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Informationen zum Autor KJ Dell'Antonia is the former editor of The New York Times ' Motherlode and the co-host of the #AmWriting Podcast, as well as the author of How to Be a Happier Parent , In Her Boots , and the instant New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick, The Chicken Sisters . She lives with her family on a small farm in Lyme, New Hampshire, but retains an abiding love for her childhood in Texas and Kansas. Klappentext Includes a conversation with the author. Leseprobe Chapter One Monday, October 26 Other people, when forced to start over, do so in appropriate places. New York. Los Angeles. Bozeman. Only Flair would wind up in Kansas, dragging a hand-painted, life-sized figure of Jack Skellington into her bakery and wondering where to hide it until the horror show that was Halloween in Rattleboro finally lurched to an end this weekend. Flair hated seeing even the outside of her tidy space besmirched with the trappings of a ridiculous holiday that invited exactly the kind of chaos that she normally kept firmly at bay. But she'd had to accept it. From the skeleton on the now spiderweb-covered bench to the black-and-orange garlands and the wheelbarrow of painted pumpkins, her precarious new venture had become part of a Main Street so drenched in town-funded Halloween preparations that it was impossible to rest your eyes on a surface not wrapped in twinkle lights or faux-aged into flawless Gothic dereliction. But Jack eating a slice of bloodred cherry pie was taking it a step too far. Like nearly everyone, he was taller than Flair, making him difficult to maneuver, but Flair would not let that stop her from ridding her entryway of the blight. She wrestled him through the door and looked around the shop, wondering where she could stash him until the town's Halloween powers that be came to retrieve him in November. Or maybe he could meet an untimely and tragic end before then. Lucie looked up from one of the white tables where she sat with her ankles wrapped around the legs of a turquoise chair, which she had-under duress-helped Flair to paint before Buttersweet Bakery's opening in August. Ostensibly she was doing vocab, but more likely she was staring into the phone Flair had given her when they moved. Flair's plan had been for Lucie to connect with (and feel appropriately cool next to) her new eighth-grade classmates, but Lucie preferred to use it to complain to her father and her friends back "home" in St. Louis about the cruelty of her mother's decision to move them both to the boondocks. "Grand is having a show in St. Louis tomorrow," she said. "If we were there, we could go." "Well, we're not," Flair said automatically. "And Grand's shows aren't G-rated, so we wouldn't be going anyway." Would Jack fit behind the hutch that was very nearly the only thing left of what had until recently been Marie's Teas, or was she going to have to find a place for him in her kitchen? "We'll see her soon." "That's what you always say," said Lucie, who was clearly gearing up for another monologue on her favorite topic, how you have ruined my life. "But it's been since her birthday two years ago. If we were home, we would at least have dinner or something." Maybe. Or maybe Cynthia would be so overrun by fans of the bewilderingly successful vampire-and-witch romances she wrote that-darn-she wouldn't be able to fit them in. Flair was relieved when the bells on the door interrupted her daughter before the pointless debate could continue. She tried but failed to hide Jack behind her as she prepared a welcoming, but not overwhelming, smile for what would be her first customer of the day. At 3:30 in the afternoon, but Flair wasn't counting. Who was she kidding? Of course she was-and the count would still be zero, because unless Renee Oakes had abandoned her distaste for all...
