Karen Kingsbury: An Author with the Zeal for Dishing out Hope

SOMEONE LIKE YOU 

Based on the popular novel, Someone Like You, is a beautiful, redemptive love story for our times. The storyline goes like this: Young architect Dawson Gage fell in love with London Quinn in high school, even though she told him not to. Ten years later, the two are still best friends when tragedy strikes. Now, the grieving Dawson is compelled to do one final act of love for London. He launches an impossible search for her secret twin sister, twins separated during their parents’ in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure. 

States away, Andi Allen has no idea she was adopted as an embryo. The news rocks her world and sends her into a spiral that culminates in her leaving home to meet her biological parents. But what will happen when Andi walks through the door of the parents she never knew? All while she’s missing the parents who lied to her? 

With one set of parents grieving the loss of a daughter, and the other set grieving the truth they never told, only Dawson can show Andi everything she missed about her twin sister. But neither of them imagined the attraction they’d feel for each other. Now can Dawson help Andi make her way back home, even though he has fallen desperately in love with her?

This movie differs from most today, Karen says, in that it deals with realistic struggles in life, like loss, betrayal, and heartbreak, but offers what is only found by knowing and trusting God. “It was important to me to have realistic themes that people can relate to, so they can walk away having hope, knowing they will be okay with God.”   
     
KAREN KINGSBURY PRODCTIONS 

“God puts a movie on my heart with all my books, and I write that. I think that’s why they do so well,” she says of her books, which total more than 25 million in print. Having had many of her books developed into films or a TV series, Karen says she likes the final products, but longed to have more say in how her stories were produced. In June of 2022, she and her husband, Don, used their own resources to launch Karen Kingsbury Productions. “It was the only way to have an opinion about costumes, direction, cast, message, location etc. I’m so thankful for the others (productions), but I sensed God saying, ‘I want you to do this.’”  

For Someone Like You, their production company worked with experienced producers to hire other veteran filmmakers for the army of people it takes to produce and post-produce a feature-length film. Karen and Don’s family added their talents as well, with their son, Tyler, co-writing the screenplay and directing the movie, their son, Austin, playing one of the characters, their daughter, Kelsey, helping to manage the set, and Karen’s sister, Trish, serving as line producer. Don pitched in as the film’s dog wrangler.  

EMBRYO ADOPTION 

At a speaking event many years ago, Karen met a woman who’d had triplets through IVF, and later, three more babies from that procedure after freezing the embryos. “It blew my mind,” Karen says. “I had no idea there was such a thing as the cryopreservation of eggs -- for decades sometimes.” Her research has shown that there are one million embryos “on ice” in the world, also referred to as frozen embryos or snowflake babies. “What if I had given away an embryo?” she wondered. Pondering that question led to a movie in her heart and mind, she says, which eventually became the book, Someone Like You. Long before the book, it led to the founding of Karen and Don’s One Chance Foundation, which awards grants for many kinds of adoptions, including embryos. Karen named the foundation after a quote from her father, Ted Kingsbury: “Life is not a dress rehearsal. We only get one chance to write the story of our lives – make it a bestseller!”

WHAT’S NEXT?

The production company has three stories in the offing for their next project. “We’ll see how this one does,” Karen says, noting that the others all have different budgetary needs. She excitedly adds that this March 28th, a TV series based on her Baxter Family book series will air on Prime. Roma Downey and Ted McGinley star in the series, as well as two actors from Someone Like You, Jake Allyn, and Brandon Hirsch. 

To find out where Someone Like You is playing, please visit: SomeoneLikeYou.movie. For more information about Karen Kingsbury, please visit her website: KarenKingsbury.com.