by Nicole Blades
-Women's Fiction
Amazon | Goodreads
First sentence(s):
Nora opened her eyes and stared through the darkness at the ceiling.
She’s blossomed from wealthy surgeon’s beautiful daughter to elegant socialite to being the top fashion stylist in the country. And Nora Mackenzie is only days away from marrying into one of New York’s richest, most powerful families. But her fairy tale rise is rooted in an incredible deception—one scandal away from turning her perfect world to ashes...
What no one knows is that Nora is the biracial daughter of a Caribbean woman and a long-gone white father. Adopted—and abused—by her mother’s employer, then sent to an exclusive boarding school to buy her silence, Nora found that “passing” as a white woman could give her everything she never had. Every golden opportunity she seized and every deception she worked kept that powerless, forgotten girl forever in the past.
Now, an ex-classmate who Nora betrayed many years ago has returned to her life to even the score. She’s a woman who won’t be bought off, reasoned against, or pleaded with. Her machinations are turning Nora’s privilege into one gilded trap after another. Running out of choices, Nora must decide how far she will go to protect a lie or give up and finally face the truth.
Q&A with the author:
What inspired you to write Have You Met Nora? Are there other works of fiction or nonfiction that serve as sources for your inspiration?
I've always been deeply interested in identity, more specifically, how someone organizes their entire spirit around being something and claiming all that goes with it out loud—a chef, an activist, a runner, a writer, a survivor. In so many instances, claiming your title involves a significant moment when it becomes undeniably clear how essential it (running, cooking, writing, etc.) is to who you are and how you want the world to view you. For so many people, that capital-M moment involves stepping out of a comfort zone and putting your faith in this identity, ready to decent it to those who may doubt your assertion, question your selfhood. "I don't care what anyone says, this is me." That—the person who moves through the world with that level of commitment to their identity, to their vocation—that's what intrigues me.
Nor is a flawed heroine. What do you think is her biggest strength?
I like flawed characters. I like digging around their broken parts and trying to trace where the first cracks started. Nora is carrying around all of these shattered pieces, some of them barely held together by string. But as wounded as she is, there is also resilience to her. That she's made it to her late 20s despite everything that happened in her life—both of her making and at the hands of others—shows incredible fortitude. Another strength is her ability to fully give and receive love from her fiancé Fisher Beaumont. Considering her background, there's bravery in that act alone.
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