based on changing heat and rainfall patterns. This year it hadn’t thrived without him. I tried to mimic what I’d seen him do, but I couldn’t protect the waxy leaves from getting blanched by too much sun, the heavy rainfall from uprooting the kale and the spinach altogether. I tried to imagine someone else kneeling beside me, someone that wasn’t Gabe, and saw only a blank outline. Someone who might want me to do dumb things like go to professional sports games—overpriced, Gabe and I always agreed—or someone who wore too much cologne, or tried to get me to listen to his podcasts. Someone who might want kids, and those kids would come out looking nothing like the kid I imagined, the kid with Gabe’s eyes and hair. Aren’t you curious? I heard a little voice in my head. Sure. Curious like you look over the ledge of a deep well and wonder what’s at the bottom. Curious like you look up at the stars when you’re camping in the North and get your breath taken away by the distant, colorless void.
I stomped through the still dewy grass toward the backdoor. Maybe someday, I would tell Theo. Maybe next year, though the only thing on my calendar for next year was combing through Gabe’s graphing notebooks, using whatever he’d jotted to return the garden to its former glory. The thought comforted me.
“You want zucchini bread?” I asked Theo, setting my bucket inside the backdoor.
“You have to read this,” Theo said.
“I’m going to delete it.” I kicked off my clogs.
“No, you won’t.” Theo sounded smug, but when I looked at him, he was smiling gently.
I sighed, braced myself, and leaned over his shoulder. The site was navy blue and a pale pink, with blocky font separated into squared off sections, each with a bolded prompt and what was supposed to my answer. A simple butterfly logo pumped its wings in the upper left corner next to my name and photo.
Robin L., 33, Brokenridge
Describe yourself in five words or less… Just let me do it.
A huff of a laugh escaped me. I saw myself reaching for a tangle of cords over Gabe’s shoulder, making the rounds to each colleague who had filled out their expenses incorrectly, sliding the restaurant’s financial records towards myself as I sat across the desk from my mom.
Top three accomplishments… Certified Best Birthday Gift Giver Ever. Self-identified Sudoku champion.
“Self-identified. Psh.”
Theo turned his head.
I pointed at the section I was reading. “I got on the leaderboard like three times on my app.”
Zucchini bread won Best Baked Good at the Lee County Fair four years in a row, would have been five but someone couldn’t resist eating it and it got disqualified…
“That was Gabe who ate it, right?” Theo said.
I nodded, smiling at the memory of finding him standing in the baked goods tent, eating the loaf with his fingers, not a care in the world. “He thought the judging was already over.”
Three things you wish you could change about the world… Only three?
The smile on my face grew.
I’m looking for… Handyman. Iron Chef. Green thumb.
“Of course,” I muttered. He’d basically described himself. He wasn’t wrong.
My eyes wandered back to the top of the profile, toward the photo. It had been a while since I’d seen it, but I recognized it from the lock screen on Gabe’s phone. He’d taken it from his bike. He went out on long rides every day, but on weekends he would ride slow so I could come along on my secondhand Schwinn, him weaving easily as I pumped beside him. That day he had called my name. I’d turned, saw he was pointing his camera at me, and lifted my hands from the handlebars. My hair had blown back from my face and I was beaming, a little surprised at my own skill. He’d caught me right as my gaze had locked on him, and you could tell by the look, the happiness in my eyes was about much more than the trick.
Do it as a favor to me, Gabe had said.
Theo watched as I clicked around to the profile’s settings. Make profile visible?
My mouse hovered. Theo grabbed my shoulder excitedly, shaking it. I clicked. He cheered.
For you, I told Gabe in my head. I’ll do it for you.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

“In The Year of Second Chances a young widow reenters the world after a substantial loss, taking us on a lively, witty ride along with a strong cast of supporting characters. Avery tackles the topic of grief in a way that manages to feel lighthearted and profound at the same time. I flew through this book and loved every page.”
-Meg Mitchell Moore, author of Vacationland and Two Truths and a Lie
Book Links:  Amazon | B&N | iTunes | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Lara Avery is the author of three young adult novels, one of which, The Memory Book, received the 2017 Minnesota Book Award. She studied film at Macalester College and got her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi. This is her first book for general audiences. She lives in Topeka, KS.
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