Guest Author: Martha Reynolds

Tell readers about your main character

In Best Seller, Robin Fortune is a twenty-year-old young woman. The novel is set in 1976-1977, so she is quite different from a woman of the same age today (and yet, with the same anxieties and uncertainties). I didn’t write a lot about her physical characteristics, and that was deliberate – I prefer that the reader create her own image of Robin as she reads. 

Robin drives the story. The novel is told from her point of view, in present tense, so the reader should feel very connected to Robin as she goes through her struggles. She’s a woman on the cusp, as it were, in that tenuous place between teenager and adult, free but not free, desperate to know where her life is headed.

She’s flawed, certainly. We see that from the very beginning of the novel, where Robin’s been expelled from college for dealing pot. And she’s unable to admit her own failings, at least in the beginning. This unwillingness to see her own fault keeps Robin tethered to a life she doesn’t want.

She comes across as self-confident, even arrogant and superficial at times, and definitely self-centered, but there’s so much to her. She worries what others will think of her, she doubts her own abilities (especially with her writing), and she builds walls around her to keep from being hurt.

But with every flawed character, there is a chance at redemption. I believe Robin finds hers, and (thankfully) it’s not too late for her to make amends.

About the author 

After ending an accomplished career as a fraud investigator, I began writing full time in 2011.

I am the author of five novels, including the award-winning CHOCOLATE FOR BREAKFAST (book one in The Chocolate Series) and the Amazon bestseller BITS OF BROKEN GLASS.

My fifth novel, BEST SELLER, is available.

My very short poem was featured in Tell Me More's Twitter Poetry Challenge (April 2014) and I have contributed essays to Magnificat magazine.

Best Seller 
by Martha Reynolds

Paperback: 378 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (June 28, 2014)
Paperback Link

Kindle Edition
File Size: 2137 KB
Print Length: 277 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1499787936
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Amazon Kindle Link


Synopsis:

Set in New England at the time of the American Bicentennial, Best Seller is the poignant story of a displaced young woman struggling to figure out who she is within the context of her hometown and the carefully masked dysfunction of her family. "Everything can be fixed by writing a check." Words to live by for Robin Fortune's wealthy father, until he can't buy her way back into college after she's expelled for dealing pot. Now he chooses not to speak to her anymore, but that's just one of the out-of-whack situations Robin's facing. At nineteen, she feels rudderless, working in a diner by day and sleeping with a buddy from high school by night - all so strange for her because she was always the one with the plan. While her college friends plotted how to ensnare husbands, she plotted a novel, which she scratched out into a series of spiral-bound notebooks she hides in the closet. But now, there's nothing. No vision, no future, no point. In fact, the only thing she feels she has to look forward to is that her favorite author, Maryana Capture, is paying a visit to the local Thousand Words bookstore. Robin surmises that if she can convince Maryana to help her get her novel published, she'll finally get herself back on track. Except that life never takes a straight path in this intensely satisfying coming-of-age novel