A Million Reasons Why
Caroline lives in a Cincinnati suburb with her husband, Walt, and their three young children. She’s never seen the appeal of mail-in DNA tests, but Walt decided to give them to everyone in their family for Christmas. Now she’s stunned to receive an email from someone claiming to be her half-sister. At first she thinks it must be a mistake, but the company stands by its result.
Sela is an artist living in a small North Carolina college town; her recently-deceased mother never told her who her father was. Sela has a young son and an almost-ex-husband. She also has a failing kidney. Her friends persuaded her to submit a DNA test in hopes of finding a relative who might be a match for a kidney transplant.
Caroline and Sela start exchanging emails, and ultimately decide to meet. Neither of them has any other siblings, and somewhat to their surprise, they start feeling like real sisters. But they’re being careful not to rush the get-to-know-you stage.
But events move beyond them. Family secrets and long-hidden betrayals are uncovered, and much that Caroline thought she knew about her family and her own life is upended. And Sela’s life is also more complicated than it seems.
As the novel unfolds, with twist following twist, all of them end up re-examining what family really means, and what love and forgiveness are all about.
Parenthood is a central theme in Jessica Strawser’s novels, which have been said to occupy a “particular niche of suspense that focuses on friends, family, and domestic intrigue.”
Strawser (then Yerega) grew up in Pittsburgh and studied journalism at Ohio University, where she graduated in 2001 as the outstanding magazine senior for her year. She then moved to Cincinnati in 2001 to join Writers Digest as editorial assistant.
In the next few years she held several different roles at Writer’s Digest, followed by a series of positions in book editing at small nonfiction publishers, as well as a short stint in marketing and public relations. She married in 2006, and returned to Writers Digest in 2008 as editorial director. There her work with other writers inspired her to begin writing her own fiction, which she worked on at night while keeping up with her day job at WD. During that time she also gave birth to two children, and motherhood has clearly contributed themes to her writing.
Despite her experience as an editor, writing fiction was a new challenge. She spent nearly five years writing and rewriting a novel, which ultimately did not sell. A new agent encouraged her to try again, and with a second novel she finally landed a two-book deal from St. Martin’s Press in 2015. Those two books (Almost Missed You and Not That I Could Tell) appeared in 2017 and 2018.
In 2017 she scaled back her role at Writer’s Digest to an editor-at-large position, which freed her to focus on her own writing. Her third novel (Forget You Know Me) came out in 2019, followed in early 2021 with A Million Reasons Why.
Strawser lives in Cincinnati with her family.
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