Warming Up - Paperback

by Mary Hutchings Reed (Author)

Approaching forty, unemployed but well-off, talented but unknown, functional but depressed, former musical actress Cecilia Morrison reluctantly starts therapy, hoping for a change in her life, but ultimately it's a runaway teenager who cons her out of sixty bucks, not therapy, that gives her the inspiration she's looking for.

Front Jacket

Reed's charming new novel stars a neurotic singer with mother issues who has been avoiding auditions and attending frustrating therapy sessions instead. When Cecilia meets a homeless boy on the streets, however, her life takes a risky new direction . . . A well-written, endearing book that surprises .

--from Kirkus Reviews

To read Warming Up is to enter a story that keeps you eager to know what ever-compelling twist is just beyond the next page. Ms. Hutchings Reed tells a warm, wise, well-wrought tale with characters you care about accompanied by virtual music.

--Lucia Blinn, author of We Called It "The Country"

Only an ingenious writer gifted with imagination, heart, and courage could bring these people together with the result that the reader cannot turn pages fast enough to be rewarded with basic truth caring for someone else and accepting yourself, even when your own life is forcing harsh truths on you, can still break the bonds of fear and allow love to thrive.

--Enid Powell, author of To Tell You The Truth and Other Fictions

Author Biography

Mary Hutchings Reed has always wanted to be a writer, and remembers fondly a toy printing press with handset type on which she wrote her first poem. Now a novelist and playwright, in addition to practicing advertising, entertainment, and media law with Winston & Strawn, Chicago, her fiction has appeared in ARS Medica, The Ligourian, and The Tampa Review. Warming Up is her seventh novel and the second to find its way to print. Her first, Courting Kathleen Hannigan, was published in 2007, and her musical, Fairways, has been produced three times in the Chicago area, including its 2006 premiere at Steel Beam Theatre, St. Charles, Illinois.
Mary lives with her husband, Bill, in Chicago, where she was named "2012 Lawyer of the Year" in Advertising Law by Best Lawyers. She is a graduate of Brown University with a combined bachelor's degree in public policy making and a master's degree in economics. She earned her J.D. from Yale Law School. She is represented by April Eberhardt of April Eberhardt Literary of San Francisco.
Mary is pleased to donate 10 percent of the proceeds from the sale of Warming Up to The Night Ministry, which serves the homeless in Chicago, an organization she strongly supports. Visit Mary at maryhutchingsreed.com.