Here is a brief description of the book:
Elliot was taller than Nina was, but not by much, and her blocky heels gave her the inch or two needed to engage him eye to eye. “I am woman. Hear me roar. Welcome to the seventies,” she said.
Standing on a Scottish tower high above the North Sea, Nina Rushforth gazed into the eyes of a lanky young man and made a big mistake—she fell in love. Six months later, she’s back in Utah with a ring on her finger, standing in front of a classroom of farm kids, discussing the dangers of dangling participles.
Instead of the sophisticated life she had imagined, Nina is keeping house in a miniscule apartment and living with a young husband who knows nothing more about being married than she does. Beset with cooking mishaps, lesson plans, and interfering in-laws, the newlyweds find themselves teetering on the brink of disaster—and neither knows know how to stop from going over the edge.
Award-winning author Annette Haws brilliantly captures the comic strife of young LDS love caught in the turbulent social crosscurrents of the 1970s. As Nina and her husband struggle with these first-year missteps, they must learn to trust the love that brought them together.
Meet the Author:
After fourteen years teaching in the public school system, Annette Haws set aside her denim jumpers and sturdy shoes to pursue her interest in writing fiction. A native of a small college town on the northern edge of Utah and a people watcher from an early age, Ms. Haws examines the tribulations and the foibles of the characters playing their parts on a small stage. Her first novel, Waiting for the Light to Change, won Best of State, A Whitney Award for Best Fiction, and the League of Utah Writers award for best published fiction. She’s been published in Sunstone and Dialogue. She is the mother of four above average children and is the spouse of a patient husband. She blogs at annettehaws.com.
Guest Post by the Author
Combining the problem of starter marriages (which last only a year or two) and the 1964 Civil Rights Legislation might seem like a stretch, but women moving into the workplace in the 1970’s strained marriages and poked and prodded society’s concept of the roles of men and women. I’ve tackled serious issues in this novel, but young love and new marriages are inherently comic, and I have to admit, writing this story was a lot of fun.
I hope The Accidental Marriage will appeal to anyone who has successfully navigated the first years of marriage as well as those folks who have floundered. The story is set in the early 1970’s, an interesting decade when gender roles were shifting. The groom in this tale is very traditional; the bride is not. The groom’s mother, a stalwart woman who raised seven children in a small home with limited funds and a single bathroom, has no intention of surrendering her first born son to some interloper she has not personally selected. The bride’s father, a successful attorney, has plans for his daughter that do not include an impetuous marriage to a young man whose only certain prospects are a future in his family’s feed and seed store. To the dismay of both families—and the ex-girlfriend—the young lovers plot a course of their own. After a tumultuous courtship, the bride, a lovely girl with a silver spoon stuck in her throat, jumps blindly into her new life as a junior high teacher and wife, but the intricacies of laundry, in-laws, classroom shenanigans, correcting essays, and faculty politics are more than she can successfully manage. The groom, a handsome boy, didn’t realize for better or worse included loving a girl who stretches the truth and can’t cook. Six months later, the mismatched newlyweds realize the head on the adjacent pillow belongs to an immature stranger.
At work, Nina is plagued by sexual harassment, a term not yet coined, which twists the plot and drives Nina to deception. She’s caught in the social crosscurrents of the burgeoning women’s movement; her young husband refuses to compromise his rigid expectations; and consequently, the young marriage teeters on the brink of failure. Will love conquer all? Can the newlyweds settle down to begin the hard work of being happy? That’s the question.
