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by Jeffrey Bartsch
Highly awkward teenager Stanley Owens meets his match in beautiful, brainy Vera Baxter when they tie for first place in the annual National Spelling Bee - and the two form a bond that will change both of their lives.
Though their mothers have big plans for them - Stanley will become a senator, Vera a mathematics professor - neither wants to follow these pre-determined paths. So Stanley hatches a scheme to marry Vera in a sham wedding for the cash gifts, hoping they will enable him to pursue his one true love: crossword puzzle construction. In enlisting Vera to marry him, though, he neglects one variable: she's secretly in love with him, which makes their counterfeit ceremony an exercise in misery for her.
Realizing the truth only after she's moved away and cut him out of her life, Stanley tries to atone for his mistakes and win her back. But he's unable to find her, until one day he comes across a puzzle whose clues make him think it could only have been created by Vera. Intrigued, he plays along, communicating back to her via his own gridded clues. But will they connect again before it's all too late?
"Smart and sprightly ... readers will root for Vera and Stanley, who are uncommonly agreeable characters ... Reader, can you spell romantic comedy Clearly, Bartsch can and does to wonderfully good effect." - Booklist
"Two crossword puzzle lovers come together and fall apart in this smart, romantic debut... Bartsch's delightful novel creates a lovely marriage between words and romance." - Kirkus
"I fell in love with Two Across twenty seconds into the first page, and I swear - with my right hand raised and my left on a Jane Austen novel - that with this book you'll meet your new favorite author. His warmth and wit remind me of Laurie Colwin and the other best practitioners of smart romantic comedy. I wish I'd written this wonderful novel. Well, first I'd have to be as good as Jeff Bartsch." - Elinor Lipman, author of The View from Penthouse B and The Inn at Lake Devine
'What a quirky, witty, wonderful read. I ignored my family for the better part of a beach vacation because I couldn't bear to put down this gem of a book. Jeff Bartsch is an immensely talented writer, and I plan to be first in line to buy whatever it is he publishes next." - Cristina Alger, author of The Darlings
This information about Two Across was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jeff Bartsch is an award-winning copywriter who has worked on campaigns for many major brands, received the D&D Young Guns Award, and been featured twice in Adweek's Spot of the Week. He studied creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, and held the Katey Lehman Fellowship in the MFA program at Penn State University. He lives in New York.
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