Meet Me / Events
I'm a California girl (transplanted from Pennsylvania via North Carolina). Well, girl might be stretching it, I'm a mom (Thing One is 21 and Thing Two is 20), a runner (slogger is more like it, I jog very slowly),a pickleballer, a cook and a life long lover of reading. I love the beach, Lemonheads, and baseball. I've sampled several professions including psychologist, college professor, rat lab tech and waitress (not in that order). And these days, I am a novelist, and blogger.
My novel My Paperback Cape is a sort of support letter to my teenage self. Jacqueline is not me and the things that happen to her did not happen to me but the feelings she had, the sense of loneliness, helplessness, fear, those all did happen to me and I would have welcomed a story about someone who found the heroic side of herself. And who did it without the help of any adults.
My novel The Unmooring of Mrs. Mango is a darkly comedic family drama reminiscent of A Man Called Ove and This Is Where I Leave You. Straight-laced, sixty-something Mrs. Mango has been married to her second choice for forty-two years, mindlessly trudging through her tedious life—except when she's dreaming of the fancy wedding she'll throw for still-single daughter Christine, and except on Sunday mornings when she allows herself a half-hour locked in the bathroom to write tragic letters to her first love, Raul. When Christine announces at Thanksgiving dinner that her friend Sarah is really her girlfriend, disapproving Mrs. Mango is shaken to her core. Stumbling through subsequent events with her husband, four grown children, dogs, cats, nosy neighbors, religious authorities, octogenarians, babies, and random strangers, every experience seems out of kilter, colored by her daughter's perceived betrayal. As family strife builds, Mrs. Mango is forced to confront her rigid world view and the secret she herself has hidden for almost fifty years, the cause of a painful rift with her own mother. In the process, she discovers that what she thought she knew about love (and sex, definitely sex), was all wrong.
I am currently editing the first book in a cozy mystery series called The Tangerine Dress: An Order Ouf of Chaos Mystery. In The Tangerine Dress, Izzy Bishop pretends a lot. Pretends to know how to organize a closet in her new job with her sister Lauren’s Order Out of Chaos organizing business. Pretends she didn’t have a recent onset of unwelcome extrasensory skills courtesy of a car accident and coma. Pretends she isn’t in financial peril with a son in college, another son about to start college, an estranged husband living in France, and a bundle of unpaid hospital bills. When her new extrasensory skills tell her a client is in danger and no one, not even the client, believes her, it is up to Izzy to find the murderer while she stumbles her way through organizing jobs, manages her mother’s recent onset of mini-strokes, and complicates her life by falling for a mesmerizing ER doc. If you mixed Janet Evanovich's main character Stephanie Plum with Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri you would have Izzy Bishop.
You can also find my work on:
my blog (https://lynnrankinesquer.wordpress.com)
and on my author FB page (https://www.facebook.com/lynnrankinesquer)
