Milk Blossom Pushes Free, a Basil Rosa novel

 

Thank you to Tony Sturtevant for the cover image.

You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/1053013

At the age of 35, Ruby L. Hermosa would like to know how her life became so complicated and difficult. The year is 2022, having survived in her native Manhattan during the Covid-19 lockdown, Ruby is now seeing herself and the city bounce back. Broadway plays and musicals are casting again, and so are movies.

 
A third-genration actor and singer, raised by her Tony-award-winning grandmother, shunned by her drama queen of a mother, Ruby is laboring to get career back on track. She still doesn't talk to her mother, now a widow who has taken her husband's inheritcance money and exiled herself to a life poolside with cocktails in Costa Rica. 

Ruby's in mourning, as well, over the sudden death of her closest friend, Diego, a dancer in Alvin Ailey's company who was killed in a car accident. To complicate matters further, Ruby believes she's fallen in love with Montag Carlin, a loyal practicing Catholic just like her, and she dreams of starting a family with him. 

Ruby's also convinced she's Sarah Bernhardt and, though she sees various doctors regarding this obsession, her mood swings and her compulsive behavior, she remains committed to writing and rehearsing her one-woman play about the famed French diva, though her agent wants her to abandon the demanding project and choose more commercial opportunities. 
Ruby won't. She knows, believes, is absolutely convinced she's the second coming of Madame Sarah. She needs to write and perform this play. 

She's talented and she's had some success in the professional theatre, but will Ruby be able to balance, post-Covid, her desire for continued career success with a desire to marry Monte and have a child with him? 

Will she reconcile with her agent, or will she fire him? 

Will she, with the help of therapy and medication, shed her delusion about being Sarah Bernhardt?

Will she come to terms with her mother, at last, and most importantly with herself?