Today’s post by author Ann Hood 

We’ve got a copy of Ann’s latest novel, THE OBITUARY WRITER, up for grabs today. Leave a comment on this post and we’ll enter you in the drawing.

Ann Hood

Update: the winner of of this giveaway is Katherine Jones. She has been notified via email. Thanks to everyone who entered. Please check back soon for more great book reviews and giveaways!

At my friend’s dinner party, she seated me next to a man I did not know. Dinner that night was butternut squash lasagna, and lots and lots of wine. The man was witty and sophisticated, and he regaled me with stories of his years in the Middle East. With all the food and wine and conversation, the night became a pleasant blur, a successful dinner party.

A few days later, my friend called. In a flat voice, she told me Steven was dead from a heart attack. It took me a few minutes to realize that Steven had been my dinner companion. His round flushed face appeared in my mind just as she said: “Will you write his obituary?”

It is true that I am a fan of obituaries. I even have a favorite obituary writer, Robert McG Thomas, who wrote obits for the New York Times, including his own. But being a fan of reading obituaries is very different from actually writing one. Before I can explain any of this to my friend, she is reminding me that I told Steven I would do this.

“I did?” I manage to ask her.

“Yes. He said that he loved your writing and that you should write his obituary and you agreed.”

I want to tell her that I said that hypothetically, after lots of wine. I said that to a man who did not know he was going to die forty-eight hours later. But what I say instead is, “Of course I’ll write it.”

For the next few days, I worried over what to say about this man. What a responsibility it is, I realized, to sum up an entire lifetime in so few words. Remembering his love of his time in the Middle East, I read Arabic poetry and found quotes about life and love. I did not write an obituary, but rather a short story about this man.

In the end, I knew two things: that the day you were born, the degrees you acquired, the facts of your life, these things do not tell your story. And I knew that I would write a story about an obituary writer, a woman who moves through her own grief by honoring the grief of others. Yes, I wrote Steven’s obituary, but by doing so he, in a way, gave me a gift as well.

A sophisticated and suspenseful novel about the poignant lives of two women living in different eras.

On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, an uncompromising young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie O, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless marriage or follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier, in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the devastation of her own terrible loss. The surprising connection between Claire and Vivien will change the life of one of them in unexpected and extraordinary ways. Part literary mystery and part love story, The Obituary Writer examines expectations of marriage and love, the roles of wives and mothers, and the emotions of grief, regret, and hope.

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post by Alison Atlee | @AlisonAtlee

We’ve got a copy of Alison’s debut novel, THE TYPEWRITER GIRL, up for grabs today. Simply leave a comment on this post to be entered.

Alison Atlee

UPDATE: the winner for this giveaway is Kathy. She has been notified by email. Thanks to everyone who entered! And don’t forget to visit again soon.

How far is a palazzo in Venice from an American family farm? Lifetimes, worlds, ages. But I was three or four drafts into a “practice novel” before I realized the two places were actually one: the palazzo my main character and her family were struggling to keep in a post-Napoleonic Venice was also my father’s farm, facing an uncertain future as my father grew older.

Funny, I’d thought I was writing of something far removed from my own life. As a reader and a writer, it’s part of the appeal of historical fiction for me. With the turn-of-the-century world of The Typewriter Girl, I loved thinking of telephone calls and bicycle rides as novelties; I relished the poshness of a seaside hotel I’d seen only in pictures.

Now, before The Typewriter Girl was even a one-celled organism in the primordial soup of my imagination, I bought a silver typewriter jewelry charm. But not for myself. I wanted to celebrate a friend who’d begun seeing success in her submissions to journals and magazines. This gift seemed the perfect way to let her know how proud I was of her.

What I didn’t expect:  My wistfulness as I watched the shop clerk wrap it up, a little voice that wished the charm was right for me, wished I’d earned the right to wear it.

But I’d put boundaries on that dream. Academic writing had burned me out, I was happily busy with a career and family and traveling. Plus, among mountains of books and populations of authors, what special thing did I have to offer? So, maybe someday, but maybe not; it wasn’t that important, life was still good without it.

Excuses, etc. Perhaps that quiet wish on the typewriter charm was the beginning of the end of them. In any case, a few years later, at work on a revision of The Typewriter Girl, I arrived at the following passage:

The house was let for the season, and the family in residence appeared to be expecting guests for the evening, so standing here before it, [Betsey] needed no imagination at all to see it occupied, brimming with life. She imagined anyway. She dreamed in a way she had not since Thomas Dellaforde had allowed his mother to strike her a second time; she dreamed wildly and without boundaries.

I felt rather proud of Betsey at the end of that paragraph—she had, after all, started the story believing her life, restricted as it was, was as good as it was ever likely to be. Now here she was, dreaming wildly.

“Good for you, Betsey,“  I thought. “Stop limiting yourself.”

And the voice that wished on the typewriter charm added, “Good for you, too, Alison.”

ALL BETSEY DOBSON HAS EVER ASKED IS THE CHANCE TO BE VIEWED ON HER OWN MERITS, BUT IN A MAN’S WORLD, THAT IS THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN

When Betsey disembarks from the London train in the seaside resort of Idensea, all she owns is a small valise and a canary in a cage. After attempting to forge a letter of reference she knew would be denied her, Betsey has been fired from the typing pool of her previous employer. Her vigorous protest left one man wounded, another jilted, and her character permanently besmirched. Now, without money or a reference for her promised job, the future looks even bleaker than the debacle behind her. But her life is about to change . . . because a young Welshman on the railroad quay, waiting for another woman, is the one man willing to believe in her.

Mr. Jones is inept in matters of love, but a genius at things mechanical. In Idensea, he has constructed a glittering pier that astounds the wealthy tourists. And in Betsey, he recognizes the ideal tour manager for the Idensea Pier & Pleasure Building Company. After a lifetime of guarding her secrets and breaking the rules, Betsey becomes a force to be reckoned with. Now she faces a challenge of another sort: not only to outrun her sins, but also to surrender to the reckless tides of love. . . .

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post by the amazing Beth Webb Hart | @bethwebbhart

We’ve got five copies of Beth’s new novel, MOON OVER EDISTO, up for grabs today. (Believe us, you want a copy of this one–Pat Conroy endorsed it.) Just leave a comment on this post to enter.

Marybeth Whalen

UPDATE: the winners for this giveaway are Nuala Reilly, Megan C, Blanche Diane, Karen, and Kerri. They have been notified by email. Thanks to everyone who entered! And don’t forget to visit again soon.

What would be the most difficult thing to forgive?  That was the question I was turning over in my mind like a lemon drop on the tongue when the idea for my new novel, Moon Over Edisto, materialized.  The story is about a young woman, Julia Bennett, whose best friend from college has an affair with her father, and the ripples of this particular betrayal expand like this:  Julia’s father divorces her mother, marries his young love, they have a family of their own before he dies very suddenly of a heart attack one morning while painting a landscape on their Edisto Island dock.

When the novel opens it’s nearly twenty years after the initial affair and Julia, who traded the southern gothic family dysfunction long ago for a life as an artist and art professor in Manhattan, finds her father’s widow – Marney – on her doorstep one night.  Marney slowly divulges her outrageous request.  She wants Julia to come home for the summer and take care of her three young children (Julia’s half-brothers and half-sisters who she’s never had contact with) because she has lung cancer and will need help as she recovers from massive surgery

So how is this story connected to my personal life?  No, my father never had an affair with one of my friends (though I do actually have a friend who this happened to).  But, I did experience betrayal at a very tender age – not the juicy kind – but certainly the slow burning insidious type consisting of verbal lashings, reckless decisions, acute temper flares, intimidation, fear of what might happen next.  And it has taken me years and no small amount of counseling and prayer to work these painful memories and their impact on all of my subsequent relationships.

To spell out the particulars of what happened to me as a child and young adult would harm the process of forgiveness I’ve been undergoing with loved ones.  However, that’s what makes story such a therapeutic place to confront this kind of injustice.  Julia’s fury is my own fury, and the fury of anyone who has been unfairly treated or abandoned.  Her grief was mine too.  And her willingness – at last in the story – to acknowledge the intrinsic frailty and woundedness of those who hurt her most also belonged to me.

Like Julia and like the ones who hurt me when I was young, I’m a broken, flawed, weak human being living in a fallen world where I’m surrounded by others who share my affliction.  I’ve been abused and forsaken, and I’ve done those things right back at the people I loved most, even the most innocent.  Such is my condition, the human condition.  Such is my need for someone to rescue me from myself and the world in which I have no choice but to live.

Julia finds a way through this, and she can’t help but falling in love with the half-brother and half-sisters who are – whether she likes it or not –  her family.  Love covers a multitude of sins.  I know from personal experience, that this much is true.

Edisto Island was where it all came apart. Can the Bennett girls ever be whole again?

Once, they were the happiest family under the sun, crabbing and fishing and painting on beautiful Edisto Island in South Carolina’s lowcountry.

Then everything went wrong, and twenty years later the Bennett family is still in pieces. Mary Ellen still struggles to understand why her picture-perfect marriage came apart. Daughter Meg keeps a death grip on her own family, controlling her relationships at a distance. And eldest daughter, Julia, left it all behind years ago, forging a whole new life as an artist and academic in Manhattan. She’s engaged to an art dealer and has no intentions of returning to Edisto. Ever.

Then an emergency forces Julia back to Edisto to care for her three young half-siblings. She grudgingly agrees to stay a week. But there’s something about Edisto that changes people. Can Julia and her fractured family somehow manage to come together again under that low-hanging Edisto moon?

“A rich, endearing, can’t-stop-reading book about what matters most, the power of love to transform the human heart.” —Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times best-selling author, Porch Lights

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post by this month’s featured author, Julie Kibler | @Julie Kibler

UPDATE: the winners for this giveaway are Susan Coster and Sandy Nawrot. They have been notified by email. Thanks to everyone who entered! And don’t forget to visit again soon.

Those of you reading CALLING ME HOME this month will understand the symbolism of the thimble. But Julie decided she didn’t just want you to read about it, she wanted to share one with you. Which is why she’s giving away two of these thimble necklaces today. One for a reader and one for a member of  our Blog Network. All Blog Network members are automatically entered. And any readers who would like to toss their name in the hat can simply leave a comment on this post.

The first word I clearly remember reading on my own, without prodding from an adult, my fingers running across each letter, was Heidi — the title on the colorful cardboard sleeve of a read-aloud record album. I must have read other words before that. I was four or five, and I was an early reader, but for some reason, that experience remains vivid and fills me with nostalgia and the memory of listening to the story.

This doesn’t surprise me. Throughout my childhood, I was drawn to nostalgic stories about girls who were marginalized but remained or became strong. I was a painfully shy, often lonely girl. We moved a lot. I attended seven different schools. We never seemed to have quite enough money to make ends meet, and my brother and I were frequently ridiculed or bullied by the kids who had lived in our neighborhoods their whole lives. Being a preacher’s daughter often made things worse. Strong female characters who chased their dreams in spite of seemingly insurmountable barriers resonated with me. I lived vicariously through my fictional friends when my own life felt out of control.

They were orphans — Heidi, Pollyanna, Anne Shirley, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase‘s Sylvia Green.

They were poor and/or living on the edges of society — Laura Ingalls Wilder, Francie Nolan, Anne Frank, The Borrowers’ Arietty Clock, Blue Willow‘s Janey Larkin, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March.

They were just plain different — Cress Delehanty, Velvet Brown, Ramona the Pest, Caddie Woodlawn.

Or they were all three — Pippi Longstocking.

I grew up, married, and had babies. I divorced and lived five years as a single mom before remarrying. Now I’m following a career path I dreamed about for as long as I can remember—author.

And I’m not a bit surprised that I’m drawn to writing nostalgic stories about characters who are marginalized, yet resilient, characters who attempt to build happy lives and strong families in spite of their circumstances. In Calling Me Home, Isabelle is a young girl who falls in love despite all the naysayers. Dorrie is a single mom who would do anything for her children when they’re in trouble, yet believes she must handle her brokenness alone.

In spite of our differences, I am all of them. And they are me.

What characters did you relate to as a child? What characters did you want to be?

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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Today’s post by Emily Winslow, author of THE START OF EVERYTHING | @emilycwinslow

We’ve got a copy of THE START OF EVERYTHING up for grabs today. Simply leave a comment on this post and you’ll be entered!

Emily Winslow

Update: the winner of this giveaway is LRF. She has been notified by email. Thanks to everyone who entered! Don’t forget to check back soon. We’ve got more great giveaways lined up.

The first narrator in my first novel is an American just arrived in Cambridge, England. I started writing that book six months after I moved to Cambridge myself. My new novel, The Start of Everything, is also set in Cambridge. I had tried telling stories set in places more familiar to me, but it turns out that the too familiar just didn’t work. Plopping down here and trying to capture the new experience for my friends and family back home inspired me in a way that writing about my hometowns hadn’t.

I find it interesting that local book clubs in the UK tend to like that they recognize a familiar Cambridge in my books–both in the places and in the quirks of my characters–but American book clubs seem to like that it’s, to their minds, a fantasy world. It’s both, really. Cambridge is a real place, but sometimes it feels like I’m neighbors with Hogwarts.

One of its pleasures is that the University isn’t hidden away on a private campus. The University has been here for more than 800 years, and has grown up with the even older city; they mesh together like the teeth of a zipper. I go into town to hit the pharmacy and the grocery store, and it’s medieval-market-square-this and ancient-Roman-river-crossing-that, punctuated intermittently by the stone arches and iron gates that front the 31 colleges. The University has retained its traditions–its graduation-robe-like “academic gowns,” its May Balls (that take place in June), and its posh boat races. Most of all, Cambridge is a wonderful setting because of the people it attracts and inspires. I have no association with the University myself, but the departments and colleges are so friendly and generous that I feel connected with it, just as a resident. My kids play in their gardens, do experiments in their labs, sing in their chapels, and sit in on their lectures. I can’t think of a better city for inspiring children.

I’m a foreigner here, but in a way even that makes me fit right in: Cambridge is full of foreigners. They come for a few years, then graduate or finish out their grants. More come to replace them. Cambridge has a core population, of course, but that core is rivaled by the tide of ever-changing scholars, au pairs, and English-language students from all over the world.

In short, it’s a place ripe for stories. From the tiny gravestones in the pet cemetery tucked in a corner of Magdalene College’s fellows’ garden, to Corpus Christi College’s new clock, topped by a robotic monstrous grasshopper that blinks and lolls its tongue, eating time; from the once-grand, now-abandoned telescope dome, carpeted by dead wasps, which crowns the Institute of Astronomy’s library, to the road-swallowing annual fen floods. I’ve put my characters in all of these places. Or, you could say, I’ve pulled them out from all of these places, inspired.

EMILY WINSLOW writes psychological suspense set in Cambridge, England. The Washington Post says of her new book, The Start of Everything (Delacorte Press): “[Winslow is] brilliant at portraying the ragged fragments of these lives. What emerges isn’t a single killer with motive and means, but a tangle of stories crossing and colliding, stray intersections of incidents and accidents, misunderstandings, and misreadings, all thanks to the myopia of individual perspectives and the self-centeredness of individual desires.”

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

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