A book takes a long time to make, so many steps in the process. The writing and editing and proofreading, of course. But also the design work, and all the invisible background efforts of project managers, printers, sales force, publicists. When you’re in the middle of the process, you begin to think it will never happen. And then? All at once, you’re rolling downhill to publication day.

That’s where we are with An Unlikely Prospect. The book heads out the door to the printer today. For the next three months, I’ll be sharing information about the novel’s background history, and the inspiration for the characters I’ve come to love.

But for today, I’ll just say, if you haven’t read the three Jane Benjamin novels—Copy Boy, Tomboy and Poster Girl—this is the perfect time to do so, as the new novel is a standalone emerging from the same universe as the trilogy. Jane Benjamin is sidekick and best friend to my new protagonist, Sandy Zimmer, whom you’ll know from Tomboy and Poster Girl.

Here’s how the new story begins

Renee Taylor

From “Remarks on the Fiftieth Anniversary of V-J Day”

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

August 14, 1995

It was raucous. Air raid sirens. Car horns. Factory whistles. Church bells. All burst into clanging song when President Truman broadcast Japan’s unconditional surrender. Minutes later, Market Street was a hullabaloo, everybody streaming out of buses, trains, department stores, insurance offices, and apartment buildings, onto the city’s main street, where we romped and drained bottles, our hoarse cheers echoing through downtown’s brick, stone, and asphalt canyons. In our factory clothes, we jitterbugged with crazy sailors who wouldn’t be boarding Pacific-bound ships after all. These boys weren’t going to die.

It was like a huge rubber band had been stretched too far, and then finally snapped back from the day almost four years before, when Japanese fighter planes and torpedo bombers surprise-attacked Pearl Harbor, dropping explosives that sank or damaged nearly every battleship in the Pacific Fleet, killing thousands of US sailors, soldiers, marines, airmen, and civilians, both men and women, wounding thousands more, forcing us to join the rest of the world in four years of bloody battle and total reinvention at work and at home, turning us into a country that could build the atomic bomb and then drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On their people.

But now all that was over. We could finally go back to normal life.

At least that’s what we thought.

We were wrong.

Because you can never just walk back to some supposedly perfect point in the past. History doesn’t move that way. It advances in multiple directions, each new unpredictable branch careening us down unmarked side streets and alleys, making it impossible for us to remember exactly where we started, much less how we might get back to that place that no longer exists, maybe never really did exist, except in our imagination.

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