Synopsis

Two women who never meet, a motherless child and childless mother, are brought together to discover the real magic of creation.

Simona Casale, a Minneapolis artist, learns she’s pregnant the same day she lands a major mural installation at a new women’s center. No problem; she can take on a surprise pregnancy and a monster commission. And with the father in London, that’s one less complication.
Gemma Ledbetter, a London homemaker, is grieving the babies she couldn’t have. When her husband returns from the States, she decides they’ll start fresh. But it doesn’t take long for her plans to unravel.

Simona and Gemma live an ocean apart, yet their lives become forever entwined when the women Simona is painting come to life, stepping out of their portraits. They arrive with a purpose: to nurture a broken heart…or two. Simona and Gemma learn about art-making, love, grief, and motherhood when they are magically welcomed into a lineage of women who share their lives’ joys and sorrows during the most creative time of a woman’s life.

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Praise

Women from a painting  come alive. A dash of magic. And two women connected by tragedy in ways they don’t yet understand. That’s the premise of this fascinating novel by Alida Winternheimer that combines art, women’s issues, and a dash of magic to create a unique read.

The author tackles a fantastical, complex concept in a credible way that kept me believing. Along the way, she hits on themes around the role of art in sustaining us through tough times.

A feast for artists or any reader who enjoys books with magical elements. A Stone’s Throw is a feat of imagination, truly engrossing and original. –Lainey Cameron, author of The Exit Strategy, host of Best of Book Marketing podcast

Excerpt from Chapter One

Summer had gone. Simona’s favorite time of year arrived in an extravagant show of rust and amber, scarlet and sienna. Matching shades colored her fingertips, used to blend and work the oil pastels that lay beside her in their worn out box. She sat on a lakeside bench, wrapped in a wool sweater and scarf, and gazed upward, her entire face lifted to better drink in the sky. Deciduous trees held their finery, clinging to delicate stems, at the peak of their glory. The barren season would follow soon enough. Simona let her gaze linger in the treetops. Eventually, she looked from leaves to trunk to the yellowing grasses on the banks of the lake, and at last into the sapphire waters. She only ever felt like painting landscapes in the fall, that time of year that inspired her to mix her own pigments. She believed every major life event should happen in autumn. Yet here she was, due to have a baby in June, the start of summer with all its green.

Time to move on, Hannah would be waiting. Simona put her drawing supplies in her bag and gave up the bench. She strolled, passed on both sides by a constant flow of people with clouded breath: runners, skaters, cyclists, everyone swished by her. There were also couples and parents with strollers, pumping their arms and legs as though the lake and trail only existed for their cardio benefit, the scenery disregarded as extraneous to their workouts. Simona’s mind wandered as she walked the familiar course. She remembered biology class. Human reproduction. Two cells came together inside her body without her permission and without her knowledge. They became it. It found purchase in Simona’s craggy interior. One divided and multiplied. And now, what was it? Blastula? Or was it already more than that? Embryo. She rolled the word around in her mind. It was round and smooth, oily, cleaved by the middle consonants, like a coffee bean. Was it already as big as a coffee bean? If she said it enough, it ceased to be real, became nonsense, a twenty-five cent toy from a gum ball machine—easily lost and forgotten. Embryo-embryo-embryo-embryo-embryo-embryo-embryo-embryo-embryo-embryo-embryo….

Simona came to a standstill. The person rushing along behind her was forced to suddenly divert, bumped her shoulder as he sidestepped, mumbled, “Watch it.”  She didn’t notice. She was in her own space, turning overgrown boulders of thoughts. The biggest one left a deep impression in the valley of her mind. It is becoming a person. Traffic continued to flow around Simona, like water around a stone. “A person,” she said to herself.

Slowly, Simona rejoined the current of people traveling the path, and shortly she left it for the sidewalk, took Lake Street a few blocks east, and arrived at the café where Hannah was waiting at a sidewalk table.

“You okay?” Hannah asked.

Simona pulled a wire backed chair away from the table, but didn’t sit down.

“Want to tell me what’s on your mind?”

“After I get our drinks. Latté?” She went inside the café without waiting for an answer.

Hannah stirred in honey, clinking the spoon around the glass, and stared at Simona with her brows lowered in concern.

After blowing into her mug a few times, Simona sighed and looked up. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

About the Author

A native Minnesotan, Alida grew up with wholesome Midwestern values and a daily dose of “Minnesota Nice,” but always sensed there was more going on behind people’s closed doors. Her stories explore the core of our humanity with richly emotional, darkly themed tales about complicated, real women, their relationships, and the secrets that haunt them.
Winner of the Page Turner Award, Confluence Prize, three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and a notable in Best American Essays, Alida is a developmental editor and story craft coach with a podcast for writers and readers curious about writers, called the Story Works Round Table.

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