Cara Sue Achterberg is a writer, blogger, and occasional cowgirl who lives on a farm in South Central, Pennsylvania.

Her first novel, I’m Not Her, was a national bestseller. When an obese check-out clerk and a superficial twenty-something switch lives, they discover what it’s really like to walk in someone else’s shoes. Her second novel, Girls’ Weekend, takes readers along for the ride when three overwhelmed moms go away for a weekend and decide not to go back to lives that don’t seem to fit anymore. It’s a book for every person who has ever wondered – is this all there is?

Cara’s third novel, Practicing Normal, (released June 2017), introduces readers to the Turners, a not so normal family just trying to fit in a neighborhood of McMansions. Teenage daughter Jenna spends her days breaking into the other houses on the street until an unexpected first love lands in her life. 12-year-old JT has Aspberger’s Sydrome, his brilliance displayed not only in his obsessions but also his uncanny mathematical abilities. Everett holds down a good job, but can’t keep his mitts off a mistress, and Kate is a stay-at-home mom juggling them all, plus her elderly, struggling mother who lives nearby. The illusion of their normal life get turned upside down when Kate’s wayward father resurfaces bringing with him long-buried secrets.

Cara teaches workshops on creating and affording an organic life, based on the information shared in her book, Live Intentionally: 65 Challenges for a Healthier, Happier Life, which was chosen as first runner up at the 2015 Green Book Festival.

She teaches creative writing and her essays and articles have been published in numerous anthologies, websites, and magazines.

Cara has fostered over 75 dogs for the nonprofit all-breed rescue organization, Operation Paws for Homes and writes a blog about her experiences. Her small hillside farm is home to three horses, a changing number of cats, and plenty of chickens. Links to her blogs, pictures of her foster dogs and more information can be found at CaraWrites.com.

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I’m Not Her

by Cara Sue Achterberg

Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy/New Adult & College/Women’s Fiction

It was a Tuesday like any other. And then it wasn’t. A simple encounter at a supermarket changed Carin Fletcher’s and Leann Cane’s lives – literally. Suddenly Carin, a pretty, self-absorbed, underemployed young college graduate, finds her life switched with Leann, an uneducated, perennially poor, obese checkout clerk.

Both women are forced into lives opposite all they’ve ever known. Leann, at first thrilled to look and live like her favorite soap opera stars, discovers that the insecurities and desperation she’s grown up with don’t disappear because she looks like a model now. Fighting off the affections of a boyfriend she never chose and a controlling, plastic mother is hard enough, but she must fight off her own demons and figure out how to survive when her dreams come true.

Carin, suddenly fat, poor, meagerly employed, saddled with a kid, and married to a loser, must face her own – and the world’s – preconceived notions about life on the bottom rung. Carin spends her days avoiding the threats of Leann’s abusive husband, working two jobs to save money for her escape, and wrestling with her role as a mom to a precocious six-year-old. She is surprised to learn that life can be rich even while destitute. She is even more surprised when she falls for a stock boy who repairs jukeboxes and drives a hearse in his spare time.

Both women are facing unknowable futures that neither could have imagined. Are they destined to live this way forever? And if so, where will it all lead?

A brilliant, nuanced, and surprising tale about the way the world sees us and the course we are on, I’M NOT HER is a remarkably assured first novel that introduces a profound new storyteller.

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Practicing Normal

by Cara Sue Achterberg

Genre: Women’s Fiction/Literature & Fiction/Family Life

Meet the Turners – a socially awkward genius child, an adolescent cat burglar, a philandering husband, and a doormat wife in desperate need of a backbone. The Turners are doing their best to craft a happy life and face down a history they have no control over in a neighborhood where only the houses are similar. And when relationships sprout from seemingly nowhere and secrets begin to unravel, practicing normal becomes harder than it’s ever been.

Combining her trademark combination of wit, insight, and tremendous empathy for her characters, Cara Sue Achterberg has written a novel that is at once familiar and startlingly fresh.