Book Feature - Hating Heidi Foster - Jeffrey Blount

Title:  Hating Heidi Foster

Author:  Jeffrey Blount

Synopsis:  Mae McBride and Heidi Foster were the very best of friends.  Tied at the hip from early elementary school, their relationship was the stuff of storybooks, legendary even, in the minds of their high school classmates.

Unshakable. 

That is, until Mae's father died while saving Heidi's life.

When Mae finds out, she blames Heidi.  She blames her father for putting Heidi ahead of her. She blames her friends for taking Heidi’s side. She begins to unravel amid that blame and her uncontrollable and atypical anger.

At the same time Heidi is beset by guilt, falls into depression and stops eating properly; wasting away physically and emotionally while waiting for Mae to let her back into the friendship she misses so dearly.

Mae, consumed by her hatred of Heidi, the confusion regarding her father’s motives, the perceived desertion of her friends and her mother’s grief, loses more and more of herself.

What could possibly bring these two old friends back to each other?  A miracle?

Hating Heidi Foster is a young adult novel about the place of honor true friendships hold in our lives. It is about suffering and loss and the ethics of grief.  It is about a deep and painful conflict, the bright light of selflessness and sacrifice and the love that rights the ship and carries us safely to port.

From the author:    Hating Heidi Foster has a very personal beginning.  A motivation of the heart.  My daughter, Julia and her best friend Emily, had been friends since second grade.  The idea for the book came to me in the fall of their senior year of high school.  I was watching them among a group of friends, the two of them sharing a moment, talking and laughing with the intimacy of old friends.  While watching them, I thought about the fact that they would be graduating in a few months and going to college a thousand miles apart.  Four years later, they could be half a country or half a world apart. When life intruded, would they even have time to remember that they’d shared this particular moment?  Or all of the other moments over the years?  It saddened me to think that one day they might forget what their friendship meant.  I decided that I would write a novel as a tribute to that friendship and give it to them as a graduation present, a kind of memory box for the years to come.

Author Bio:   Jeffrey Blount is an Emmy award-winning television director and an award recipient for scriptwriting on multiple documentary projects.  Born and raised in rural Virginia, he now lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Jeanne Meserve. They have two children, Julia and Jake.