Just Breathe

Sarah Moon draws a syndicated comic strip in Chicago, also called Just Breathe, that meets life's real problems with sharp humor. Her cartoon double, Shirl, goes through artificial insemination, and the storyline tracks Sarah's own hard struggle to conceive. Then her husband's infidelity ends the marriage, a blow her plans for the future never allowed for.

Sarah leaves Chicago and drives to the small coastal town in Northern California where she grew up and once couldn't wait to escape. Back home, she faces her emotionally distant father and the questions that her mother's death left unanswered.

While she comes to terms with the lost marriage, she runs into Will Bonner, the high school heartthrob she mercilessly mocked in her old comics. He is a local firefighter now, and life has changed him. Just as Sarah's heart begins to open again, she learns she is pregnant with twins by her ex-husband.

This is contemporary women's fiction with a romantic thread, set between a big city and a small town. The tone mixes humor with family history and a second chance at love, and the new start it offers is far from tidy.