About the Book

Book: Runaround Sue

Author: Jennifer Lynn Cary

Genre: Sweet and Wholesome Romance

Release Date: May 30, 2023

She gave away something precious…

…He lost a part of himself.

Can they find a way to help each other heal?

Sue is hiding out until she is sure her former reputation won’t destroy what she’s trying to rebuild. Unfortunately, that means this brilliant wordsmith turned semi-hermit is working beneath her potential and dealing with stress every time her office door opens.

The last thing she needs to do is greet some biker guy who sets her nerves to jumping just by being in the same room.

And if his hairy face isn’t enough to put her off, the mere fact that he’s male is.

So why does she keep ending up in his presence?

Mac is home from Viet Nam and if he never thinks about that place again, it will be too soon. Instead, he’s returned to his music that got him through his teen years, his exotic senior trip overseas (thanks to his Uncle Sam), and the deep wound that he brought home with him. Using his GI bill to further his music understanding has pushed him outside his comfort zone, but the leggy secretary at his professor’s office is tempting him with other ideas he thought he’d shelved for good.

Even if she gets flustered every time he runs into her.

What will it take for her to give him a chance? Or is she more wounded than he is?

Return to 1972 Kokomo, Indiana for the third installment of The Weather Girls Wedding Shoppe and Venue series—Runaround Sue—and what see happens when people discover who God has called them to be.

You will love Runaround Sue, inspired by Dion and the Belmonts’ 1960s hit song, because everyone understands about facing fears with a do-over.

Click here to get your copy!

About the Author

Historical Christian Romance author, Jennifer Lynn Cary, likes to say you can take the girl out of Indiana, but you can’t take the Hoosier out of the girl. Now transplanted to the Arizona desert, this direct descendant of Davy Crockett and her husband of forty years enjoy time with family where she shares tales of her small-town heritage and family legacies with their grandchildren. She is the author of The Crockett Chronicles series, The Relentless series, and The Weather Girls trilogy as well as the stand-alone novel, Cheryl’s Going Home, her novella Tales of the Hob Nob Annex Café, and her split-time novels The Traveling Prayer Shawl and The Forgotten Gratitude Journal.

Runaround Sue is the third book of her spin-off series The Weather Girls Wedding Shoppe and Venue.

More from Jennifer Lynn

One of the best parts of writing this series is that I get to relive lots of fun memories from my childhood. As my bio states, I am a direct descendant of Davy Crockett. This was a big deal to my father, and he made us memorize the generations back.

Well, my first real friend (we met when we were four but didn’t get to play together again until we were in first grade—long, funny story) had a famous last name, famous around Kokomo at least. Haynes. She mentioned she was related to this guy who was a big deal with cars and steel. That was about all my first grade mind could fathom.

I was able to connect that to a little side trip I took with my dad one day. He pulled up in front of an old white building on Apperson Way in Kokomo and led me to the front door. It was obvious the building was empty and had been for some time. But on the slab porch, in front of the entrance, he pointed out a tiled mosaic of a jack rabbit. Dad explained that this had been the factory where the Apperson brothers produced their car, the Jack Rabbit. They ran their factory for about twenty-five years producing one of the first sports cars ever made.

By fourth grade, where we learned about Indiana history, I also got a bit more information on Elwood Haynes (my friend’s ancestor) and the Apperson brothers. Aside from a converted horse cart, their Pioneer car from 1894 is considered the first automobile made in the USA and is now housed in the Smithsonian.

I don’t think I fully grasped Elwood Haynes’s contributions to science and industry, however, until I moved away and became an adult. (Getting older and learning how to surf the web helped too). I was able to use what I learned about the man and share it in Runaround Sue.

The auto industry left Kokomo in the dust when it became evident that Detroit was easier and less expensive to deliver raw products to. However, that didn’t stop Mr. Haynes from doing his experiments. One story has it that he invented stainless steel because his wife was tired of polishing the silver. And we can thank him for finding a use for that residue that was left after cleaning the oil captured from the drilling in the Kokomo area—a little thing called gasoline.

I love that I’m from Kokomo, that I had a wonderful childhood there, and that there are so many cool pieces of information about the place. (BTW, actor Strother Martin and author Norman Bridwell of Clifford the Big Red Dog series are both Kokomo famous sons).

If you’ve ever been to Kokomo, Indiana, I hope you will respond and let me know. If you haven’t, it’s a nice place to visit. I hope you will check it out.

Author Interview

Can you share 5 random facts about you that we will not find in your bio?

Hmm, what little known facts can I share?

I have touched the Stanley Cup. Honest. It was on tour and was brought to Phoenix Children’s Hospital where my son was and when they brought it to his room, I was there.
I auditioned for Dick Van Dyke when I was in high school. He had a group he sponsored here in Phoenix and allowed amateurs to try-out to perform for the group’s annual dinner. I sang two songs and was able to mention to him that he and my dad went to Cannon Elementary School together in Danville, Illinois. A very nice man, though I wasn’t chosen. However one of my dear friends, Russel, was and he was asked back for several years.
In college (the first time—long story), I was a speech/theatre ed major and had an opportunity to be critiqued by Ezra Stone—he was a well-known TV director (The Munsters, Love American Style, to name a couple). I had designed the make-up for our production of The Unknown Soldier and His Wife and he and his wife, Sara Seeger (she was the second Mrs. Wilson on the TV show Dennis the Menace) let me know what I did right and where I needed help. The next day Mr. Stone talked with us about what it was like to audition in Hollywood and used me as his guinea pig. I got a thank you note from him after. Another very nice man. (I wanted to check my spelling as I wrote this and just learned Sara Seegar was from Greentown, Indiana. That’s nine miles from Kokomo—my hometown and the setting for The Weather Girls trilogy and The Weather Girls Wedding Shoppe and Venue series. Plus, I used Greentown as a setting in the second book of my Weather Girls trilogy, Stormy. I knew there was a reason I liked that woman.)
I was in a movie they filmed on campus at that college—Northern Arizona University. The director picked me to sit next to the star, Jeff East, for one particular scene. Afterward, Jeff asked me out, but I had a boyfriend and was going home to see him over the weekend. Instead I got stood up. Oh, and my part in that scene? Ended up on the cutting room floor. The movie became a type of cult classic, though. Filmed in 1977, it was originally titled The Hazing, but they changed it to The Campus Corpse. It’s not all that great—though I enjoy seeing my college friends in it—but do you remember Charles Martin Smith from American Graffiti? He was in it too. And I later saw Jeff East in a M*A*S*H episode.
Early in my writing career I took second place in the ACFW Genesis contest. They were changing the name of one of the contests and brought in Janette Oake. I was honored to meet and have my picture taken with her. A lovely lady and a pioneer in Christian fiction.

Are you a planner or a pantser?

I’m about 90% pantser. I do some preplanning, mainly to meet my characters and to mark where they are at the beginning of the story, where they need to be in the middle, and an idea of how I want to land the plane, er, I mean book. They reveal a lot more to me once I get started and I often have situations and characters pop into a scene as I write that I had no idea existed before I started. One thing that often happens is that I discover a symbol that will carry through that I hadn’t imagined before I began typing. But that tiny bit of planning is like the bumper guards we used to have put into the bowling gutters so the kids could keep their balls in the lanes. It still leaves plenty of room to move about.

If you had to describe your main character(s) in just three words, what would they be?

Let’s see…

Sue is: brilliant, beautiful, broken

Mac is: wounded, considerate, talented (the alliteration worked for Sue but not Mac)

What was the most challenging part of bringing this story to life? 

The absolute hardest part of writing this book was writing through grief brain. I’ve had Sue and Mac’s story in mind for a couple of years but then just before I was to start writing, my stepmother died. She’d been my mom for fifty years and was one of my biggest fans. She bought all my books before my author copies arrived for me to give her one. She read through my rough drafts to give me critiques and ideas. Mom was my champion and I had trouble just making myself sit and type. That’s why Runaround Sue is dedicated to her.

Where can readers follow along to see what’s coming next? 

The best place to find out is at my website: https://www.jenniferlynncary.com

From there you can also join my newsletter family. I send it out on the first and third Tuesdays of each month and I not only will keep you up to date on what’s happening with my writing, I will introduce you to my author friends and have giveaways and bargains you can only find there. Oh, and you can get a free ebook copy of my novella Tales of the Hob Nob Annex Café just for joining. Hope to see you there!