Babe in the Woods by Jude Hopkins - Women’s Fiction - Timber! She’s Falling in Love
by Jude Hopkins
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press Inc.
Date of Publication: June 7, 2023
ISBN 978-1-5092-4843-8
ISBN 978-1-5092-4844-5
Number of pages: 294
Word Count: 72,321
Cover Artist: Tina Lynn Stout
Timber! She’s Falling in Love
It’s September 1995, the first year of the rest of Hadley Todd's life. After living in Los Angeles, Hadley returns to her hometown in rural New York to write and be near her father.
In addition to looking after him and teaching high school malcontents, Hadley hopes to channel her recent L.A. heartbreak into a play about the last moment of a woman’s innocence. But she seeks inspiration.
Enter Trey Harding, a young, handsome reporter who covers sports at the high school. Trey reminds Hadley of her L.A. ex and is the perfect spark to fire up her imagination. The fact that Trey is an aspiring rock star and she has L.A. record biz connections makes the alliance perfect. She dangles promises of music biz glory while watching his moves.
But the surprising twist that transpires when the two of them go to Hollywood is not something Hadley prepared for.
What Drives My Protagonist
A Guest Post by Jude Hopkins
What drives my protagonist, Hadley, in my book Babe in the Woods is yearning. At least that’s what she believes lies behind her restlessness.
Hadley yearns for a love that she feel will make her complete. Her ex-beaux have turned out to be romantic disasters, so she searches for the ideal lover who has the capacity to give her all that she imagines she needs, specifically, never-ending love and romance, unlimited devotion —and someone who cooks and does the dishes, too!
Her hometown friend, Neil, loves her—or at least she believes he does based on his past actions like throwing her a birthday party and always being available to give her sound advice and sincere concern. But he’s never really said “I love you,” at least when she searches her memory when asked that question. But it doesn’t matter because she loves him only as a brother.
Hadley is, however, bowled over by a young aspiring rock star who makes his presence known at the high school where she teaches, but he’s younger and polyamorous, carrying on with one of the teachers as well as the school secretary. He’s dazzling in the looks department, and charming, too. She decides he might be ideal for the research she needs for a play she’s writing about a woman’s last moment of innocence. But he lets her know he sees through some of her defensive actions, making her feel rather vulnerable. Besides, she’s reluctant to be one of his “girls,” wanting to be the one in control this time.
What Hadley thinks she yearns for may not be what she needs, as is so often the case. She’s willful and independent, hardly the type to want to cook dinner for a guy every night. She wants to write and sometimes stays up all night staring at her computer, making her a bit indisposed for long, romantic nights with a special someone. She’s edgy, not one prone to compromise. So her desire to be someone’s dutiful mate is a bit specious.
She has a rocky relationship with her father, a drinker and a gambler. Her mother divorced him and married a man who took her away to the South, so Hadley looks after him when she can. Through him, she sees love as something one has to earn, as she did as a child with a father who preferred booze and gambling to loving a little girl. This, she surmises, might be one of the reasons for her unfulfilled longing, a yearning originating in childhood experiences.
Hadley resembles a lot of women, fictitious and real, who honestly feel that a man is the answer to their unhappiness. In classic literature, we have the disastrous examples of Madame Bovary, bored with her husband, who then seeks out lovers who in turn fail to make her happy. The same can be said for the tragic Anna Karenina who leaves her husband and child for a lover who grows tired of her after a while. The imaginative Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady looks to find someone “fine” enough to match her over-active sensibility only to marry a cold, evil aesthete who treats her like one of his collectible art objects instead of a human being.
I think, too, of the protagonist of Dorothy Parker’s short story “A Telephone Call” wherein the female protagonist puts herself through hell waiting for a certain man to call her. “Oh, God, please don’t let me telephone him,” the frantic woman says. “Please keep me from doing that.” Yearning can be tragic and self-defeating.
I see on my social media accounts the troubling examples of some friends who post their desires for an all-encompassing love, as if this were the piece of the puzzle that will make their picture complete. I don’t know if our culture inculcates this proclivity in women, but I call it “troubling” because no person can ever adequately make another person complete. It is up to each of us to discover what our longings are and how we can be fulfilled within ourselves before we seek someone else to share our lives with.
Hadley figures out some important life lessons through her experiences and the people she meets. Whether she still yearns with the same intensity—and for the same things—at the end of the book is something readers will have to discover themselves when they read it (and I hope they do!).
Excerpt:
There was a knock on the door as Hadley sat down with a bowl of chocolate-chip ice cream. She glanced at the clock: 8 p.m. Sunday night. She’d shot the whole weekend, mostly grading papers and sleeping the day before.“My God,” she said aloud, remembering Trey’s promise to make good on a date. How could he possibly show up after she’d been so deliberately elusive? She had forgotten the resiliency of some guys.
“Who is it?” she trilled, bouncing a mound of the frozen dessert on her tongue. She cleared her throat and repeated the question, all the while picking up the detritus from the weekend—the pizza box, the ice cream container, the National Enquirer.
“ ‘Tis I, Old Dog Trey,” he yelled through the door. “Ever faithful. We have a meeting, remember?”
She used her fingers to comb her hair and moaned when the mirror reflected a wan, puffy face staring back at her.
“I never confirmed any meeting,” she said through the door. She hurried to straighten the cushions on the couch. “I’ll take a rain check.” Her heart was doing double time.
“C’mon. Please open the door. It’s getting chilly out here.” His voice was deeper than usual.
She brushed the lint off her sweatshirt and zipped up her jeans before opening the door.
Trey was twirling the end of a white stick in his mouth. With a loud slurping sound, he pulled from his mouth a bright red lollipop before sticking out his tongue, which now matched the color of his shirt.
“Fire your secretary,” he said, tapping his watch. “May I come in?”
She let him in, the shame of her unkempt apartment equaled only by the shame of her own disheveled appearance.
He stood close to her. “I have to say, you are much more attractive without all that make-up.” He talked with the lollipop stuck in his cheek. “Definitely younger.”
It was an approach she remembered from her time with Derek. First you surprise them, then compliment them when they’re at their most vulnerable. She made a mental note.
He walked toward the nearest chair, sat down, but quickly jumped up again, fishing in his pockets. “Where are my manners? Here.” He extended a lollipop, grape flavor, her favorite.
“No thanks.” It wasn’t even on the level of the apple Neil had given her on the first day of school. Besides, what was with men and their semiotics anyway? Perhaps it beat communicating with words. And how in the world would he have known grape was her favorite flavor? Was she that transparent? Was there a grape “type” as opposed to an orange or cherry type? The grape type would be moody and dark. The orange type would be young, perky, sassy. The cherry type? Passionate, desirable. Like him.
Lollipops aside, he was lusciousness itself, the blood-red shirt adding to his angel-faced carnality. His skin glowed, no doubt from a day spent in the autumn sun with a frisky faun.
About the Author:
Jude Hopkins has published essays in The Los Angeles Times, Medium, the belladonna—and poetry in various journals including Gyroscope Review, Timber Creek Review and California Quarterly. Her first novel, Babe in the Woods, will be published June 7, 2023. She has also taught English and news writing at various universities, including the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, Arizona State University and St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N.Y. She also worked at Capitol Records in Hollywood for a few halcyon and unforgettable years.
Website: https://www.judehopkinswriting.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeyJudeNotJudy
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