Finding Lisa by Sigrid Macdonald - Book Tour - Guest Post - Giveaway - Enter Daily!

Hi, lovelies!  It gives me great pleasure today to host Sigrid Macdonald and her new book, “Finding Lisa”!  For other stops on her Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour, please click on the banner above or any of the images in this post.

Be sure to make it to the end of this post to enter to win a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble Gift Card!!  Also, come back daily to interact with Sigrid and to increase your chances of winning!

Thanks for stopping by!  Wishing you lots of luck in this fabulous giveaway!

Finding Lisa

by Sigrid Macdonald

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GENRE: Mystery/Women's Fiction

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BLURB:

Finding Lisa is a character driven story about a quirky Canadian woman named Tara who is about to turn 40. She dreads the thought. Everything is going wrong in her life from her stale marriage to her boring job to her hopeless crush on a 24-year-old guy. The only thing right in Tara's life is her best friend Lisa who has just confided that she is pregnant and the baby does not belong to her partner Ryan, who has a history of domestic violence. Then Lisa disappears and the search is on to find her.

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EXCERPT ONE:

All the carts were taken at the supermarket on Tuesday. I found one off to the side of the vegetable aisle. It had a defective wheel, which resulted in me almost overturning a display of cantaloupes. The cart was also enormous. No doubt this was a deliberate ploy on the part of the supermarket to encourage excess shopping. 

"I feel as though I'm driving a school bus," I announced to the frail, pale orange-haired woman to my left, who was squeezing the small, unappetizing looking cantaloupes. 

She smiled faintly and nodded. I wondered how she had the strength to push the heavy cart through the long aisles of the grocery store at her age.

"Mum, I'll go with you to one of those Women against Rape meetings if you want?"  Devon said to my astonishment, his voice rising at the end of his sentence. "There’s only one condition. You have to watch 8 Mile with me."

"8 Mile? Isn’t that the movie based on the book by Stephen King?"

"Nah, you’re thinking about The Green Mile," Devon replied. "8 Mile is the story of a rapper in Detroit. It's based on the life of Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers. Eminem even stars in it," he said with increasing enthusiasm.

"I think it’ll give you a better idea of where he's coming from. You know, you're always talking about these girls who've been, like, abused and what horrible lives they've had. You even feel bad about boys who were taken advantage of by priests or their hockey coaches. So why don't you have any sympathy for Marshall? His mother was abusive. She was mean to him, and she did drugs! Also, she, like, gave him something called Munchkins syndrome," Devon added uncertainly.

"Munchausen syndrome?” I asked, trying to picture the tough guy with the tattoos and bad attitude as a small child with a manipulative and controlling mother.

"Yeah, that sounds right. She made him feel sick when he was totally healthy. And, Mum, I know you would respect the way Em felt about his little brother, Nathan. He, like, didn't wanna leave him alone in the house with his mother when he finally split from Detroit. He's also really keen about his daughter, Hailie Jade. He talks about her all the time in his songs and on TV."

I pushed the buttons on the radio. The Steve Miller band was singing, "Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future." I had a sense of motion. The car was moving forward, and with every traffic light I passed, I was moving farther away from Lisa and our routine evenings at the ByTowne Theatre. The rest of us were going ahead, and Lisa had been left behind. I wanted to go back, not just to last Thursday night, but to my university days, so I could live my life all over again.

I wanted to be sixteen or twenty-six again, making decisions based on what I knew now. So many lost opportunities. How had I managed to completely screw up my life? I'd done everything wrong except that I hadn't become a street prostitute or a serial murderer. Too late for the former—who would want me? But there was still time for the latter.

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GUEST POST:

Describe Your Book Cover and How It Came About:

Thanks so much for having me on your blog. Much appreciated.

My book cover depicts a young woman standing at a crossroads. She is free, and she has choices. She can go to the right, go to the left, go straight ahead, or stand there ruminating. But she's frozen. She doesn't know what to do. Any one choice eliminates the other. If she goes right, she could get lost. The answer could be somewhere else that she can't even see, like behind her, underneath her, or behind an elusive tree. What should she do?

My protagonist, Tara, has just lost her best friend, Lisa. Lisa, who is newly pregnant and recovering from a slip—Lisa had several years of sobriety, but then she lost it—has vanished without a trace, and Tara is delirious. She needs to find Lisa because everything is going wrong in Tara's life. Tara's marriage is stale, and she has a hopeless crush on a man 15 years younger than her. She is tired of her job at the rehabilitation hospital and is no longer empathetic; in fact, she often finds herself blaming patients for their slow recovery. Her teenage son is distant and moody. And if that's not bad enough, Tara is about to turn 40; the thought terrifies her.

Her rock, her confidante, her "sister" is Lisa. She can tell Lisa anything. They laugh, they cry, they fight, they hug each other and then make fun of each other's parents and tastes in men. Tara also pokes fun at Lisa's newfound obsession with Narcotics Anonymous, but she prefers Lisa to be obsessed with AA and NA rather than snorting white powder. Tara also teases her friend about her ketogenic diet, all in good fun.  But now Lisa has disappeared, and Tara is paralyzed. She has no idea what to do, but eventually, she decides to join the search party in conjunction with the local police.

The search party for Lisa includes Tara's inadvertently comical women's collective; Lisa's partner, Ryan, who has a history of battery; Lisa's crush, 24-year-old assistant grocery manager Alain; Lisa's Catholic parents and their congregation, who frequently have a good-natured clash with the feminists; and the Ottawa Carleton police. There are many times when Tara has to make a decision that may or not be correct because she's in uncharted territory. There is no guidebook for what you're supposed to do when your best friend might be dead. So Tara struggles, and the reader must ultimately decide if Tara's decisions are the right ones, if they are ethical, if they are effective, if they are the choices you would make.

One of my favorite characters on the Netflix show Dear White People plays a journalist. In one episode, he wears a t-shirt that says, "Bad Choices Make Good Stories." So true! It is up to the reader to decide if Tara has made the right choices.

PS Tara, as you can see on the book cover, is a fabulous brunette!

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AUTHOR BIO:

Originally from New Jersey, Sigrid Macdonald lived for almost thirty years in Ottawa, Ontario, and currently resides in Weston, Florida. She has been a freelance writer for years. Her works have appeared in The Globe and Mail newspaper; the Women's Freedom Network Newsletter; the American magazine Justice Denied; The Toastmaster; and the Anxiety Disorders Association of Ontario Newsletter. Her first book, Getting Hip: Recovery from a Total Hip Replacement, was published in 2004. Her second book, Be Your Own Editor, followed in 2010. Although Finding Lisa is written in first person, Macdonald only resembles her character in the sense that she once had a neurotic fixation on her hair, and she has always been called by the wrong name; instead of being called Sigrid, people have called her Susan, Sharon, Astrid, Ingrid and, her personal favorite, Siri.

Macdonald is a social activist who has spent decades working on the seemingly disparate issues of women's rights and wrongful convictions; she has worked at the Women's Center at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, and was a member of AIDWYC, The Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted. She owns an editing company called Book Magic. Sigrid is a public speaker and a member of Mothers against Drunk Driving, Ottawa Independent Writers, the American Association of University Women, and the Editors' Association of Canada. Visit her website at http://bookmagic.ca/ or friend her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sigridmac.

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CONNECT WITH SIGRID:

Website:

http://www.bookmagic.ca

Blog #1:

http://bookmagicwritingtips.blogspot.com

Blog #2:

http://sigridmacdonald.blogspot.com

Email:

sigridmac13@hotmail.com

Facebook Personal Page:

https://www.facebook.com/Sigrid.author

Facebook Fan Page:

https://www.facebook.com/bookmagic.ca

Twitter #1:

https://twitter.com/sigridmac1

Twitter #2:

https://twitter.com/BookMagic4

Goodreads Author Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/255173.Sigrid_Macdonald

Goodreads Book Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47870407-finding-lisa

Amazon Author Page:

https://amzn.to/2G86HM6

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BOOK BUY LINKS:

Amazon Kindle eBook:

https://amzn.to/2NHP6P2

Amazon Paperback:

https://amzn.to/2NHK19H

Barnes and Noble Paperback:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/finding-lisa-sigrid-macdonald/1132691210

The Book Depository Paperback:

https://www.bookdepository.com/Finding-Lisa-Sigrid-MacDonald/9781590952511

BAM! Books-A-Million Paperback:

https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Finding-Lisa/Sigrid-MacDonald/9781590952511

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GIVEAWAY INFO:

Sigrid will be awarding a $20 Amazon or B/N GC to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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This contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish Promotions.  Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.