AAUW Alameda Branch and Oakmont of Cardinal Point present
Alameda Authors Series II
photo credit: Yanina Gotsulsky
Holly Brown
on her new book
How Far She’s Come
April 30, 2018, 7:00 p.m.
in the Living Room
Oakmont of Cardinal Point
2431 Mariner Square Drive
Alameda 94501
Reservations requested:
https://hollybrown-aauw2018.eventbrite.com
For more information, please contact AAUW Alameda at alameda-ca@aauw.net or see our Web site at http://alameda-ca.aauw.net/
Event telephone: 510.463.4966 Kevis Brownson (leave message)
Details: For the second year, AAUW Alameda and Oakmont of Cardinal Point present a spring series of talks featuring authors who live and write in Alameda. In April, we feature a reading and conversation with Holly Brown on her new book being published in May, How Far She’s Come.
If you would like to have a book signed by the author, please bring your checkbook to the event to purchase the newest book, How Far She’s Come. You may also buy any of her previously published books in advance at Books Inc. or your favorite indie bookstore to bring with you for signing.
Look for the event in the “Living Room” near the front entrance. Free and open to the public; please reserve your spot using the tickets link
About the book:
From the highly acclaimed author of Don’t Try to Find Me and This is Not Over comes the unforgettable, harrowing story of a young broadcast journalist who discovers a mysterious diary from a female broadcaster in 1991 featuring startling—and frightening—parallels to her own life.
You might be wondering what a diary from 1991 has to do with you. You’re about to find out. Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it…
Twenty-four-year-old Cheyenne Florian has just received her dream job offer. On the strength of a few vlogs, she’s recruited to be the new correspondent on the recently hatched Independent News Network, INN.
With the slogan “Because independent thinking is the only way out,” INN has branded itself as innovative. Yet once Cheyenne joins the INN team, she finds age-old dynamics in play. Some of the female staff resent her meteoric rise, while a number of the men are only too happy to welcome her. Then there’s the diary left for her anonymously, written in 1991 by a female broadcaster named Elyse Rohrbach. The mysterious diary is accompanied by a note, urging Cheyenne to learn from the past. She wants to believe it’s intended as inspiration and friendly advice, or at most, a warning. But as disturbing—and increasingly dangerous—parallels begin to emerge, she starts to wonder if something more sinister is at work.
It’s almost as if someone is engineering the similarities in Cheyenne’s life to match those from Elyse’s past, like she’s a pawn in a very twisted game. But Cheyenne is determined to rewrite the rules and play her own game. Though they’re separated by more than twenty-five years, Elyse and Cheyenne are forced to learn the same lesson: Nothing is more threatening than a woman who doesn’t yet know her own power…
About the author:
Holly Brown is (in no particular order): a novelist, wife, mother, marriage and family therapist, poker enthusiast, resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, lover of some incredibly shameful reality TV, devotee of NPR (she owes a debt of gratitude for inspiring more than one novel), and a believer that people should always be willing to make mistakes and always be the first to apologize for them.
As a writer, she tends to be inspired by contemporary events and phenomena. With her first novel Don’t Try to Find Me, she was intrigued by a real-life story about how a parent’s use of social media helped find a runaway daughter. In A Necessary End, she was compelled by all the maddening hoops that people have to jump through in order to adopt a newborn and what this does to their psychologies and their relationships. This is Not Over is an escalating cat-and-mouse between two women after a house rental goes wrong. She likes to take an emotionally charged situation and then imagine the people within it. That’s where her background in human dynamics comes into play, and where the fun begins.
With How Far She’s Come, her inspiration came from a wholly different source: from the incredibly uninspiring 2016 U.S. presidential election. Donald Trump’s ascension to the highest office in the land after his (on-tape!) brag about groping women raised some disturbing questions about how far women still have to go to achieve not just equality but safety. Yet since she wrote that first draft, she’s been heartened by the surging women’s movement, and she’s thrilled to be part of the conversation and, hopefully, the revolution that will lead to evolution.
Her Website is hollybrownbooks.com.
For more information, please contact AAUW Alameda at alameda-ca@aauw.net or see our Web site at http://alameda-ca.aauw.net/
Event telephone: 510.463.4966 Kevis Brownson (leave message)
