More About My Next Book...

I'm getting ready to send my next book to my agent;  I would like to send it to her sometime next week.  She'll read it -- hopefully quickly -- she is usually very good about reading new manuscripts in about a week's time -- and then advise me about what she thinks we should do next. I'm looking forward to this part.  Meanwhile, I'm on my second rereading since my work on the version I finished based off of my editor's suggestions. It's amazing that no matter how careful I think I'm being, no matter how many times I go through it, I still find things to change, whether we're talking about typos I missed or phrases that I could have written more smoothly or a new line of dialogue one of my characters just has to say.

Many of you have asked me for a sneak peek into this next book, and while I'm hesitant to say too much until my agent reads it and we decide how to move forward, I will give you a glimpse here. It's called The Opposite of Normal (right now, because titles almost always get changed somewhere along the publishing process) and it's told from three different points of view -- twelve year old Hannah, who is questioning her identity as an American Jew, since she was adopted from a Chinese orphanage and doesn't fit in with the mostly white, Christian peers in her town, her brother Aaron, who, at seventeen, is dating a Christian girl who wants nothing more than to marry young and have as many children as possible, while Aaron prepares to leave town for an Ivy League college, and their father, Rabbi Mark Friedlander, whose wife died two years ago from cancer, leaving him alone (and feeling quite incapable) of raising his two teenage children as a single parent while he fights to keep his job at a failing synagogue.

I'm really excited about this book -- hence the sneak peek for all of you -- and I can't wait to get it out there to hear what you, my supportive and enthusiastic readers -- have to say about it.