Kathy Cooperman shows her pride...plus a book giveaway

We're thrilled to have Kathy Cooperman at CLC today. Her sophomore novel, The Very Principled Maggie Mayfield, published last month and we're excited to read it soon. Thanks to Lake Union, we have THREE copies to give away! 

Kathy Cooperman wrote Amazon bestseller CRIMES AGAINST A BOOK CLUB (one of Melissa A's 2017 favorites, reviewed here). She is an ex-improv comic, a recovering attorney (Yale Law), and a mom to four challenging children. Kathy lives in Del Mar, California. Visit her on Twitter.

Synopsis:
Maggie Mayfield, an elementary school principal in the upscale suburbs of San Diego, likes to do the right thing—for her students and, after her marriage takes a hit, for herself as well. What’s wrong with that?

To keep her cash-strapped school afloat, Maggie says yes to a sweet deal from Silicon Valley’s hottest for-profit education company. They’ll provide enough funding so that Maggie can keep her science, art, and PE teachers in exchange for some dopey beta-test program backed by handsome CEO Danny Z. No layoffs! Happy kids!

Professionally, everything’s flourishing. Personally, the right things are tingling—Maggie can’t resist Danny Z’s magnetism. But as the school year continues, Maggie senses that she might have been duped. As things take a turn for the worse, Maggie and her BFF assistant, Diane, must keep things good—by going a little bad.

Smart, funny, and unpredictable, The Very Principled Maggie Mayfield is a comedy of friendship, class warfare, good intentions, and occasionally necessary unprincipled behavior. (Courtesy of Amazon.)

“YOU ARE MORE THAN YOU HAVE BECOME” – NOW CLEAN YOUR ROOM!

Kathy Cooperman, here. I’m too klutzy to see myself as of the Disney princesses and too earnest/disorganized for its villains. So these days, I identify with Disney’s bumbling, but well-intentioned parents.

Disney has soooo many sweet, but lousy, parents (especially dads – it’s forgivable for dads to be lousy—sorry, but them’s the rules). Belle’s sweet, eccentric dad—“crazy, old Maurice”—constantly puts her in terrible situations. Seriously, Maurice’s “wackiness” works perfectly as a metaphor for the way parents’ addiction traps children – it’s as if Disney wrote a musical version of Shameless. Then, there’s the loving, but uber-controlling watery papa from The Little Mermaid—Triton is obsessed with preventing his daughter Ariel’s assimilation and intermarriage (like a watery version of Fiddler on the Roof).

Photo courtesy of Fanpop

But the bumbler I identify with most is—drumroll, please—Mufasa from The Lion King. To be clear, I do not have delusions of grandeur. I do not identify with Mufasa’s grander characteristics: his James Earl Jones’ voice coming out of a cloud, his flowing mane, the way he rules “everything the light touches.” I’m not organized or ambitious enough to rule everything the light touches. I can’t even keep my car clean.

No, what I identify with is Mufasa’s fierce—and ultimately ineffective—protectiveness for his child. Mufasa does great when something—a pack of hyenas—threatens Simba directly. Mufasa is not afraid to charge at any problem and muscle it to the ground. I have that quality. Though I’m a nebbishy, Jewish lady in my forties, I am formidable when my babies are threatened (by bullies, by a disability, by their own sadness, by ANYTHING!). You just have to point me the right way, and I. WILL. ATTACK.

But the problem for me – as it was for Mufasa – is that I don’t always know what the right way to attack is. Mufasa ran to protect his kid, and—in his eagerness to protect—he met his doom. Before I had kids, when I saw The Lion King in theaters and they got to the scene where Mufasa was dangling from a cliff and his eyes widen as he realizes Scar is going to shove him to his death, I thought Mufasa was thinking: “Oh, woe unto the Heavens, I have been betrayed. Noooooooo!” Years later, watching it again on a food-stained couch next to my toddler, I read that look differently. Mufasa was thinking: “Crap, who’s gonna pull my baby outta that furry traffic jam down there?! Who’s going to help him get into college?!”

My greatest fear as a parent is not that I won’t be able to control every force that threatens my children. I know that lightning may strike, tornadoes may scoop them up, etc. No, what makes my skin crawl is that I will be focusing on the WRONG threat and will thus fail to protect them from another TOTALLY AVOIDABLE THREAT. So, yes, Mufasa is my guy.

Thanks to Kathy for visiting with us and to Lake Union for sharing her book with our readers.

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. If you have trouble using Rafflecopter on our blog, enter the giveaway here. 

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Giveaway ends November 13th at midnight EST.