Kindle Edition Amazon Libby Broadbent Amazon Kobo Category:  Mainstream Publisher: Libby Broadbent ISBN-10:  0988032201 Type: Fiction Pages: 287 Copyright: July, 2012 ISBN-13: 9780988032200 Cosy LeFevre is a divorced high school teacher learning to rise above a difficult past. When tragedy strikes, the school becomes the focus of a senseless crime and the community reels as they try to come to terms with the unexpected. There are secrets under the surface of every story, and sometimes the guilty parties are not what they appear. Cosy’s Journal Today the button on my pants popped off in the middle of a class. I don’t mean it merely loosened and required a slight shift of posture to conceal, I mean that sucker blew and ricocheted off the desk of the student closest to me. We all froze as it spun out on the floor: me, twenty-eight teenagers, and the threat of my belly taking over the world. A kind young man picked up the offending button and passed it to me. Nice. “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” I quipped, clutching my pants and my self-esteem in one mortified hand. I saw a student texting and knew my button adventure was being immortalized in cyber space. Why oh why, did I choose teaching when I could have chosen a more anonymous job, like phone-sex operator? In my next life, I’m going for a teen-free, buttons-optional career. Something where I can wear pajamas all day. And have wine at noon. That would be bliss.        Teaching high school in a small town is not always easy, and running off those last fifteen pounds of baby fat, in purple spandex leggings, when every cinnamon bun knows your name... well, that's no easy feat either. Cosy LeFevre is happily divorced, happily romancing the Man of her Dreams, and not so happily trying to avoid her mother’s bi-polar hysterics. It’s a good life in a small town, with laughter and cinnamon buns and good friends.      But when tragedy strikes and La Coste High School becomes the focus of a senseless crime, the community struggles to come to terms with the unexpected. There are secrets under the surface of every story, and sometimes the guilty parties are not what they appear. Both gripping and hilarious, Cosy LeFevre's story will leave you grinning on the edge of your seat.       "That Thing That Happened" placed third in the WFNS Atlantic Writing Competition in 2011. It has recently been endorsed by Grub Street Reads as a quality standard in Indie publishing. Libby’s novel is available in print through Amazon.com, and as an ebook through both KOBO and Kindle. Follow Libby’s blog at www.libbybroadbent.com . Excerpt 1 Cosy I started running because of The Divorce. That’s how I referred to it at first… The Divorce. I couldn’t say my divorce––not for a long, long time. About as long as it took me to stop referring to him as ‘my husband’ and start calling him ‘my ex.’ The Divorce was like the menacing bad guy in a horror movie. I could see it lurking in the shadows, but I had no control over its actions. I was the dumb blonde chick wandering wide-eyed toward the mysterious scratching sound coming from behind the closed door. The Divorce was the zombie on the other side. It was an unpleasant un-dead creature that showed up one day, chewed on my organs and left me leaking and twitching on the floor. It didn’t quite kill me, it wasn’t my fault, and it certainly wasn’t going to be something I wanted the neighbours to know about. But of course, they did know. And it was my fault. Which they also knew. Newly married husbands don’t sleep with waitresses unless the new wife is failing in the sack. So I started running. I had always been scared to be seen running. Scared people would laugh at me, point, throw eggs. But when you get divorced after only eight months of marriage and your husband–– your ex––grows his hair long and becomes a drug-smoking surfer with a tattoo of some strange bird on his shoulder, having people laugh at you for running seems an acceptable distraction from the other public hilarity your life inspires. The tattoo came after the divorce. I know about the tattoo because of the mercy sex. Yes I regret it, and yes it was a total waste of time. The mercy sex was a direct result of the running. Running: Good. Mercy sex: Bad. I have always been heavy. Ish. If I were tall, I would be willowy. I would. As it stands, I am somewhat more of a shrub than a willow, but I still hope my true love will recognize the willow hidden within the shrubbery. I decided to prune. After the divorce I was a disaster… No, wait … I was not exactly a disaster, but I did have panic attacks, and I lost twenty pounds, and I bought a subscription to Cosmo because I thought it would put me on the correct road to independent womanhood. They practically worship dildos in Cosmo, and there is no shame to self-gratification. Of course, I cried so hard over the “Turn Your Man on with One Simple Move” columns that self-gratification came in the form of two-liter tubs of Haagen Dazs. I did lose weight though. Cosmo only comes out once a month after all, and the rest of the time I lived on cheese and muesli. But I did eventually get to the point where shedding twenty pounds got me almost within spitting range of ‘willowy’, in a squat kind of way, and I decided running was the next logical step. And it worked. I found muscles in surprising places. I got toned. Unfortunately, my boobs disappeared like ice cubes on a hot dog’s tongue. My ass was still there. But I was hard in places that had been squishy when I was ‘the old ball and chain’. I wanted him to know it. Wanted him to realize what he had walked away from. My husband’s comment… rather, my ex’s… after the mercy sex, was ‘your tits are gone.’ It was those words that convinced me the divorce was actually my divorce, and I could get on with it. I have heard several definitions of mercy sex. It is usually described as an event involving alcohol, extended celibacy and a sense that doing it would be less embarrassing than not doing it. In our case, it was all me, and all of the above. In a Morticia Addams Halloween costume. I didn’t lose the wig throughout the entire bleak encounter, and that is something to be proud of. One must embrace one’s skills, no matter how depressing. Halloween dance. Vodka and cranberry. Raging libido. It went something like this: Me: Oh, hello heinous ex-husband. I see you are grinding on the dance floor with my friend Jude, who you once described as ‘bulbous.’ Him: You look different. Me: It’s the wig. Him: What you drinking? Vodka is bad for you... remember last Christmas? Me: Remember last spring, when we were still married and… oh no, you probably forget the whole marriage thing since it lasted for less than a nano-second. Him: You wanna fuck? Me: Yes. I suppose that doesn’t really qualify as mercy sex, except by the time we got a cab and got back to his place… his surfer shack in the middle of nowhere… I had sobered up enough to start crying, and he had toked enough to ignore me, and suddenly it was over... bodies that know each other fall back into the pattern very easily…and there we were with this weird bird tattoo on his shoulder. Me: The long hair is one thing, but what is that? Him: It’s a raven, man. Nevermore. Me: (having read way too much poetry in my youth) No way. Does that mean… that you miss me? ’Cause, in the Poe poem, the raven is the symbol for his grieving over his lost Lenore, who he’ll never… Him: No, man… It’s just cool, ‘cause it’s, like, black and shit. Me: Oh. Him: Your tits are, like, gone. I married this man, I marvelled. And when he left I grieved like my soul had come untethered. It was while straightening my wig, wiping my mascara drenched eyes and thinking his dick was actually quite small, that I realized it was my divorce. Thank God. 2 Tarl There had been suicide attempts. They were as much a part of Tarl’s perception of his mother as knowing she had brown hair and liked her coffee black. She had the scars on her wrists as livid reminders, although the attempts had been when she was young. Young and sad. In Tarl’s mind, his mother’s youth had vanished with each shot of whiskey, with each pill and snort, but the sadness had remained. He had vague memories of her making his breakfast, or pushing him on the swings at the playground, but now Tarl was a bystander, watching his mother function in a hazy world he didn’t share, characterized by the quest for release. Tarl had become adept at reading the signs, knowing the difference between needing to call the ambulance, or just letting her sleep it off. When it was the booze, it was sleep she needed. When it was the pills… well, it had been a while since he had come home to empty pill bottles scattered like loose change on the rug. He hoped those days were over. “Mom, you getting up?” Tarl pushed on her shoulder, slack with sleep. “C’mon, Mom… I need some cash. Get up, will ya?” Linda sprawled on the sofa, the flotsam of the night before awash on the floor around her. Bottles, a few roaches, an empty twist of tin foil. He wondered what she had taken. Wondered briefly if he should force her to her feet, make her walk it off. Call 911. The kinds of things children did for their mothers who were too wrecked to take care of themselves. At seventeen, he was hardly a child but then again, she was hardly a mother. He used to try to wake her up before he left for school. Until one morning when he was twelve, when the man lying beside her on the bed had lurched up and knocked Tarl across the room. He mostly left her to her own devices after that. “Ok then, no problem, mummy dear.” He stuck his hands in her pockets, recoiling slightly from the rancid smell of her body. His search was rewarded with a joint, a toonie and a crumpled scrap of paper. It was her work schedule for the convenience store. He scanned it quickly. He would wake her if she had to go to work. Someone had to pay the bills in this dump they called home. She groaned, and cracked open an eye. “What the fuck you want?” “Money. There’s no food. You got any cash?” “Gimme a smoke.” She pointed weakly at her purse, stuffed under the coffee table. He stepped back, watching her in a detached way. This is my mother. Her arm drooped, and her face went slack as she drifted back to sleep, mouth half open. He could see the scars on her wrist, and remembered when he didn’t know what they were. At eight years old, he’d found out. A neighborhood kid told him, before he stopped bringing friends into the apartment. “Your mom tried to kill herself. Them’s suicide scars. I know, ’cause my uncle tried, and that’s what it looks like when it don’t work.” He had never asked his mother about it. Just like he didn’t ask about the bruises on her arms, or the sounds of men’s voices coming from her room late at night. Some things just were. He dragged her purse out from under the table, took a package of smokes, a ten-dollar bill and a lighter. He threw the purse down and turned to leave. The room was dim, smelling of sleep and stale smoke. His mother’s ragged breathing tugged on him like a rusty fish hook embedded deep in his skin. He couldn’t force himself to ignore her, as much as he wanted to. “Goddammit.” He turned around, gently rolled his mother onto her side, and slid a cushion under her head. She grunted and curled her knees up, hunching her shoulders against his touch. He draped a thin blanket over her. He knew all about the recovery position. He just wasn’t sure what good it would do.

It will make you laugh, cry and think.
Cosy is a happily divorced teacher living in a small town who struggles with her love for cinnamon rolls, losing weight and romancing a new man. At work she strives to be an inspiration for her students. Unfortunately, not all of them are eager to be inspired, like Tarl. His mother's poor work ethic and her addictions haven't provided him with the structure he needs to succeed in this hard world. Tarl's only salvation is in the arms of a teenage girl, Meg, whose parents don't want their daughter anywhere near him. When Tarl feels he has been disrespected by too many people he will be forced to take action to save his "reputation". This contemporary fiction book tackles issues we have all dealt with, from relating to our families to finding our place in the world when everything feels like it's against us.

This book made me laugh out loud and then I cried so hard I had to stop reading for a minute. This story stayed with me long after I finished reading as I contemplated the issues that the author presented. Author Libby Broadbent's themes are reminiscent of Jodi Picoult where the difference between right and wrong and the consequences of actions are never black and white. This is an amazing story that I highly recommend.

This book was provided to Compulsion Reads for review by the author.

Great debut novel
I really enjoyed the writing style of this author.This poignant book which began as a very amusing take on life after divorce quickly developed into a heart warming and heart stopping story of tragedy. The plot and the characters are very well developed by a writer who has a natural creative ability to draw her readers into the world her characters share. I look forward to reading more from this author.


It felt so real
So many mind stirring thoughts on how we look at life. It was very interesting and fascinating. I have worked with troubled youth and found it to be very true to form.