"After the Leaves Fall" by Nicole Baart

Wow! I just finished this debut book by Nicole Baart and I was blown away. She is such a gifted writer and I am so looking forward to reading everything she writes. If you need a good read, pick up her book. You will not be disappointed and it is worth every minute of sleep you lose while reading it. Here is an excerpt from the end of Part One of the book to tantalize you:

My life became a cautious mosaic, slowly taking the form of a shabby mixed media - shattered glass among cool, round stones and tentative, interrupted strokes of inoffensive color. I couldn't see myself as much as I could feel myself in the angles and corners and lines. I was well hidden. Unrecognizable.

I was unfamiliar even to those who knew me best. It wasn't that I was afraid of getting hurt, of losing more than I had already lost. I wasn't trying to hold them at arm's length or be evasive. The truth was, I didn't know who I was, and I was afraid of being defined by who I wasn't. By what I didn't have. By all the tears that I had cried and the catalog of dates that told me who I could never be. By remembering with predictable, cyclic accuracy all I had lost.

I decided I could do better than that. I could handcraft the life, the person I wanted for myself. I could be my own artist, and I surrendered myself to the creation of a Julia who was too smart to attach, too independent to want to, and so secure as to be untouchable. I wasn't interested in allowing myself to wait a single second longer for something I was convinced I could walk up and take.