The Coach House

2012 BRAG Medallion honoree!What They're Saying About "The Coach House:"Rebecca's Reads -- The Coach House is a well written saga I'd happily recommend to any reader.Mary Crocco -- The Coach House is a superbly written book. It will leave the reader thinking about relationships, adversity, independence and growth.Best Chick Lit -- The Coach House both inspires and captivates as it explores the ins and outs of life as a mixed-race woman in the 1940s.Synopsis:Marie Marchetti has what appears to be the perfect life: she’s beautiful, smart, successful, and recently married to medical equipment salesman Richard, her equal in many aspects. But shortly after their wedding, adversity abruptly halts the idea of creating a perfect family. Mistrustful of her husband’s late night phone calls, cryptic receipts hidden in the basement, and the gun in his desk drawer, Marie’s suspicions of something amiss are confirmed when she inadvertently interrupts a meeting between Richard and his so-called business associates in their living room. Enraged, he causes her to fall down the basement steps, compelling Marie to run for her life. Marie realizes survival comes with a price when she ends up in Atchison, Kansas. There she sets up a new life for herself with help from Karen Franklin, a woman who would become her lifelong best friend, when she rents a coach house apartment behind a three-story Victorian home. But her attempts at a new life are fraught with the fear that Richard will show up at any time—and who knows what he’ll do? Ironically, it is the discovery of the identity of her real father and his ethnicity that unexpectedly changes her life forever.Relationships are complicated. Forcing her protagonist to let go of old conventions to forge new, healthier ones, Osmund tears open layers of confusion, anger, fear, and shame that are universal to the human experience of catharsis and growth. With extraordinary insight into our most basic need for trust and connection, The Coach House expertly builds tension as it tears open our primal instincts for survival and community.