Guest Post: Shelly Bell

This week I reviewed A Year to Remember by Shelly Bell (you can check out my review here if you missed it). Shelly was kind enough to stop by Books Etc. with a guest post as part of the CLP Blog Tour. This is the question I had for her:

Your novel has some autobiographical parts to it. Was that easy or hard for you to write? Did you want to include as many references to your own life as possible or did you decide to just use the basics and let the character's own story come through?

Thank you to Shelly for writing this post for my blog! I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

I was on my way to see a documentary about primates at the Henry Ford Museum when the story for A Year to Remember downloaded in my head. That’s literally what it was like. By the time we got to the theater, I told my family to go on ahead while I jotted down an outline in the lobby. An hour later, I had a skeleton synopsis, including character names, events, and the ending.  It wasn’t something I had considered writing.  But once I started, I couldn’t stop and I temporarily shelved the paranormal romance I had been working on.
They say an author’s first book is the most autobiographical. Mine is no exception. The process of writing it went rather quickly; I think it took less than three months to write because the voice of Sara was so loud and insistent. There are pieces of me in the main character, Sara, as well as her best friend, Missy. Sara and I are both compulsive overeaters, and when I was twenty-nine, I was “in the food.” Writing the book helped me process some of the events that transpired in my twenties and see it from a different perspective. For example, my younger brother did marry before me. I was in my late twenties and when I gave my toast, I had a slip of the tongue and admitted I was jealous! At the core of my book is not just my story, but the story of women I know. My friend Miriam and I went on several disastrous blind dates. Most were too horrific to even make the book.  Sara’s dates are a combination of dates that Miriam and I suffered through in our late twenties.  Like Sara, I spent a year throwing everything I had into finding a husband. I spent a thousand dollars on a dating service, tried speed dating, and went on several dates with men I met through JDate. Most of time, there wasn’t a second date. Adam and Caleb are completely made-up characters. But the issues that Sara faces in regards to religion and marriage were issues that Miriam and I both faced. Without giving the book away, the real outcome of those issues differed.
After I gave up my search, I met my husband through a different Jewish online dating site.  He emailed me on a Friday, we met on Sunday, got engaged four months later, and married six months after that. I knew the moment I read his name on the email that I’d marry him.
The hard part of writing a book is having people read it and assuming everything is autobiographical. It’s fiction!  I had to convince my mom that I never had a crush on any of my brother’s friends. And no matter how many times I tell her Sara is not me, she maintains she knows too much about my sex life.  I would never put such personal information down on paper for the world to read. What happens in my bedroom stays in my bedroom.
Yes, Sara and I are a lot alike. I used the book to try and educate people on compulsive overeating in an entertaining way. I hope that at the minimum, the reader gets a couple of chuckles from it!

CLP Blog Tour: A Year to Remember

Welcome to a stop on the A Year to Remember tour hosted by CLP Blog Tours. I started out loving Shelly Bell's novel but then...well...we'll get to that.

First, here's the synopsis:

When her younger brother marries on her twenty-ninth birthday, food addict Sara Friedman drunkenly vows to three hundred wedding guests to find and marry her soul mate within the year.
After her humiliating toast becomes a YouTube sensation, she permits a national morning show to chronicle her search. With the help of best friend, Missy, she plunges head first into the shallow end of the dating pool.
Her journey leads her to question the true meaning of soul mates, as she decides between fulfilling her vow to marry before her thirtieth birthday and following her heart’s desire. But before she can make the biggest decision of her life, Sara must begin to take her first steps toward recovery from her addiction to food.

Have you ever started reading a book, fell in love with it, and then ended up being just a little bit disenchanted by the end? This is what happened to me with this novel. When I started A Year to Remember, I was hooked. I found the concept interesting - trying to marry within the year - and even though the year deadline seems like something that's been written to death, it was fresh to me. What was the problem then? Well...a couple of bizarre errors that should have been caught in the editing stages didn't help matters. I could overlook Zac Efron's name being spelled incorrectly (she added an h) but to switch POV? That's a little crazy. I was reading along and enjoying the first person point of view when all of a sudden I got very confused because I was now reading from the third person POV, then, BAM, back to first person. Unfortunate.

The other thing that didn't thrill me was that Sara's story started getting...well...sort of preachy. I don't think that's quite the word I want but I can't think of how else to describe it. She realizes what she needs to do to fix her issues, and I love that, but suddenly it's all about the "higher power" and it was hard for me to stay interested. Don't get me wrong, I like stories that focus on more than just the romance and I like when characters go on personal journeys, but something just wasn't sitting well with me. I don't think the vast majority of people would feel the same as me so I urge you to check out the other reviews during this tour to get a better idea if you'd like this one. Deal? Deal.

Enough negatives. Like I said, I really liked the idea for this novel. Lots of great stories seem to start at a wedding. Add in a drunken toast and you've got a winner. I'm glad that Sara's YouTube video didn't harm her but instead helped her.

I had a feeling I knew who Sara would end up with and even though I was right, I really enjoyed the romantic twists and turns. It was a bit bothersome when she couldn't see that some of the guys were so incredibly wrong for her because she seemed perfectly content to settle. Happily, she found her way and had a happily ever after ending.

So, overall, even though I started out wanting to give A Year to Remember by Shelly Bell five stars, I ended up only awarding it three. I think I'd still recommend it because, like I said, other people may not have the same issues I did. It's worth a look because Sara's story is uplifting and I think a lot of people could identify with her. The end result of the romance storyline was really sweet as well.

Happy reading :)