Wanda Adams Fischer’s A Few Bumps is a new KC-set romance novel that tackles addiction, housing insecurity
Courtesy of Wanda Adams Fischer
A Few Bumps by Wanda Adams Fischer is a romance that begins with a chance encounter between main characters Amy and Brian on an airplane, traveling from Boston to Kansas City, just before Christmas.. For Amy, Kansas City is supposed to just be a stopover on her way to a friend’s wedding in Hawaii, while Brian is visiting his family who resides in KC. When they land, the worsening snowstorm grounds all planes, and Amy is stranded with nowhere to stay. Naturally, Brian offers her a place to stay in his wealthy family’s mansion. While Brian’s family mostly takes to Amy, Amy struggles to win over his mother, who disapproves of her less sophisticated background. 
Most of the first half of the story is set in Kansas City, as Amy ends up stuck there for several days while the romantic tension between her and Brian grows. Once they return to Boston, the story takes a different turn, grappling with the issues of homelessness and addiction—since Brian runs a non-profit agency for people with drug and alcohol addiction. Through all this, the story follows the continuation of Amy and Brian’s relationship.
Because the first half reads like the start of a Hallmark movie, it makes sense that the idea for the story began with Fischer and her husband watching them—though the story deviates from this template in the second half—and it’s very on brand for a story inspired by Hallmark movies to take place in Kansas City.
“We’ve been watching Hallmark movies just to stop being overwhelmed by the news,” says Fischer. “I said to him [my husband], ‘I’m gonna write one of these,’ and he said, ‘Go ahead, knock yourself out.’ So I started writing it, and in the rest of the book—I’m very much interested in social justice and those kinds of things, so in the rest of the book, it does take on some topics that I don’t think Hallmark would like, so I’m not gonna send it to them.”
Fischer’s husband is originally from Kansas City, which played a part in the choice to use Kansas City as a main setting of the book. Her husband’s father is a pilot and he has four siblings—just like the character Brian’s family in the book—but the similarities end there, and the rest of the story is fiction.
Courtesy of Wanda Adams Fischer
However, though most of her husband’s family has moved away, Fischer still visits KC every year in February for the Folk Alliance Conference—which she is a part of, as she runs a folk music program on her local NPR station in New York and is a musician herself. One year, she was stuck in Kansas City because of a blizzard, which was an element she worked into the story. A favorite place of hers to visit in KC is the Country Club Plaza, which is also used as a setting and mentioned several times in the novel.
“I really like Kansas City,” says Fischer. “I think it’s a lovely place.”
A Few Bumps is Fischer’s second novel. While she’s loved writing since she was young, she just started self-publishing her novels after a career in public relations and marketing spanning four decades. Fischer also has a long-standing love of baseball—even desiring to be a sportswriter when she was younger, but that was a difficult field for women to break into at the time—which she worked into her first novel, Empty Seats. She tries to visit the Negro Leagues Museum whenever she’s in town and enjoys seeing baseball games at Kauffman Stadium.
A Few Bumps is available as an e-book or paperback on Amazon.
