A Second Award!

Falling Through the Night a finalist for IPNE book award

Hello Substack peeps!

Last night, I found out that my novel, Falling Through the Night, is a finalist for an IPNE book award.

Woohoo!!!

I’m so proud of this book.

I believe so strongly in its message: that we can heal, that we can create our own families, that when we lean on our creativity and our curiosity and our perseverance, magic happens.

Audrey, the main character in the novel, suffers with crippling anxiety. She was adopted by a woman who feels called to adopt special needs kids, and Audrey’s identity as disabled is strong. Her central struggle is to make a healthy family in spite of her traumatic background. In the course of her quest, she discovers a family secret that helps her understand her place in the world very differently: as a mother, a daughter, a queer person, and a Jew.

I love Audrey as a character. She’s introverted, insecure, funny, and screwed up. She’s profoundly visual and a master of collage. She deeply wants children. She deeply wants family. And she wants these things in a fundamentally queer way.

I love Martha, Audrey’s adoptive mom. She does so many things that I don’t like: she smokes. She judges. She cuts people off. But she’s also funny, open-hearted, devoted, and capable of change. She adores her daughter with a ferocity I would have loved in a parent.

I love Jessica, Audrey’s best friend. She’s a recovering addict. A badass. Fragile and tough at the same time. In earlier drafts, she was a Trump supporter. She comes from a farm family, and she feels betrayed by the system. But she’s plucky and hilarious and tells it like it is. She’s also tender and cares for Audrey like nobody ever has before.

If you think you’d like this book, you have a few options. You could:

A) Recommend it to your local library. If you are a member, you can go online and request the title. Typically, you’ll be the first in line to read it. I love this option because readers get to read for free and the book becomes available to many more people than it would in a private sale.

B) Purchase the book yourself. It’s available at Bookshop.org and other online platforms, but you can also order it through your local bookstore. I personally feel invested in supporting independent local stores.

C) Ask a friend to buy it for you for your birthday. Or Mother’s Day (particularly great given the novel’s theme). Or Valentine’s Day (one reviewer wrote, “Above all, this is a love story.”)

D) Buy a special signed author copy, if you live in the US or Canada. I will need to charge you the regular price plus shipping, and my supply is running low, but DM me if this is appealing.

E) Offer me a book exchange. It can be a book you wrote or that someone else wrote that you love. Swapping books in the mail is super duper fun, if you’ve never tried it. Again, my supply is running low, but I’m open to this.

Thanks, subscribers, for being supportive of my work. In spite of the changing political climate, we will continue our literary conversation, and I look forward to reading you and writing for you!

Gail