IN TWENTY YEARS by Allison Winn Scotch & GIVEAWAY

I was so thrilled to meet bestselling author, Allison Winn Scotch at BEA in Chicago this past May. It’s an exciting turning point for Allison. She’s changed publishers, after six New York Times bestselling novels, including THE THEORY of OPPOSITES and TIME of MY LIFE, which has been optioned to be made into a film, and her seventh novel has been published. The subject of IN TWENTY YEARS is something she’s wanted to write about for awhile, and says this was finally the right time to tell this story to her readers.

In, IN TWENTY YEARS (Lake Union Publishing), six Penn students shared a house twenty-years ago, believing they’d be best friends forever. Their ringleader, Bea passes away and they go their own separate ways loaded down with personal grudges, anger and indignities, ultimately becoming estranged. Nearly two-decades later, each receives a letter from Bea’s legal counsel calling them to the house they used to share.

Lindy is a music superstar, pushing middle-age with too many resentments to count and ready to lash out at anyone who looks at her funny. Catherine is a Martha Stewart wanna-be on the edge of a meltdown, married to her college sweetheart, Owen, who resents being a stay-at-home dad. Colin is a plastic surgeon to the stars who has his own baggage about his former relationship with Bea. Annie worked hard to pull herself up from lower class to an empty marriage on Park Avenue, where all she does is post how “happy” she is on social media, wishing it had been different with Colin.

It’s a universal truth we all share. We tend to romanticize the past and when we meet up with people from our past, we tend to puff up our present lives. I’m not making any judgments, just stop for a moment and think about it. After some time together, many of us wake up to the realities of  our lives and see how we didn’t achieve many of our dreams, but we can still be grateful for each other. Although Bea wasn’t physically at the reunion, her spirit was and she brought the group back together.

I expect readers will become invested in these emotionally compelling characters Allison has created in this multi-layered narrative, as I did. I found myself wanting to know what happened next, and at times, angry at what I felt was wasted energy on unimportant grudges. But that’s the way we humans are; we can get over a huge problem quickly, but we’ll let something relatively small fester until it creates an impenetrable wedge.

For all things ALLISON, check out her Facebook, website at  www.allisonwinn.com  or on twitter @aswinn

Thanks to TLC Book Tours http://www.tlcbooktours.com and Lake Union Publishing, we have one copy of IN TWENTY YEARS to give away. Have you ever attended your high-school or college reunion? Maybe some other kind of reunion. Tell us what your experience was. We’ll pick a winner Monday.