Authorpreneur Dashboard – Lise McClendon
All Your Pretty Dreams
Literature & Fiction
"The beauty of this book is its originality, and its sheer inability to be categorized, which, in today's world of cookie-cutter books, is a good thing! It's a romance, with its lovers troubled and conflicted and struggling with their feelings, but ultimately, wonderfully in love. It's a coming-of-age story, with characters young as well as old doing so! It's a story of family and values … and more than anything, love. Eccentric and lovable characters come together and break apart in the small town of Red Vine, Minnesota. Lise McClendon is a joy to read. Her stories are unique and inventive. Her dialogue is witty, her characters multi-dimensional, and her locales so well defined that the visuals replay in your head long after you lay the book down. ALL YOUR PRETTY DREAMS is a joy to read."
Book Bubbles from All Your Pretty Dreams
All yours, Jonny boy
Rehearsal for polka mass is underway but Jonny Knobel still hasn't rediscovered any love for polka. His sister's trumpet-playing screeches. His father is distracted and out of sorts. But the family band must go on. Sometimes you feel caught in your family, between the way they see you, the way they want you to be, their expectations -- and the way you see yourself and want to be. Jonny wants to please his parents but he's in the middle of his own life crisis. He's divorcing his high school girlfriend, taking a break from his drafting job, and rattling around his parents' old house in rural Minnesota. Not until he meets the lively college crew in the motel next door do things have a glimmer of changing. But sometimes all you need is a glimmer to hang on to.
Kin and Kith
If you are born into a polka band does that mean you play the accordion forever? Can you move on (please)? For Jonny Knobel life in small town Minnesota is all about his (embarrassing) family and the polka band his grandfather started. But this summer there's a college field crew next door studying wild bees. And a rude but intriguing grad student leading the crew has her own family issues. She's estranged from her rich, overbearing family and just back from an escape to Europe with a broken heart. All Isabel wants is to keep the college kids out of jail and finish out the summer. But nothing turns out the way you plan, does it? For Jonny and Isabel, all their pretty dreams are shattered. Will one summer in Red Vine, Minnesota, put them back together?
The Push/Pull
Life is like playing an accordion, ups and downs, ins and outs, pushes and pulls. Like breathing, like growing up, like intimacy. Jonny Knobel goes home for the summer to help out with the family polka band -- but not because he had anything to stay in the Twin Cities for. What will the summer bring -- besides burgundy tuxedos?
