Pinch Me

LILY MARRIED THE MAN OF HER DREAMS.THEN SHE WOKE UP.“Never marry a man unless hes short, bald, fat, stupid, and treats you badly.” That is the advice that twenty-nine-year-old Lily Burns has heard her entire life from her grandmother Dolly and her mother, Selma. Despite this, when she meets Gogo, the handsome, successful pediatrician who treats her like a queen, she has no choice but to let her heart take over. When she agrees to marry him, Dolly and Selma are inconsolable. They decide its time to tell her the truth: their family is cursed. If she marries for love, there will be unimaginable consequences.Nevertheless, Lily and Gogo elope. Unable to believe her good fortune, Lily asks Gogo to pinch her—to make sure all this isnt just a dream. The moment he does, Lily finds herself transported back to the house she lived in when she was single. Gogo is gone. When Lily tracks him down, she finds that hes married to someone else and has no memory of her. In this modern fairy tale, Lily must find a way to break the curse and turn her nightmare back into a dream come true.

"Halpern (29) tackles cursed love and alternate dimensions in this gushy novel featuring uninspired characters plucked from central casting. Lily Burns's grandmother instructed her to 'Never marry a man unless he's short, bald, fat, stupid, and treats you badly.' Defiantly, Lily falls for and marries the most utterly perfect man, Gogo Goldblatt. Unable to believe her wondrous good fortune, she orders her new husband to pinch her to be sure it isn't a dream — and promptly finds herself in an alternate reality where Gogo is married to another woman and doesn't remember Lily at all. As it turns out, there is a family curse that has condemned all the women in Lily's family to misery unless they marry the worst possible men. The story wobbles like an earnest, tipsy party-goer, highlighted mainly by a painfully overabundant use of descriptive dialogue tags. (Aug.)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From the author of 29, novel about a woman who has the perfect life, until she discovers it has all been a dream. Or has it?

Adena Halpern is the author of the novels 29 and THE TEN BEST DAYS OF MY LIFE and TARGET UNDERWEAR AND A VERA WANG GOWN- NOTES FROM A SINGLE GIRL'S CLOSET, a memoir which was based on her popular "Haute Life" essays for the back page of Marie Claire magazine. In addition to Marie Claire, Adena has written for Daily Variety and The New York Times. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in screenwriting from The American Film Institute. A proud Philadelphia native, she resides in Los Angeles with her husband, television and screenwriter Jonathan Goldstein.