Her childhood marked by rejection and loss, Julia Bakker longs for life to finally begin. Determined to escape her conservative Christian hometown, she chooses college for a radical reinvention. But following a momentous mistake, the self-defeated Julia returns to her loving grandmother's farm. Will she learn to hope in a God who makes all things new? 350 pages, softcover from Tyndale.

Julia DeSmit can't wait for her life to begin. After her mother leaves when Julia is nine years old, she's raised by an unassuming, gentle father and a saintly, matriarchal grandmother until her father dies just as Julia is becoming a young adult.
On the cusp of womanhood, Julia feels jaded by her circumstances and longs for a new identity. College seems like the perfect place to start over. But when Julia makes a mistake that will change her life forever, she returns to her grandmother's farm, defeated and convinced of her own worthlessness. Only through the gentle prodding of her loving grandmother does Julia begin to accept the imprint her childhood has left on her life and look for hope in a loving God who longs to make all things new.

NICOLE BAART was born and raised in a small town in Iowa. After lifeguarding, waitressing, working in a retail store, and even being a ranch hand on a dairy farm, she changed her major four times in college before finally settling on degrees in English, Spanish, English as a second language, and secondary education. She taught and developed curriculum in three different school districts over the course of seven years.

Teaching and living in Vancouver, British Columbia, cultivated a deep love in Nicole for both education and the culturally inexplicable use of the word eh. She became a Canadian citizen for the sole purpose of earning the right to use the quirky utterance.

Nicole wrote her first complete novel while taking a break from teaching to be a full-time mom. She is also the author of hundreds of poems, dozens of short stories, a handful of articles, and various unfinished novels. The mother of two young sons and the wife of a pastor, Nicole writes when she can: in bed, in the shower, as she is making supper, and occasionally sitting down at her computer. As the adoptive mother of an Ethiopian-born son, she is passionate about global issues and works to promote awareness of topics such as world hunger, poverty, AIDS, and the plight of widows and orphans.

Nicole and her family live in Iowa.

Sometimes it takes losing everything in order to see what has been there all along, and that’s exactly what happens in Nicole Baart’s debut novel, After the Leaves Fall. A young girl, Julia Bakker, struggles through the pain of never having her absentee mother’s love, the loss of losing her father to cancer when she needs him most, and the hurt of a love affair that is one-sided. She finds herself running away from her problems and into the path she thinks she wants. When college life doesn’t go quite as planned, she returns home to discover how much more clearly she can see when the only direction left to look is up.

In this deep and moving story told from Julia’s perspective, the chapters seem almost like journal entries on key events in her life, but are told with such poetic description it’s hard not to feel every ounce of emotion Julia feels. The author does a marvelous job of drawing the audience in from page one as she describes, with clarity and vivid detail, the emotions a 15-year-old girl feels as she stands with her grandmother at her father’s graveside. Julia is so realistic it’s not only hard to believe she is a fictional character, but that this is only Nicole Baart’s first novel. The only disappointing factor is that you’ll have to wait for the sequel in order to tie up some of the loose ends.

After the Leaves Fall is so emotionally gripping and true to life, readers will find it hard to put down and even harder to forget. The message—that all the bad stuff that happens to us ultimately makes us stronger and causes us to be brought closer to a loving God—is something that certainly rings true. Whereas this book is most definitely not fluff, it is inspiring and, ultimately, a feel-good novel. I would recommend this to women in their teenage years and older, especially to those who are looking for a good cry or a novel that will make readers think. – Shannon Potelicki, Christian Book Previews.com

In her promising debut novel, Baart writes compellingly about a young girl's struggle with loss, love, identity and faith. Julia Bakker knows what loss is. Her mother abandoned her, her beloved father died, and her childhood love has gone to college and found another. As a teen, she lives with her saintly grandmother, who urges her to go to church camp, but Julia finds only “quick answers and thrilling conversions” there. Disillusioned, Julia decides it is up to her, not anyone else—“even some impossible, far-flung God”—to reinvent herself. “The truth was, I didn't know who I was, and I was afraid of being defined by who I wasn't. By what I didn't have.... By remembering with predictable, cyclic accuracy all I had lost.” After chronicling her early years, the story follows Julia as she enrolls in college to study engineering and become someone who is “too smart to attach, too independent to want to, and so secure as to be untouchable.” Soon, Julia is repeating her mother's mistakes. The love of her rock-solid Christian grandmother and a newfound (and not completely well-explained) reliance on God help fortify her for the difficult path ahead. Sparkling prose makes this new novel a welcome addition to inspirational fiction. (Oct.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

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