The Shape Of Joy

Coming Soon from Alchemy Maiden Publishing
Women’s Fiction | Midlife Reinvention | Healing After Survival Mode

For readers who love character-driven stories about women, friendship, marriage, emotional repair, and learning how to live after years of simply getting through.

Mara Ellis knows the language of healing.

She has led the workshops, earned the certifications, taught the practices, and built a life around helping other women name their pain. From the outside, she looks wise, capable, and whole.

But Mara has mistaken functioning for healing.

At fifty-three, she moves with her husband, Daniel, to a quiet mountain town carrying boxes of old training materials, an exhausted marriage, and a body that still mistakes peace for danger. Daniel wants to believe they can begin again. Mara is not sure she knows how.

Next door is June, barefoot in the garden, blunt in the way only lonely people can afford to be, and somehow alive in a way Mara finds both irritating and impossible to ignore. Their unlikely friendship begins with borrowed sugar and bad cookies, then widens into cold lake water, repaired tomato trellises, painful apologies, porch chairs, a judgmental cat, and the terrifying possibility of being known.

As Mara dismantles the identity she built around healing, she must face the marriage she nearly disappeared from, the mother wound she never fully named, and the return of wants she spent years trying not to need.

Quietly funny, emotionally honest, and deeply human, The Shape of Joy is a women’s fiction novel about midlife, marriage, friendship, anxiety, repair, and the ordinary moments that teach a woman how to stop performing wholeness and come back to her life.

Joy does not erase fear.

It gives life another shape.