Not Everyone's Past Is Picture-Perfect

A Look At All of You's Marley Jade

I’ve come to learn one thing over the years of being an adult: Life is so hard. Truly.

When we’re young, we picture everything working out exactly as we want. We set out our life plan, picture our rosey vision for the future, and feel like the pieces will all fall into place.

Sometimes, though, that’s not what happens.

Whether it’s hauntings from our past or unexpected hurdles that surface, our lives are never, ever a perfect path to happiness. Suffering, hard choices, sadness, and pain are all a part of the human experience.

When I sat down to write All of You, I’d just finished writing the first book in my beachy series, Lines in the Sand. I love writing romantic comedies because it’s fun to explore the humor in life and expand upon it. However, as a writer, I also pride myself on not being one-dimensional. I want to capture real life, which means that for every romantic comedy, somewhere deep within is also a romantic drama.

Marley Jade from All of You is a very different character than so many of my female protagonists. She’s got a heavy past, probably the heaviest I’ve written. Her life is scarred by relics of a past she can’t quite get over. Like so many of my characters, her twenties aren’t exactly what she had pictured for herself. However, unlike my other characters, Marley Jade feels trapped by loyalty, responsibility, and the ensnaring power of her past.

Marley Jade was the first piece of the puzzle in writing All of You. As I started writing for Hot Tree Publishing Rescue Me collection, I knew for a fact that I didn’t want to just write about a physical rescue. I wanted to tackle something a little bit bigger and somewhat more taboo in our world-- I wanted to tackle the realism of a mental and emotional rescue. I wanted to highlight that in real life, the emotional and mental rescues are sometimes even harder to endure and to pull off.

More than that, I didn’t want Marley Jade to be the victim or the rescued. Sure, she has her issues. However, I saw in her a resilience and a strength I hadn’t detected in any of my other characters. In her signature red hat and somewhat wild sense of fashion, she exudes confidence in a way only those who have survived the unsurvivable can.

Alex Evans saves Marley Jade in more ways than one… but he is also saved by her. Living a serious life dictated by familial expectations and pressure, Alex doesn’t even realize he needs saved from a life that isn’t his own.

As Marley and Alex’s characters developed, I realized that there was a simple beauty in their love story that wasn’t in any other book I’d written. Out of the wreckage of sadness that swirls in this book came a love story more beautiful, more powerful because it was such a contrast to the heavy moments presented.

All of You isn’t a light read. It deals with hard issues and topics we don’t always like to talk about. However, for me, that’s what makes this a book I’m proud of. It’s real. It’s raw. It’s true to life.

Scroll down to read the blurb for All of You and see if this sounds like your kind of book. Feel free to hit reply and tell me if Marley and Alex’s love story sounds like your kind of read and if you’re ready to add it to your Goodreads TBR list.

All of You Blurb:

There’s no such thing as impossible when it comes to saving the one who holds your heart.

A sexy doctor who’s restricted by expectations.

A quirky poet who’s defined by her dark past.

All it takes is Alex Evans saving Marley Jade one fateful night for their futures to be realigned. And when a passion sparks between them, they must decide if they can piece each other back together and make love work.


XoXo,

Lindsay Detwiler

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