An enlightened, feel-good novel about a middle-aged woman who goes on a
quest to revisit her past in order map out her future.
Just when it appears as though 42-year-old Carla Carter--a divorced dating expert and entrepreneur--is about to start a glorious new chapter in her life, a visit to a psychic upends her hoped for ‘happy ending’ in Phaedra Patrick’s enlightened, feel-good new novel, The Year of What If.
Carla is emerging from a sordid past. A supposed curse was said to be placed upon her family many years before that has familial folks believing that all females in the bloodline will never find true and lasting love. Carla has always attributed the hex to her first, regrettable (and forgettable) first marriage.
After she establishes Logical Love, a dating app, and the algorithm pairs her up with Tom, a game inventor who later becomes her fiancĂ©, it would appear as though Carla is on the road to a fresh, new start…and she’ll finally be the one to break the dreaded spell.
Her superstitious family, however, intervenes and forces Carla to visit a psychic who urges that Tom isn’t the man she should marry. Rather, she believes a man Carla met twenty years before, during Carla’s ‘gap-year’ after college graduation, is really the love of her life.
Upon the urging of the psychic and her family, Carla cannot rest. She sets off on a quest--not telling Tom about the nature of her travels--through Europe in search of looking up men who might’ve crossed her path during that oh-so-innocent time in her life.
With signature insight and tender humor, Patrick (The
Little Italian Hotel, The
Messy Lives of Book People) once again takes readers on an exciting, adventurous
literary journey where one woman’s search for a former flame actually leads her
down a path to self-discovery.