Johanna Porter Is Not Sorry
“A fast read with a strong message about women learning to stand on their own, and powerful men who do as they please.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
An Amazon Editor’s Top Pick in Fiction
Finalist for the Audie Award for Best Fiction Narration
Johanna is not a thief—and she is definitely not sorry.
In the back room at an elite gallery party, forty-something soccer mom Johanna Porter stands face to face with her younger self. The girl in the portrait, La Rosa Blanca, is fierce and fearless, and Johanna sees the great painter she almost was before her lover, the powerful artist Nestor Pinedo, torched her career.
When she cuts the million-dollar masterpiece out of its frame, rolls it up and walks out, it’s not a theft. It’s a rescue.
Hiding out in a shack on the Chesapeake Bay with La Rosa Blanca looking on, Johanna tries to paint again but encounters only the cringe-worthy atrophy of her talent. When she reluctantly goes sailing with the injured surgeon two houses away and chemistry flares between the struggling misanthropes, Johanna realizes that to fulfill the promise of her younger self, she’s got to quit playing it safe.
Battling novice-thief paranoia, impostor syndrome, and mom guilt, she can stay one step ahead of the law. But it will take an act of desperation to become the woman La Rosa Blanca was meant to be.
Praise