melisanance
At seventeen, she thought she had found love.
What she found instead was a cage.
This is not a story about a perfect victim.
It is, however, a story about ignoring enough red flags to start your own parade.
A Practical Guide to Marrying a Scrub: Love, Loss, and Other Bad Decisions follows a young woman pulled into an abusive relationship before she fully understands what is happening to her. What begins as teenage love slowly becomes control, violence, isolation, and a marriage held together by fear, hope, and an impressive number of terrible decisions.
Through motherhood, devastating loss, betrayal, and years of believing things might finally change, survival becomes messy-and leaving becomes more frightening than staying.
Until one day, staying becomes more frightening than leaving.
Looking back, the signs seem obvious. At seventeen, they looked a lot more like love.
Based on true events and written as autobiographical fiction, A Practical Guide to Marrying a Scrub: Love, Loss, and Other Bad Decisions is a story about domestic abuse, generational trauma, grief, motherhood, and what it takes to survive someone you once loved.
There are no perfect choices here. No flawless heroine. Just one woman eventually realizing that love should not require this much survival.
Excerpt from my completed novel A Practical Guide to Marrying a Scrub: Love, Loss, and Other Bad Decisions