Blog Tour: The Switch

Guys, I am super excited to be a part of Flatiron's blog tour for The Switch by Beth O'Leary. The Switch has the cutest premise.  It's all about a granddaughter and a grandmother who are stuck in a rut, so they switch spots for a few months. The grandmother moves to London and the granddaughter to the country in Yorkshire. Can swapping lives help them and essentially change their lives?

I also recently found out that the film rights for The Switch have been acquired with Rachel Brosnahan, (of Mrs. Maisel fame), attached to it.  What do you guys think? I can't wait to read this book!

Learn More About the Book:

About the Book:  A grandmother and granddaughter swap lives in this charming, romantic novel by Beth O’Leary, hailed as “the new Jojo Moyes” (Cosmopolitan UK)  Eileen Cotton’s husband of sixty years left her four months ago, and good riddance. After all these decades of sleepy village life, Eileen is ready for an adventure. She’d like a chance at real love, too – and she wonders if maybe the right man is up the road in the big city…  Eileen’s granddaughter (and namesake) Leena lives in bustling London, where she is overworked, overscheduled, and overcaffeinated. When Leena collapses and her office sends her on a mandatory vacation, she wants to escape to her grandmother’s inviting, picture-postcard little village.  So they decide to switch lives.  Eileen will take Leena’s flat, Leena’s laptop, and Leena’s glitzy twenty-something London lifestyle. She’ll learn all about dating apps and swiping right, the best coffee shops, and paper-thin apartment walls. Leena can have Eileen’s sweet cottage, her idyllic Yorkshire village, her little projects to help her neighbors, and her nice, quiet life. But neither finds that her new life is exactly what she'd imagined.  Will swapping lives help Eileen and Leena become more truly themselves, and can they find true love in the process?

The Switch comes out August 18th. You can pre-order it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound or wherever books are sold.   To learn more about Beth O'Leary, you can find her on Instagram or follow her on Twitter.   

Excerpt From The Switch:

Today as part of the blog tour, I'm very excited to share an excerpt from The Switch with you guys. Let me know what you think! 

1

Leena

“I think we should swap,” I tell Bee, bobbing up into a half-squat so I can talk to her over my computer screen. “I’m bricking it. You should do the start and I’ll do the end and that way by the time it gets to me I’ll be less, you know…” I wave my hands to convey my mental state.

“You’ll be less jazz hands?” Bee says, tilting her head to the side.

“Come on. Please.”

“Leena. My dear friend. My guiding light. My favorite pain in the ass. You are much better than I am at starting presentations and we are not switching the order of things now, ten minutes before our key client stakeholder update, just like we didn’t switch at the last program board, or the one before that, or the one before that, because that would be madness and quite frankly I haven’t a bloody clue what’s on the opening slides.”

I sag back into my chair. “Right. Yes.” I bob up again. “Only this time I am really feeling—”

“Mmm,” Bee says, not looking up from her screen. “Absolutely. Worst ever. Shaking, sweaty palms, the lot. Only as soon as you get in there you’ll be as charming and brilliant as you always are and nobody will notice a thing.”

“But what if I…”

“You won’t.”

“Bee, I really think—”

“I know you do.”

“But this time—”

“Only eight minutes to go, Leena. Try that breathing thing.”

“What breathing thing?”

Bee pauses. “You know. Breathing?”

“Oh, just normal breathing? I thought you meant some kind of meditative technique.”

She snorts at that. There’s a pause. “You’ve coped with way worse than this hundreds of times over, Leena,” she says.

I wince, cupping my coffee mug between my palms. The fear sits in the hollow at the base of my ribs, so real it feels almost physical—a stone, a knot, something you could cut out with a knife.

“I know,” I say. “I know I have.”

“You just need to get your mojo back,” Bee tells me. “And the only way to do that is to stay in the ring. OK? Come on. You are Leena Cotton, youngest senior consultant in the business, Selmount Consulting’s one-to-watch 2020. And…” she lowers her voice, “soon—one day—co-director of our own business. Yes?”

Yes. Only I don’t feel like that Leena Cotton.

Bee’s watching me now, her penciled brows drawn tight with concern. I close my eyes and try to will the fear away, and for a moment it works: I feel a flicker of the person I was a year and a half ago, the perso who would have flown through a presentation like this without letting it touch her.

“You ready, Bee, Leena?” the CEO’s assistant calls as he makes his way across the Upgo office floor.

I stand and my head lurches; a wave of nausea hits. I grab the edge of the desk. Shit. This is new.

“You OK?” Bee whispers.

I swallow and press my hands into the desk until my wrists start to ache. For a moment I don’t think I can do it—I just don’t have it in me, God, I’m so tired—but then, at last, the grit kicks in.

“Absolutely,” I say. “Let’s do this.”

* * *

Half an hour has passed. That’s not an especially long time, really. You can’t watch a whole episode of Buffy in that time, or … or bake a large potato. But you can totally destroy your career.

I’ve been so afraid this was coming. For over a year now I’ve been fumbling my way through work, making absent-minded slip-ups and oversights, the sort of stuff I just don’t do. It’s like since Carla died I’ve switched my writing hand, and suddenly I’m doing everything with my left, not my right. But I’ve been trying so hard and I’ve been pushing through and I really thought I was getting there.

Evidently not.

I honestly thought I was going to die in that meeting. I’d had a panic attack once before, when I was at university, but it wasn’t as bad as this one. I have never felt so far out of my own control. It was like the fear got loose: it wasn’t a tight knot anymore, it had tendrils, and they were tightening at my wrists and ankles and clawing at my throat. My heart was beating so fast—faster and faster—until it didn’t feel like part of my body any longer, it felt like a vicious thrashing little bird trapped against my rib cage.

Getting one of the revenue numbers wrong would have been forgivable. But once that happened the nausea came, and I got another wrong, and another, and then my breathing started coming too fast and my brain was filled with … not fog, more like bright, bright light. Too bright to see anything by.

So when Bee stepped in and said allow me to—

Then when someone else said come on this is laughable—

And when the CEO of Upgo Finance said I think we’ve seen enough here don’t you—

I was already gone. Doubled over, gasping, and quite sure I was about to die.

You guys hooked? Be sure to keep your eye out for the novel when it comes out on August 18th.  Is The Switch on your TBR list? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.