Happily Ever After

February 15, 2014
What if a novelist's characters object to their storylines? Worse, what if they hijack the plot? While other mothers in her posh neighborhood fill their days with Bikram yoga classes, Sadie Fuller secretly writes steamy romance novels. Divorced yet still friends with her gay ex-husband, she's raising their 11-year-old daughter, Allison, with the help of Greta, their German housekeeper. As far as her own love life, well, at 46, Sadie knows she's past her prime, so she places an ad on Craigslist for a Friday-morning, no-strings-attached lover, and Jason responds. He's a kind attorney, eager for a sexual relationship since his wife stole his confidence by cheating on him with the tile contractor. It's a stable life, if a little lacking in excitement. Yet one morning, Sadie discovers an extra 1,500 words have mysteriously appeared in the novel she's writing. She's sure she didn't write those words. She's sure there was no witch named Clarissa in the story last night. And she's sure she doesn't know the impossibly gorgeous man who seems to be suffering from amnesia in the baby-products aisle at Target. The gorgeous man is, indeed, Aidan Hathaway, the hero of Sadie's novel, and Sadie's life turns upside down as she tries to explain him to nosy neighbors and jealous Jason, not to mention bewildered Greta. Allison is smitten and couldn't care less where Aidan came from. As a romance novel hero, Aidan relies on steamy glances and suggestive comments, neither of which helps Sadie crack the mystery of why he's here, much less how to send him back into the safe pages of her book. Debut novelist Maxwell and Sadie herself deftly bend the rules of genre fiction, letting the boundaries between reality and fiction shimmy and shimmer. Clever, engaging and sparkling with wit.

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February 1, 2014
New to the romance genre, Maxwell cleverly takes on its classic plotlines in this novel about an erotic-romance author whose fictional characters come to life. Sadie Fuller is a slightly frumpy divorced mom with an 11-year-old daughter, gay ex-husband, and a no-strings-attached weekly date with fun-but-flabby Jason. With K. T. Briggs as her pen name, she plumbs women's wildest fantasies in her racy novels. Things get interesting when a strange passage appears in her latest manuscript, followed by the materialization of the hero, Aidan, at the local Target. Though Sadie is not sure how her fiction has become her reality, she sets out to help Aidan find his love interest, Lily, and break the spell cast by Clarissa, a witch Sadie created during her brief foray into paranormal romance. This light and funny contemporary tale is made even more interesting by how it subverts elements from popular erotic, paranormal-themed romance novels. Even the expected happy ending has a clever twist.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)