Broken Homes & Gardens by Rebecca Kelley

With an unwavering spirit, she endures hardships and heartaches. After growing up in an orphanage, she sets off to work as a governess at Thornfield, run by the grim and mysterious Mr. Is a love story ever just a love story, though? Take Jane Eyre. They’re labeled “contemporary romance” or “historical romance” or “chick lit.” Sure, thousands of books about love get published each year, but they seem to occupy different sections of the bookstore, far from the classics and the Pulitzer Prize winners. Like Carrie Bradshaw before me, I had to wonder: Is the love story over? Some of our greatest works of literature are about love, but it’s a lot harder to come up with contemporary love stories that are considered important and literary. and that’s when we started hearing that tired refrain: We just don't know how to position it in the marketplace. But then she started submitting to editors. The day I signed with my agent was one of the happiest ones of my life. I saw the idea echoed around me in movies, and other books, and figured I was golden - that must mean the market was hungry for such stories, right? My nascent idea was that they would, at some point in the story, enter into a friends with benefits arrangement. That’s the kind of story I am attracted to, and that is exactly what I went out and wrote.īroken Homes & Gardens centers around Joanna and Malcolm - two characters who meet at a party and spend the next four years trying to figure out if they are friends, more than friends, or what. So basically, boy meets girl and they hang out. Or maybe something like Before Sunrise, one of my favorite movies.

Maybe I could write the next Twilight, minus the vampires and werewolves. After some dabbling in blogs and non-fiction, I needed to go back to fiction, and I needed to write the story I wished I could find on the bookshelves. Years ago, I had a little revelation: I wasn’t writing what I wanted to read.

In the face of all this rejection, I had to remind myself of why I started working on it in the first place.

Was Broken Homes & Gardens - a contemporary love story set in the mossy neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon - a literary novel? Upmarket women’s fiction? Commercial women’s fiction? Contemporary romance? It seemed like it could fit anywhere. I knew exactly what that meant, because I had the same trouble classifying my book when I was working on pitching it to agents. They might have liked the prose, or the characters, or even the whole book, but in the end all of them felt that Broken Homes & Gardens “wasn’t a good fit,” mostly because they just weren't 'sure where to position it in the marketplace.” As my agent pitched it to editor after editor, the rejections were polite and vaguely encouraging.

Broken Homes & Gardens by Rebecca Kelley