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 Ellen Marie Wiseman, author of THE PLUM TREE | @EllenMarieWise

We’ve got a copy of THE PLUM TREE up for grabs today. Just leave a comment on this post and you’ll be entered.

Ellen Marie Wiseman

Update: the winner of this giveaway is Faith Hope & Cherry Tea. She has been notified by email. Thanks to everyone who entered! Check back soon for more giveaways!

When it comes to love during a time of war, there are millions of stories waiting to be told. In my novel, The Plum Tree, a poor, young German woman, Christine Bölz, falls in love with Isaac Bauerman, the son of her wealthy Jewish employer, in Nazi Germany on the eve of WWII.

When I wrote The Plum Tree, I could have focused on any number of family stories as the foundation for my plot.  My grandparents’ story sounds straight out of a romantic movie—“Devoted husband and father of three is drafted into the German Army during WWII and sent to the Eastern front, where he is captured and sent to a POW camp. For two years his family has no idea if he is dead or alive, until he shows up on their doorstep one day.”

In the photo taken before my Opa is sent off to fight, my grandparents are smiling as they pose with my mother and uncles. I often wonder what was going through their minds at the time. Did they worry that this could be the last time they would be together? Did they wonder if the war would come to their small village and threaten their children’s lives?

During the four years Opa was gone, Oma repaired damaged military uniforms to bring in a small income. She stood in ration lines for hours on end, made sugar out sugar beets, and bartered beechnuts for cooking oil. She cooked on a woodstove, made clothes out of cotton sheets, raised chickens and grew vegetables to keep her children fed. Under the cover of night, she put food out for passing Jewish prisoners and listened to illegal foreign radio broadcasts—both crimes punishable by death. She put blackout paper over the house windows so the enemy wouldn’t see their light and, night after night when the air raid sirens went off, ran down the street to hide with her terrified children inside a bomb shelter.

I could have based the story on my maternal great grandparents, who survived WWI only to have my great-grandfather killed in WWII while trying to save the family home during an air raid. A burning wall from a neighboring barn fell on top of him, and my great-grandmother was severely burned trying to save him.

I could have based the book on my mother, who, after reading American magazines left behind by occupying Allied soldiers, took a ship to America alone, at the age of twenty-one, to marry an American soldier she barely knew.

These stories and more were the inspiration behind The Plum Tree. But by inventing the love story between Christine and Isaac, I was able to tell them all. Imagine my surprise when, after I named my main character Christine, my mother told me that my great-parents’ names were Christine and Christian. I guess it was meant to be!

Ellen Marie Wiseman was born and raised in Three Mile Bay, a tiny hamlet in Northern New York. A first generation American, Ellen has traveled frequently to visit her family in Germany, where she fell in love with the country’s history and culture. A mother of two, Ellen lives peacefully on the shores of Lake Ontario with her husband and three dogs.

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 Cathy Marie Buchanan author of THE PAINTED GIRLS | @CathyMBuchanan

Marie’s novel releases today from Riverhead Books and we’ve got a copy up for grabs. Simply leave a comment on this post and we’ll enter you in the drawing. 

Cathy Marie Buchanan

Update: the winner of this giveaway is Susan Coster. She has been notified by email. Thanks to everyone who entered! Check back soon for more giveaways!

Have you ever stood at the barre with your heels together, your feet turned out, bending your knees? Do you know a strange collection of French terms—battement beat, fouetté whip, frappé strike? Do you handle hairpins with deftness? Sit ramrod straight? Have you ground rosin beneath your slippers? Do you sometimes look at your footprints in the snow and see that still you walk with your toes turned out to the sides?

Can you recall the tiny nod of the ballet mistress as she took in the line of your attitude—your open hip, your toe level with your held high knee? Remember your first decent fouettés en tournant?  Had the turns eluded you the very next day? Were there tears behind the piano? Had you stomped off?

Do you remember putting on that first pair of pointe shoes? How you had risen onto the tips of your toes about a hundred times even if the ballet mistress said only fifteen minutes to start? Was there a blot of seeped blood on the toe of your stockings? Had you felt a bit of pride?

Do you sometimes dream you cannot get the combination right? Is the ballet mistress waiting, the two bars of introductory music very nearly finished, and still you cannot remember whether the glissade was en avant or en arrière? Or worse, do you dream of the stage, your mind unable to recall the steps?  Do you wake knowing that no such debacle ever happened, that always you were prepared?

Do you remember those moments when you truly felt the music, the way your body became expansive, full of grace, precise? Was your bliss such that you failed to notice your heaving ribs, your knotting calf? Had the moment faded too quickly? Was it one you wanted to feel again?

While I was writing The Painted Girls, I went to Paris to research the story of Marie van Goethem, the young dancer who had modeled for Edgar Degas’s beloved sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and is the novel’s protagonist.  I was lucky enough to attend a class of the fourteen-year-old girls at the dance school of the Paris Opéra Ballet.  What struck me most was how, even a continent away and thirty years after I had stood at the barre, the slippers, the pinned up hair, the exercises, the corrections, the music had not changed.  And it made me think that, same as me, a hundred years earlier Marie had flubbed combinations and wept and counted music and ground rosin beneath her slippers and nailed fouettés en tournant and experienced moments of undeniable grace. I think Marie’s story speaks to that place inside each of us that always surfaces, as we take in the magic of a sylph before us on the stage– our remembering bodies twitching with a longing to dance.

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 David R. Gillham, author of the newly released debut novel CITY OF WOMEN | @drgillham

David Gillham

It all started with Sophie’s Choice—William Styron’s masterpiece about a young southern writer who goes to New York to write the Great American Novel, and instead is drawn into the center of a stormy love affair between his brilliant Jewish housemate, Nathan, and Sophie, a young Polish woman who has arrived in the States after surviving the Auschwitz death camp.

I was twenty-two years old, living in Los Angeles and just starting out as a writer, when I picked up the paperback. The book struck me like a thunderbolt. I fell in love with it. And of course, I fell in love with Sophie too. How could I not? How could I—another potential Stingo—possibly resist falling for that striking, fragile, needy, irreparably damaged, and ultimately unattainable character of Sophie Z.? Later, I would be very gratified to hear a friend of mine tell me that he had fallen for my character, Sigrid Schröder, in much the same way.

In Styron’s book, Sophie drew back the curtain on a much darker place than a postwar rooming house in Brooklyn. She took me into Auschwitz. While I knew about the Holocaust and had an interest in World War II, it is Sophie’s journey through Auschwitz-Birkenau that made a lasting impression on my writing. Survival in such a place was a morally ambiguous business, and often governed by the capriciousness of the rules of chance.  This is what I write about, and read about.

The Good German, by Joseph Kanon, is another of my fiction favorites set in a morally ambiguous world. A Princess in Berlin by Arthur R. G. Solmssen (you may have to search in the used-book section, but it’s worth the effort). It is a novel I wish I’d written.

If you’re interested in learning more about Berlin from a historical perspective, I can recommend several terrific nonfiction books that offer a penetrating appraisal of life in the city in the first half of the twentieth century; among them are Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse, The Last Jews in Berlin by Leonard Gross, and Otto Friedrich’s quintessential homage to Berlin between the wars, Before the Deluge.

While it’s not about Berlin, if you’ve never read it, for a timeless piece of writing pick up Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. Or if you have read it, read it again.

Sometimes I like to imagine that I am about to take a long train ride, and must choose from my bookshelf only one of my favorites, which has nothing to do with Berlin or World War II, but is simply a great book, beautifully written with vivid, lived-in characters. My current choice would be any one of these: Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, each of which is a poignant, intensely human story about a woman facing a devastating family tragedy; Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a deeply captivating coming-of-age novel; Robert Stone’s, A Flag for Sunrise, a political thriller set in Central America, populated by vivid characters; Don DeLillo’s hilariously dark White Noise; Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, an intimate portrait of a woman on the edge; Charles Dickens’s intricately plotted and exciting yarn of revolution and sacrifice, A Tale of Two Cities; Isabelle Allende’s epic tale of love and family, The House of the Spirits; and Jodi Picoult’s emotional novel of a broken family, Lone Wolf.

All of these books have left their imprint on me, sometimes for different reasons, but in every case because of their beautiful writing, unforgettable characters, and powerful stories.

David’s novel, CITY OF WOMEN, was published yesterday by Amy Einhorn Books.  We’re giving away two copies  today. Leave a comment on this post to enter!

In the very darkest hour, who do you trust, who do you love, and who can be saved?

It is 1943—the height of the Second World War—and Berlin has essentially become a city of women. The men are fighting and dying at the front. Those who return alive are injured, ghosts of their former selves. But on the home front the women solider on.

While her husband is entrenched outside of Moscow, Sigrid Schröder is, for all intents and purposes, the model German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime. But behind this façade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former lover who is now lost in the chaos of the war. Her lover is Jewish.

Before long, Sigrid finds herself embroiled in an underground world she knew nothing about. When she becomes responsible for hiding a mother and her two young daughters, who might be her lover’s family – Sigrid is forced to make an agonizing decision that could cost her everything.

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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