Laura Bass: Hello. This is Laura Geringer Bass, and I'm the author of "The Girl With More Than One Heart." I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to write this book, and then I'll share an excerpt with you. I began "The Girl With More Than One Heart" during a time when I was mourning the death of my dad. The book started as a memoir about the tender relationship my father had with my oldest son who is on the spectrum. I wanted to write about their way of being together. My editor read the book at that early stage, and it made her cry. She asked me to turn it into a novel. My last novel had been a fantasy. I didn't know how to write a story with characters so close to home. I didn't know where to start. So I put the book aside for a while. A year later, on the anniversary of my dad's death, I couldn't sleep. At 3: 00 in the morning, I sat at my desk, and I wrote, "The day of my father's heart stopped, I discovered an extra heart deep in my belly, below my right rib. It talked to me. I wasn't crazy. Before that day I had just one heart that never said a word."

Suddenly there was Brianna, the heroine of my story. She was in eighth grade, a budding writer who needed to get through a crisis, the death of her dad. She had a little brother on the spectrum, and yes, she had a grandpa who resembled my father. Briana's extra heart speaks to her in her dad's voice. It gives her mysterious commands. "Find her," it says. "Be your own." In the process of working out what those words mean, she discovers and starts to trust her own voice. My hope is that my book will help those who feel alone after a crisis of loss discover their voices and the power to tell their story.

And now I'll read an excerpt to you. "Brown Eye, Green Eye. Mom showed me how to paint and glue wings on clothespins. We sprinkled them all over with sequins. We called them clothespin angels. We made them talk to one another in high, squeaky voices, the way I imagined bugs with sound if they spoke. We played with them for hours. While we played Mom's green eye came so close to mine, it looked almost too bright, like when I stared at the moon in Cape Cod. I have green eyes. Mom has only one that's green. Her other eye is brown like Aaron's. I used to wonder, if mom had been born with both eyes,the same color, would they have been green or brown? I asked her, if she could change one eye or the other, which color would she choose? 'Green,' she said, 'like new grass.' 'That's the color of my eyes,' I said proud, she had picked me over Aaron for once. Mom says she sees mostly through her green eye. I call it her miracle eye, because Mom sees miracles. Not big miracles like Moses parting the Red Sea, but everyday ones like the shadow patterns pigeons make in the park when they flutter or mist rising from the Hudson River when sunbeams bounce off the George Washington Bridge and hit the sky. You have to be in the right place at the right time and in just the right mood to see Mom's miracles. It was easy to miss them. When Aaron came along and took them away from me, I thought maybe he was better than me at seeing them."