The Overdue Life of Amy Byler
Amy Byler needs a break. Only, she doesn’t realize it yet. After being a single mother to her two children for years and working full-time as a school librarian, she is exhausted. And she is in a decidedly gray area with her husband, whom she is still married to despite the fact that he left the country and left his family with no support, financial or otherwise.
When her husband comes back begging for a role in his children’s lives, Amy very, very reluctantly agrees to take a week off to attend a library conference for CE hours and blow off some steam with her best friend, Talia, in Manhattan.
Much to her shock, Amy is able to relax a bit during her conference and indulge the professional side of herself that often gets neglected. She even meets a very handsome fellow librarian while presenting her Flexthology idea, which has helped overcome the challenge of reading group disparity in her own school.
Even more surprisingly, her teenaged children and their father reconnect nicely, so nicely that her husband is able to convince her, after talking it over with her children and a good bit of soul searching of her own, to take a little summer break. Her kids will get the chance to go to camps they have dreamed of and Amy will be able to work on spreading the Flexthology concept to many other schools across the country. The idea of helping so many others leaves her invigorated and inspired.
Her best friend Talia, who works for Pure Beautiful, a popular women’s fashion magazine, has been sent to Florida for the summer to work on engaging her magazine’s Southern audience, leaving her New York apartment blissfully available. And Amy, much to her chagrin, discovers that she is supposed to become the subject of a piece for Talia’s magazine.
After being made over and pampered, however, Amy begins to get on board. A new haircut, some simple wardrobe tweaks, the endorphin boost that is Flywheel and having a little bit of time for herself gives her an entirely new lease on life that she realizes she actually wants to share with the world. The magazine begins tweeting about Amy’s #momspringa, based on the Amish tradition of rumspringa, where youth take a break and decide to either commit to an Amish life or leave the culture forever, and everyone involved is stunned with the hashtag begins trending.
As fans follow along with Amy’s dating life, her wardrobe choices, and her city getaway, she starts to panic that, whereas this started as a silly experiment, she might not actually want to go back to her real life. And the magazine’s followers begin a contentious debate about whether what Amy is doing is self-preservation or abandonment of her family. When the man she is dating’s teenaged daughter questions Amy’s motives over lunch, she, for the first time, actually starts to question them herself.
But when crisis strikes, the chips, as they so often do, fall exactly where they need to and everything that has plagued Amy—her future, whether she wants to be with her husband, and the status of her blossoming new romance—comes sharply into focus.
A laugh-out-loud funny, pitch-perfect novel that will have readers rooting for this unlikely, relatable and totally lovable heroine, The Overdue Life of Amy Byler is the ultimate escape—and will leave moms everywhere questioning whether it isn’t time for a #momspringa of their own.