BOOK CLUB FRIDAY -- GUEST AUTHOR JENNY GARDINER

Our Book Club Friday guest today is author Jenny Gardiner. Jenny doesn’t write mysteries, but she does write very funny books, including the award-winning SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER. The book she’s going to tell you about today is quite timely, given the gluttony of last week. I also invited Jenny to be a guest at Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers because we have something in common: At Casa Pollack, we have Ralph, the Shakespeare quoting parrot, while Jenny lives with Graycie, the killer parrot. Jenny has chronicled her life with Graycie in the recently released WINGING IT: A MEMOIR OF CARING FOR A VENGEFUL PARROT WHO'S DETERMINED TO KILL ME and is offering a copy to one of our readers who posts a comment to the blog this week. Read more about Jenny and excerpts from her books at her website. -- AP 

Thank you for allowing me to visit today, Anastasia. I really appreciate it! I am so excited to talk about my novel, SLIM TO NONE, which I released digitally and is now also available on Amazon through print on demand.

SLIM TO NONE is a story near and dear to my heart. Like probably every female out there with a heartbeat and a stomach pooch, I have been on the dieting treadmill since I was oh, born. Well, wait, I guess after I started walking. It was then that I knew I needed to stop cramming down the Froot Loops my mother kept insisting was the only thing I would eat, and instead turn to steel-cut oats direct from Ireland for the best proper nutrition.

Alas, Froot Loops won the day, over and over again. In my omnipresent dietary smack-down between Brussels sprouts and Fluffernutter sandwiches, the latter prevails every time. And with that has been the roller coaster of dieting and hating to diet and then never having pants that fit and a closet full of awesome clothes collecting dust that I really ought to just purge and give to someone thinner and more deserving, but instead I hold out mournful hope that I again will jam my fat ass into a size 6 pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans (yes, friends, it has been that long).

With that albatross secured snugly around my neck, I decided to tackle the ups and downs of this way of life in a novel—and decided upon a foodie for whom food had to become the enemy. I loved the idea of taking someone who has to eat for a living, then not be able to eat, in order to continue to be able to eat for a living. Such a quandary! And then of course I wanted to pile her up with all sorts of issues that she has to overcome.

Here's a blurb about the book:

In SLIM TO NONE, Abbie Jennings is Manhattan's top food critic until her expanding waistline makes staying incognito at restaurants impossible. Her cover blown on Page Six of the New York Post, her editor has no choice but to bench her—and suggest she use the time off to bench-press her way back to anonymity. Abbie’s life has been built around her career, and therefore around celebrating food. Forced to drop the pounds if she wants her primo gig back, Abbie must peel back the layers of her past and confront the fears that have led to her current life.

I also released another book digitally just a few weeks ago: OVER THE FALLS. Here’s the blurb about it:

Mary Kate Dupree has been spinning her wheels for too long. Trapped in an abusive marriage to an overbearing good ol’ boy, she finally decides break the cycle when she heads out to pick up her husband's dry cleaning and instead picks up a handsome hitchhiker. They impulsively set off on a road trip of self-discovery, peeling away layers of their dark pasts en route to Niagara Falls, but once there will they take the leap?

 Both SLIM TO NONE and OVER THE FALLS sound like fun books, Jenny! And I know from having read WINGING IT that it’s a hoot! Readers, if you’d like a chance to win a copy of WINGING IT, don’t forget to post a comment. Check back Sunday to see if you’re the lucky winner. -- AP