The Art of Letting Go by Anna Bloom
(Uni Files #1)
Publication date: September 25th 2013
Genres: New Adult, Romance
Synopsis:
One year. One woman. One Diary. One question: can you ever stop history from repeating itself and if you could what would you do to stop it?
When Lilah McCannon realises at the age of twenty-five that history is going to repeat itself and she is going to become her mother—bored, drunk and wearing a twinset—there is only one thing to do: take drastic action.
Turning her back on her old life, Lilah’s plan is to enrol at university, get a degree and prove she is a grown-up.
As plans go, it is a good one. There are rules to follow: no alcohol, no cigarettes, no boys and no going home. But when Lilah meets the lead singer of a local band and finds herself unexpectedly falling in love, she realises her rules are not going to be the only things hard to keep.
With the academic year slipping by too quickly, Lilah faces a barrage of new challenges: will she ever make it up the Library stairs without having a heart attack? Can she handle a day on campus without drinking vodka? Will she ever manage to read a history book without falling asleep? And most importantly, can she become the grown-up that she desperately wants to be.
With her head and her heart pulling her in different directions can Lilah learn the hardest lesson that her first year of university has to teach her: The Art of Letting Go?
When Lilah McCannon realises at the age of twenty-five that history is going to repeat itself and she is going to become her mother—bored, drunk and wearing a twinset—there is only one thing to do: take drastic action.
Turning her back on her old life, Lilah’s plan is to enrol at university, get a degree and prove she is a grown-up.
As plans go, it is a good one. There are rules to follow: no alcohol, no cigarettes, no boys and no going home. But when Lilah meets the lead singer of a local band and finds herself unexpectedly falling in love, she realises her rules are not going to be the only things hard to keep.
With the academic year slipping by too quickly, Lilah faces a barrage of new challenges: will she ever make it up the Library stairs without having a heart attack? Can she handle a day on campus without drinking vodka? Will she ever manage to read a history book without falling asleep? And most importantly, can she become the grown-up that she desperately wants to be.
With her head and her heart pulling her in different directions can Lilah learn the hardest lesson that her first year of university has to teach her: The Art of Letting Go?
Purchase:
GIVEAWAY:
One e-book copy each of
The Art of Letting Go and The Saving of Benjamin Chambers + a signed cover art postcard of both books.
Open internationally.
Perception
It’s funny, when
I wrote The Art of Letting Go, the first novel in The Uni Files it never
crossed my mind that it would make readers feel so many different things.
That’s a crazy thing for someone like me to think but I did nonetheless. By someone
like me, I mean a person of an imaginative persuasion who has been obsessed
with books since they were eight years old.
I mean of course
I always knew that when I read a book the way it made me feel, happy, scared or
sad would not be the same as another person but it never ever occurred to me
when I typed The End on the last page of my manuscript that people would find
something different to me on the pages I was binding together with my
tale. I mean, I’m the author right? If I
say it should read one way then surely it should??
Not so much, and
a big fat raspberry to me for forgetting the power that the written word has.
And a second big raspberry to me for forgetting that perception is the key to
everything.
Some readers
have found it laugh out loud funny and have related to the fun aspects of the
book. For others it has brought back happy but blurry memories of a misspent youth.
Others have found it tragically sad and cried buckets at the end.
I’m going to
share a little personal experience with you before I tell you how it made me
feel, and that is what my most feared reader felt when she read it. My mum.
Now this is
quite a sensitive subject because I was quite scared about my mum reading The
Art of Letting Go, and I think she was just as worried herself. I mean, what if
my mum hated it? Or what if she thought her daughter’s debut literary release
was a complete pile of rubbish? That would be a bit awkward around the family
dinner table next time I saw her.
Anyway, Mum
refused to read it in draft form, not even the final version, she was
determined to wait for it to come out so she could buy it. And she did. Then I
heard nothing. Nooooothiiiing for days.
Well that’s
great!
Finally my dad
rang (my parents live abroad) and I answered Skype with fearful trepidation.
“Your Mum has been face down crying on the bed for twenty minutes,” he told me.
PANIC it was that bad I made her cry! Eventually mum shuffled into view on the
computer, still sniffling. “That was so sad, but beautiful,” she said and then
started to cry all over again. That was possibly one of the shortest
conversations I have ever had with my mum.
My mum was
definitely in the ‘Sad’ camp, and I’ll tell you a little secret, it actually
made me really proud that I had managed to reduce my own mother to tears with
the tale that I had to tell – and yes I know that’s a bit wrong.
So what did I
feel when I wrote it? Well I felt it all. I laughed, I reminisced and I cried.
I had my heart in my chest when I wrote that scene at the end, but more than
all of that I felt this incredibly uplifting feeling in my soul that you can
learn The Art of Letting Go and survive it.
It fills me with
delight that every person who picks up my book has the ability to read it a
different way. I wonder what you will feel when you read it?
A.B.
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