tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15359458143780306942024-02-24T15:46:14.068-05:00C. P. Lesley, NovelistHistory, Fiction, and Publishing in the Internet AgeC. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.comBlogger583125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-38564581778890796612023-06-30T09:00:00.002-04:002023-06-30T09:00:00.148-04:00Times A'Changing<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Eleven years and as many days ago, I tackled Blogger for the first time. Titled “<a href="http://blog.cplesley.com/2012/06/having-just-published-my-first-novel.html" target="_blank">Confessions of a Befuddled Author</a>,” that initial post expressed my very real confusion about the blogoverse as a whole and my own place in it, combined with the awkwardness of writing about the sixteenth century while being expected to master twenty-first-century technology to promote my work.<br /><br />The issue was not then and is not now the technology itself. I actually have a well-developed inner geek. I love trying out new software and solving those bizarre problems that computers throw our way from time to time. I spend much of my day hunched over my trusty Mac and my evenings reading on a tablet. I’m a whiz at Adobe InDesign, Affinity Publisher, and Word—not so much with Photoshop or its equivalents, but I can at least get around without bumping into walls. And after eleven years, I have become quite comfortable with Blogger and its quirks.<br /><br />In other ways, I am wildly out of touch. I rarely watch television; I haven’t kept up with the latest movies, pop stars, or trends. I discover new slang most often while scratching my head over crossword puzzles. My characters, living as they do in the 1530s and 1540s, are clueless about emojis, and for the most part so is their creator.<br /><br />Yet however much I resist change, I realize that at times it is necessary. For years, my blog lived at one site while my website was hosted by another (Wix), but a couple of months ago Wix decided that it would no longer link directly to Blogger. <br /><br />At first, I let it slide, hoping the policy would change. But then I realized that my own site is secure, whereas Blogger is not and that without the weekly blog posts my site updates very rarely, which discourages attention from search engines. So I gritted my teeth and decided to switch. Since the beginning of June, I have posted everything in both places, but that is about to end.<br /><br />I have not abandoned Blogger entirely. Since I started the blog on June 18, 2012, I have made almost 600 posts, which have attracted more than 420,000 views, including almost 10,000 this past month. So for as long I can, I will keep those older posts available to view at <a href="http://blog.cplesley.com">http://blog.cplesley.com</a>. But for future posts and updated news of all sorts, please check <a href="https://www.cplesley.com/blog">https://www.cplesley.com/blog</a>. Look forward to connecting with you there!</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvenz3V4qNhC_4hANW9cNE2dBU_uJJh4pvmHbnco0j-22Vn-EQQMQFKI7zb2DOZ0Uj4zjdW8mQPXZPa2EiILw79Lep2UvYT_sBDCwgYXLn-7z5STeNXhqtUeWV2so-FPSyW4w7ctHf3qw-Oxkq195hkzmwRSoQfEaVXupgBEpzby9mffUgOXEU9keyhjFH/s2700/FB-Twitter-CPLcov2023.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="2700" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvenz3V4qNhC_4hANW9cNE2dBU_uJJh4pvmHbnco0j-22Vn-EQQMQFKI7zb2DOZ0Uj4zjdW8mQPXZPa2EiILw79Lep2UvYT_sBDCwgYXLn-7z5STeNXhqtUeWV2so-FPSyW4w7ctHf3qw-Oxkq195hkzmwRSoQfEaVXupgBEpzby9mffUgOXEU9keyhjFH/w582-h195/FB-Twitter-CPLcov2023.jpg" width="582" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /> </span><p></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-24981465885625369962023-06-23T09:00:00.002-04:002023-06-23T09:00:00.143-04:00The Anatomist's Widow<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgONeRrcH2qx5-QHrSKlZLn9ZiJKaFiFRRYe_gFxb9NTDqIC2WwIMSpGZo8C2k3KkvXi2NRefThlVCKamQF-lPlg9EP7JnKGHRARaD7Mme4Vx2QjdQhrc6BbuloBe3ADKvMhYPdl63RvhqEFODA-NOJ6nWfEIULml3Cp0H4_IUXwbj_sEhqBE7njCc2EQ/s2400/Fatal-Illusion.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1538" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgONeRrcH2qx5-QHrSKlZLn9ZiJKaFiFRRYe_gFxb9NTDqIC2WwIMSpGZo8C2k3KkvXi2NRefThlVCKamQF-lPlg9EP7JnKGHRARaD7Mme4Vx2QjdQhrc6BbuloBe3ADKvMhYPdl63RvhqEFODA-NOJ6nWfEIULml3Cp0H4_IUXwbj_sEhqBE7njCc2EQ/s320/Fatal-Illusion.jpg" width="205" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">I encountered the Lady Darby novels through a circuitous path of Amazon recommendations—mostly in connection with other series I have covered in New Books Network interviews. Specifically, my interest in <br />C. S. Harris’s Sebastian St. Cyr books and Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels led to </span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Anna Lee Huber’s </span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Lady Darby and Verity Kent novels. At first, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to commit to another series, never mind two, but I kept coming back to them and eventually decided to give them a try.<br /><br />What drew me to the Lady Darby books in particular was their setting, which is a little off the beaten path. Most of them take place in Scotland during the 1830s. The Regency has ended—in fact, George IV has died, leaving his brother William as king—but the Victorian era has yet to begin. Familiar figures—the Duke of Wellington, Lord Melbourne, and so on—make their appearance, but the contexts are different. And the contrast between rich and poor, as well as the harsh restrictions placed on society ladies, inspire important elements of each plot.<br /><br />When we meet the series heroine—Kiera, Lady Darby—in <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008EXNOZI" target="_blank">The Anatomist’s Wife</a></i>, she is a young widow in her mid-twenties. A gifted portrait painter, she is in a state of emotional near-collapse caused by the abuse she endured during her three-year marriage and the even more traumatic investigation that followed her husband’s death. A social outcast, she has taken refuge in her brother-in-law’s castle, but a house party arranged by her sister reawakens all of Kiera’s fears. When one of the guests turns up dead, she is the prime suspect. To clear her name, she agrees to assist Sebastian Gage, another guest and a semi-official inquiry agent, to find the suspect. Gage is, to put it mildly, not Kiera’s type: a self-assured, relentlessly flirtatious gentleman who employs all the social skills that Kiera so noticeably lacks in pursuit of his goals.<br /><br />Fast forward two years, when <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Illusion-Lady-Darby-Mystery-ebook/dp/B0B5SS2CLD/" target="_blank"><i>A Fatal Illusion</i></a> opens, and a great deal has changed. Over the course of ten cases, Gage and Kiera’s partnership has become firmly established. So when Gage’s arrogant, disobliging father is attacked in Yorkshire, the pair of them set off to find out what happened and to provide whatever aid they can.<br /><br />Somewhere along the way—perhaps around book 6, <i>A Brush with Shadows</i>—I realized that, thanks to my connection with the New Books Network, I could sidestep Amazon’s unending pleas that I pre-order the latest book and go straight to the publisher. As a result, I had the chance to interview <a href="https://www.annaleehuber.com" target="_blank">Anna Lee Huber</a> about the entire series toward the end of last month. The interview went online this week, though, to coincide with the book’s release on June 20, and you now have the chance to <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/a-fatal-illusion" target="_blank">listen to our conversation</a>. Read on to find out more.<br /><br />As usual, the rest of this post comes from <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical-fiction" target="_blank">New Books in Historical Fiction</a>.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />This—the eleventh installment in Anna Lee Huber’s Lady Darby Mysteries featuring Kiera and Sebastian Gage—opens in Yorkshire in 1832. The two of them have come a long way since their first acrimonious meeting two years earlier; in fact, they have married and produced an infant daughter. Yet Kiera, Lady Darby, is still known by her detested first husband’s title—a courtesy extended by society that she would much rather forgo in favor of being plain Mrs. Gage.<br /><br />On this occasion, Gage has received word that his father has been attacked and left for dead on the Great North Road. Despite years of neglect and mistreatment, Gage rushes to his father’s side, bringing his family with him. After discovering his father alive, if not well, Gage and Kiera set out to discover who attacked him and why, but they have to contend with both the victim’s refusal to share all he knows and resistance from the locals, who are determined to protect a group of highwaymen (or is it a group of smugglers?) whom they believe to be the nineteenth-century equivalent of Robin Hood.<br /><br />As always in these mysteries, the setting comes vividly to life, the problems unknot themselves in satisfying but not always predictable ways, and the characters slowly move toward greater understanding of themselves and others. If you haven’t encountered Kiera and Gage before, you should certainly seek out their adventures. But do yourself a favor and start with book 1, <i>The Anatomist’s Wife</i>. Although you can tackle the books in any order, you will enjoy them more if you read them as I did, from start to finish.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">As I noted last week, because of changes to Wix, which hosts my main author website, and my own desire to consolidate my author persona in one secure location, I will be transferring my blog to my main site, <a href="https://www.cplesley.com">https://www.cplesley.com</a>, at the end of June 2023. The older posts—dating from June 2012!—will continue to be archived here for as long as I can make that happen.<br /><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-7441140616374741672023-06-16T09:00:00.001-04:002023-06-16T09:00:00.127-04:00Making Stuff Up<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’ve made no secret of the fact that one reason I chose to set my historical novels during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible—who became the nominal ruler of Russia a few months after his third birthday and held the throne until his death at fifty-four—was because the history of that period is so dramatic that the stories almost tell themselves. When I began, I intended to start not long after Ivan’s accession to the throne and end with the suspiciously convenient death of his mother, Grand Princess Elena Glinskaya, four and a half years later. That is, indeed, the span of my first series, Legends of the Five Directions.<br /><br />But when I found myself with a group of characters whose stories I’d planned to tell but had no room for—having had entirely unrealistic ideas of just how much I could cover in a single book—I was having too much fun to quit and decided to bring the series forward into the even more troubled and chaotic years that followed Elena’s death. That brought me, in due course, to the bride show held for the by then sixteen-year-old Ivan and, as of the current novel, the Great Moscow Fire that followed it. Or more accurately, as I discovered when I began to research the topic, not one fire but a series of three that wreaked havoc on Moscow from mid-April to late June, killing thousands and destroying the livelihood of many more.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZMk8fiHXoAeQwywhlafKi7gwM47UCb32vpamCeIhLcdviVyuB7QwHQk5rUHilN5LOkBYGYNYO9yUBMDSwWvDWtpU_yGyOUpipwAmVlUp8u3YRbtHgYpeTxRUsqKp7i3GTme54r4uQF6oEC3yb-ZvZ9V43sxi4lTbNTwliOaSmUWcr7e3yiGshEtb1Ow/s1200/Vasnetsov-BoyarHouses.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="936" data-original-width="1200" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZMk8fiHXoAeQwywhlafKi7gwM47UCb32vpamCeIhLcdviVyuB7QwHQk5rUHilN5LOkBYGYNYO9yUBMDSwWvDWtpU_yGyOUpipwAmVlUp8u3YRbtHgYpeTxRUsqKp7i3GTme54r4uQF6oEC3yb-ZvZ9V43sxi4lTbNTwliOaSmUWcr7e3yiGshEtb1Ow/w400-h313/Vasnetsov-BoyarHouses.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This was sixteenth-century Europe, so governments thought nothing of catering to the wealthy and ignoring the woes of the poor. But in this case, so many people lost family members as well as all their belongings that the survivors lost patience with the callousness of those in charge and rioted in the streets. And because this was a time when people liked to blame their misery on sorcery, rumors circulated accusing the tsar’s grandmother, a Serbian princess (rightly or wrongly, Serbians were considered particularly likely to indulge in witchcraft), of turning herself into a bird and flying over Moscow, dripping liquid derived from a human heart to set the city ablaze.<br /><br />An incredible story, to be sure, and from a historical standpoint highly questionable, not only because of its content but because of when the story appears in the official annals. If I were writing an academic article, I would exhibit extreme skepticism, mining the tale for evidence of who might have gained from spreading such nonsense decades after the last embers of the Great Fire fizzled into ash.<br /><br />But I’m writing a novel, and the story is wonderfully indicative of how people dealt with trouble back then (and sometimes even today). The question for me is, as always, how to blend the lives and thoughts of my fictional characters into the broader historical arc created by the royal coronation and wedding, followed so closely by the near-destruction of Moscow. <br /><br />Like most of us, my characters aren’t anticipating disaster; their problems, however important to them, seem quite small next to the larger drama playing out behind them. Yet they must interact with that bigger world, using outside events to solve their issues and get to where they need to go. How do they cope with tragedy? What strengths and weaknesses do they reveal? Do they resist the pressure of the maddened crowd or give in to the prejudices of their day?<br /><br />I don’t know yet. But I’m about to find out. No doubt Yuri and Anna, like their predecessors, will surprise me. Just a few days ago, a cat showed up in the story and demanded, as cats will, a place at Anna’s side. I have yet to discover what role Mila the Cat will play, although I’m sure she will tell me when I need to know.<br /><br />But as I write in almost every historical note, the most outrageous events in my novels are almost always historically attested. The old adage really is true: you can’t make this stuff up, because no one would believe you if you did.<br /><br />As for the most outrageous coincidence in this particular novel, I think I’ll save that for a future post.<br /><br />Because of changes to Wix, which hosts my main author website, and my own desire to consolidate my author persona in one secure location, I will be transferring my blog to my main site, <a href="https://www.cplesley.com">https://www.cplesley.com</a>, at the end of June 2023. The older posts—dating from June 2012!—will continue to be archived here for as long as I can make that happen.<br /> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Image:</i> Apollinary Vasnetsov, <i>Boyar Houses at Night</i> (1918) looking distinctly smoky, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.<br /></span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-52063889427354986102023-06-09T09:00:00.001-04:002023-06-09T09:00:00.140-04:00Reimagining Tragedy<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWwyPful-v4kl32yFSXV_pStTlMmUJu_zVv-aBUjYU2GjR266unjplpGxM35pNVaSnfKF9bLtylSAt3qhLKm_SuzXwsW5P061V0ayj6SiPQkrZYUhDRAgLS0Htx9XWEJdrURl_phlJDHNevETB_dKZ6psj8kxTE7D2D1f6U184p6t1EUrOSWvaRSVKng/s2560/Killingly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1707" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWwyPful-v4kl32yFSXV_pStTlMmUJu_zVv-aBUjYU2GjR266unjplpGxM35pNVaSnfKF9bLtylSAt3qhLKm_SuzXwsW5P061V0ayj6SiPQkrZYUhDRAgLS0Htx9XWEJdrURl_phlJDHNevETB_dKZ6psj8kxTE7D2D1f6U184p6t1EUrOSWvaRSVKng/s320/Killingly.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">I encountered Katharine Beutner’s new novel, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Killingly-Katharine-Beutner/dp/164129437X/" target="_blank"><i>Killingly</i></a>, through a NetGalley recommendation and was instantly hooked. I graduated from Mount Holyoke College, and although that was a long time ago now, I still have fond memories of South Hadley and its environs. But I had never heard of this case of a missing student, either when I lived on the campus or in the years since. Fortunately, the author agreed to speak with me for a <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/killingly" target="_blank">New Books Network interview</a>, which posted just this week, around the time of the book’s release.<br /><br />To be clear, this novel draws on a historical event, and some of the characters and details are also historical. But the book itself is, as advertised, a psychological thriller that includes fictional characters and a lot of (fascinating) speculation about what happened to Bertha Mellish, the missing student, and what might have been going on in her family that precipitated the story events. Read on—and, of course, listen—to find out more<br /><br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYE_2tACWfY1Bvi6cUYeYXgEkYdA23WIKnQnGJYK36k5UUSPGYvgnZ4B6iEOqDPyPytTf9I-MLTvSIoNiiEIijKfb-3fpn0fcMeINUkJFPUIN4nJS9H_G5NrbtGZpFWAu315bPKku_7p-zWvk0kDRtbk_ug_oIDJ-QhY39nBtCKIo2N_SQrw6lIglrDA/s2000/Seminary_Building,_Mount_Holyoke_Female_Seminary,_1886.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1322" data-original-width="2000" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYE_2tACWfY1Bvi6cUYeYXgEkYdA23WIKnQnGJYK36k5UUSPGYvgnZ4B6iEOqDPyPytTf9I-MLTvSIoNiiEIijKfb-3fpn0fcMeINUkJFPUIN4nJS9H_G5NrbtGZpFWAu315bPKku_7p-zWvk0kDRtbk_ug_oIDJ-QhY39nBtCKIo2N_SQrw6lIglrDA/w400-h265/Seminary_Building,_Mount_Holyoke_Female_Seminary,_1886.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">As always, the rest of this post comes from <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical fiction" target="_blank">New Books in Historical Fiction</a>.<br /><br />In 1897, a Mount Holyoke College junior named Bertha Mellish disappears from campus overnight, leaving no word for her family. It’s a time when female college students are still considered “queer” (in the old sense of peculiar as well as the modern understanding of the word), although the college administrators insist that their primary purpose is to produce excellent wives and mothers. But even this community of oddities considers Bertha strange, by which the other girls mean that she pays too little attention to parties and boys, too much to her schoolwork and social causes.<br /> <br />Bertha’s only true friend is Agnes Sullivan, a young woman from a poor Boston family who has been forced to conceal her Catholic upbringing to gain admission to the college. Agnes, a would-be doctor (an even greater anomaly in late 19th-century culture than a woman with a college education, although not inconceivable), grieves Bertha’s absence but insists she has no idea where Bertha might be. Dragging the rivers and lakes turns up nothing, supposed sightings of the missing girl lead nowhere, and the police would be willing to write the case off as closed if only her relatives and the family doctor would let it go.<br /><br />Almost from the beginning, it’s clear that Agnes knows far more than she lets on, but finding out what really happened to Bertha and why is a long, winding trail of suspense. Through the overlapping stories of Agnes, Bertha’s sister Florence, Dr. Henry Hammond, and the inspector whom Hammond hires to find the missing girl, <a href="https://www.katharinebeutner.com" target="_blank">Katharine Beutner</a> keeps us on the edge of our seats as she unravels their tangle of secrets and lies. Perhaps the most intriguing element is knowing that however fictional the plot and many of the characters, the story derives from the real-life disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student in 1897, the mystery of which has never been solved.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Image of Mount Holyoke College’s Seminary Hall in 1886 public domain via Wikimedia Commons.<br /></b></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-48699473439666897152023-06-02T09:00:00.001-04:002023-06-02T09:00:00.135-04:00Interview with Amy Barry<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEIMF2l_q2Vw2Xaw_vJpdJSUdl2-5LTQK6H-dyxQNAnfV5dZW3v3O6rNxaMpi0yf59qO8shzT2bnnCynVvylmqRVI9RPbhUa95RYU3NQvmmE2yMDGufy-rJNhFPSo0p4gUD3uYAa2Z4UqcNGPWyM-YBCfaiQXDb8xl3KXNeLiRidsyVUwdjH75ik0wgw/s1501/Morgan-McBride.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1501" data-original-width="1000" height="349" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEIMF2l_q2Vw2Xaw_vJpdJSUdl2-5LTQK6H-dyxQNAnfV5dZW3v3O6rNxaMpi0yf59qO8shzT2bnnCynVvylmqRVI9RPbhUa95RYU3NQvmmE2yMDGufy-rJNhFPSo0p4gUD3uYAa2Z4UqcNGPWyM-YBCfaiQXDb8xl3KXNeLiRidsyVUwdjH75ik0wgw/w232-h349/Morgan-McBride.jpg" width="232" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: small;">As detailed by Amy Barry in her latest historical romance—<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Marrying-Off-Morgan-McBride-Barry/dp/0593335597/" target="_blank">Marrying Off Morgan McBride</a></i>, </span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;">released just this week—Epiphany Hopgood, better known as Pip, has been having a hard time finding a husband in her small home town of Joshua, Nebraska. It’s 1887, and a woman’s future is pretty much limited to husband and children. So at the “ripe” age of 22, Pip is desperate enough to answer an ad in <i>Matrimonial News</i> for a mail-order bride, even though the man advertising describes himself as a “bullheaded backwoodsman with a surfeit of family.” After all, he wants a woman with a mind of her own, and Pip has that. He wants a good cook, and if there is one area where Pip excels, it’s in the kitchen.<br /><br />But when Pip reaches Montana, she discovers that her bridegroom, Morgan, has no idea she exists. And as we might expect, things go downhill from there. But the whole journey, including its final resolution, is tremendous fun. Amy Barry was kind enough to answer my questions, so read on to find out more.<br /><br /><b>This is your second historical romance featuring the McBride family. Could you tell us a bit about the first, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kit-McBride-Gets-Wife-Barry-ebook/dp/B09MHFVRXZ/" target="_blank">Kit McBride Gets a Wife</a></i>?</b><br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7QfX8i3uBLiuHxjBYiCX8CTr3X8SKdI5TVn41o7ICrlWHnSHqWVXVQI07-lEzqJJ2gaj5WjKkALfJMlVu6Rqz8kmIngZ6NTcLCMWBVXG-glfTLYeyyzzJYR7sdIxJDUnQikl4wyxjmteN7L0jiMiB-rGUZg0QqV2SYmsMJErd-y0GhRsbNDsxZC5JLQ/s1500/Kit-McBride.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7QfX8i3uBLiuHxjBYiCX8CTr3X8SKdI5TVn41o7ICrlWHnSHqWVXVQI07-lEzqJJ2gaj5WjKkALfJMlVu6Rqz8kmIngZ6NTcLCMWBVXG-glfTLYeyyzzJYR7sdIxJDUnQikl4wyxjmteN7L0jiMiB-rGUZg0QqV2SYmsMJErd-y0GhRsbNDsxZC5JLQ/s320/Kit-McBride.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><span style="font-size: small;">It’s 1886, and the four McBride brothers live high in the Elkhorn Mountains of Montana, raising their irrepressible little sister Junebug, who has had more than enough of looking after a passel of grumpy mountain men. She’s sick of doing their laundry and of cooking and cleaning for them. So she secretly orders up a mail order bride for Kit, her hulking blacksmith of a brother. A brother who cares more for book reading than finding a wife to help Junebug out. But Junebug has no plans to sell some poor woman a false bill of goods—she tells the truth about her brother—snoring, cantankerousness, and all. When Maddy Mooney arrives in their mountain meadow, she’s not what any of them expected. But she might be exactly what Kit (and his little sister) needs.<br /><br /><b>Kit and Morgan’s sister, Junebug, is the motivating factor in both novels. What makes her so determined to find wives for her brothers?</b><br /><br />Junebug is no one’s fool, and she’s certainly no one’s maid or wife. So why should she act the housewife for her brothers, doing all the womanly chores? As far as she can see, they need wives to milk the cows and cook their dinners and wash their pestiferous underwear. And Junebug needs a woman or two around. Because no girl wants to be outnumbered by mountain men. Especially mountain men like her brothers, who are grumpy in the extreme and never let her go fishing when there are chores to be done, and there are always chores to be done.<br /><br /><b>Junebug herself is a wonderful character. Tell us a bit about her.</b><br /><br />Junebug’s mother died when she was young, and her father ran off and left her in the care of her four older brothers, rough mountain men who didn’t have the slightest clue about raising a girl. Morgan is the eldest, and he’s been Junebug’s rock through her hardest days. Even if he is a captious, nagging, irascible blockhead of a parental figure. Junebug is a force of nature, completely untamed, without any citified manners. She’s wilier than her brothers, with less scruples, and a much bigger vocabulary. They don’t stand a chance.<br /><br /><b>Introduce us, please, to Epiphany (Pip) Hopgood. We know early on why she answers the advertisement for a mail order bride, but what is it about her personality that makes her the perfect heroine for your purposes?</b><br /><br />Pip has always been too much for her hometown. She’s too tall, too big, too loud, too opinionated. She’s like a square peg in a round hole. After being rejected by every single eligible bachelor in the county (even the ones old enough to be her grandfather), Pip begins to wonder if maybe it’s not her that’s the problem. Maybe it’s the men. So she’s on the hunt for a man who doesn’t mind “too much” woman. She’s more than a match for Morgan McBride. In fact, she’s even more than a match for Junebug. Maybe …<br /><br /><b>The men in Joshua, Nebraska, spurned Pip as a potential bride, mostly because of her looks, but Morgan feels differently. What does he see that they missed?</b><br /><br />Morgan isn’t looking for dainty and girly and mannered. He doesn’t care a fig for a frilly pink dress and a well-turned ankle. He’s a rougher sort of man, the kind used to being holed up for the winter in a cabin with a bunch of mountain men. When he meets Pip, he doesn’t see any of her “flaws” as flaws. In fact, her height, sharpness, quickness, and stubbornness knock him flat. And if he doesn’t like the feeling … well, he certainly can’t resist it …<br /><br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgavMZVIF0CzEa22UVqvxGy2xVyoUEotfLVffJF8885p4Olnu13GQ969NB-uoD393duqdG1_JAjdqNGamIQQEQ1of-cNmzKBByeKYEqCCUPXCBVq1NTaCJVcZv1HGe8u2zsizDP9RRkjWJxbZ8VGS3O3TTSvPSAV0RnzPPYVcAwi4GiXwpgoWys9xH4NQ/s1457/1457px-The_Cow_Boy_1888.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1457" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgavMZVIF0CzEa22UVqvxGy2xVyoUEotfLVffJF8885p4Olnu13GQ969NB-uoD393duqdG1_JAjdqNGamIQQEQ1of-cNmzKBByeKYEqCCUPXCBVq1NTaCJVcZv1HGe8u2zsizDP9RRkjWJxbZ8VGS3O3TTSvPSAV0RnzPPYVcAwi4GiXwpgoWys9xH4NQ/w400-h296/1457px-The_Cow_Boy_1888.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><b><br /></b></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>What does Morgan really want out of life, since he’s clearly not looking for a wife?</b><br /><br />Morgan inherited a bunch of kids to raise after his ma died, and he’s been chafing under the responsibility ever since. He longs to get them raised so he can light out of the mountains and live a life alone on the trail, free. He’s spent six years playing parent, with no one who understands the burden he carries, and he’s sick of it. He wants to be responsible for no one and to no one. Or so he tells himself.<br /><br /><b>The trip to Buck’s Creek is as eventful for Pip’s grandmother as it is for Pip herself. What does Granny Colefax hope to gain from the journey to Montana?</b><br /><br />Pip’s grandmother is a firecracker of a woman who has no intention of being stored in the attic like a bit of old furniture now that she’s aging. She takes the opportunity to chaperone Pip as a chance to run away from her staid life back in Nebraska. She’s going to start anew, and that includes remembering how it feels to be a woman and doing a bit of courting. She’s letting her hair down and showing her granddaughter how life should be lived. One mountain man at a time.<br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitzPZo6BFLieYa0MoS-BVVANOET119Pbnd7pbSChrW-enVdZLKPWGkfKbjdSHHXM-_qVMsi4QQd3dTtKZj3NpFkFNyFv1EatC0nfrcJP-hg5CcVDKZQSNRzCHxeqdx_TK_8byvMZM5CgSFmq2DZFXTitC2QG3Ic5Mpmg9NmbnsN8a8G1dJymTKykzqjg/s1080/1080px-Grant-Kohrs_Ranch_National_Historic_Site_GRKO3395.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1080" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitzPZo6BFLieYa0MoS-BVVANOET119Pbnd7pbSChrW-enVdZLKPWGkfKbjdSHHXM-_qVMsi4QQd3dTtKZj3NpFkFNyFv1EatC0nfrcJP-hg5CcVDKZQSNRzCHxeqdx_TK_8byvMZM5CgSFmq2DZFXTitC2QG3Ic5Mpmg9NmbnsN8a8G1dJymTKykzqjg/w400-h266/1080px-Grant-Kohrs_Ranch_National_Historic_Site_GRKO3395.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>The end of this novel indicates that Junebug hasn’t entirely given up on her matchmaking. Are you working on the next book now, and what can you tell us about it?</b><br /><br />Oh, I’m hoping you’ll get to come back to Buck’s Creek again soon. Let’s just say, Beau and Junebug get into a little competition over who can find the best mail order bride, and it gets out of hand. There might not be one, or two, but maybe Seven Brides for Beau McBride. Fingers crossed, readers like the McBrides enough to want more marital mayhem!<br /> <br /><b>Thank you so much for answering my questions!</b><br /><br />My very great pleasure!<br /><br />Amy Barry writes sweeping historical stories about love. She’s fascinated with the landscapes of the American West and their complex long history, and she’s even more fascinated with people in all their weird, tangled glory. Amy also writes under the names Amy T. Matthews and Tess LeSue and is senior lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University in Australia. Find out more about her books at <a href="https://amy-barry.com">https://amy-barry.com</a>.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Images of cowboy (1888) and a cattle ranch in the Elkhorn Mountains of Montana public domain via Wikimedia Commons.</i><br /><br /><br /></span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-12597679038953490962023-05-26T09:00:00.002-04:002023-05-26T09:00:00.136-04:00Interview with Alison Goodman<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0UgJdvhpUtEaee0xAq4KdzVJJm7xs9ooEpng-VeCJs3gg-TIjhl9oY6-eL7IJ8p7r45j2JzgSNkjdb6lCK-NgQ17RofcgDNCPNqUkocMDL4Qx5Q45VCwG4lEIpwr8oq33JjK2iGqFk-kL1Wl0GbmUkq6upd-GUsazbcjasJsHGDnY0D80x2_MUI9SQ/s2560/Benevolent-Society.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0UgJdvhpUtEaee0xAq4KdzVJJm7xs9ooEpng-VeCJs3gg-TIjhl9oY6-eL7IJ8p7r45j2JzgSNkjdb6lCK-NgQ17RofcgDNCPNqUkocMDL4Qx5Q45VCwG4lEIpwr8oq33JjK2iGqFk-kL1Wl0GbmUkq6upd-GUsazbcjasJsHGDnY0D80x2_MUI9SQ/s320/Benevolent-Society.jpg" width="205" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Like Alison Goodman, as she notes below, I first encountered Regency London through the novels of Georgette Heyer, which I discovered in my early teens. Even now, I go back to my favorites every so often, although as I have matured, so have my views on which stories I consider favorites.<br /><br />Heyer wrote her first novel at eighteen, and her early heroines were teenagers. Over the course of her long life, the heroines aged into their twenties, but women over thirty remained bit players—chaperones, governesses, and, worst of all, poor relations, doomed by the dreaded word “spinster” to secondary status even in their own families. So to encounter Alison Goodman’s 40-something unmarried twins—Lady Augusta Colebrook and her sister, Lady Julia—is a pleasant surprise. That the two women, each in her own distinctive way, resist the society that would relegate them to back rooms and lace caps just adds to the fun. And then there’s the disgraced Lord Evan Belford, escaped convict and highwayman, a charmer in his own right.<br /><br />Alison Goodman was kind enough to answer my questions, so read on to find out more, then seek out <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Benevolent-Society-Ill-Mannered-Ladies-ILL-MANNERED-ebook/dp/B0BCKR3SGP/" target="_blank"><i>The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies</i></a> when it comes out on Tuesday. You won’t be disappointed. In fact, I can’t help thinking that if Heyer were writing today instead of in the last century, this is exactly the kind of story she would produce.<br /><br /><b>Your previous novels cover quite a range, from contemporary mystery to fantasy—including the <i>Dark Days Club</i> series, which might be considered Regency historical fantasy. How did this path lead you to <i>The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies</i>?</b><br /><br />It has been quite a winding path through many genres to <i>The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies</i>. I suppose it is because I love to challenge myself when I write, and part of that is to write in different genres or to mash them together in ways that I hope will create surprise and delight. I would say the path to <i>The Ill-Mannered Ladies</i> started when I was twelve years old and my mother gave me my first Georgette Heyer historical novel. I immediately fell in love with historical fiction, and particularly books set in the Regency era. So, that love of all things Regency has been sitting in me for a long time. It first showed itself in my <i>Dark Days Club</i> series, which is like <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> meets Buffy, and is now in full throttle with <i>The Ill-Mannered Ladies</i>. <i>The Ill-Mannered Ladies</i> has no fantastical element like the <i>Dark Days Club</i> series, but it is as historically authentic and accurate as that earlier series and has as much action, romance and adventure. Plus it’s funny.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9ApHALJUh853MPl6699g6NDYvAaIpscO6Xi1xbWdH2WunzBsmIc2j8XUTiHLMK6UY9MsLePx1GOH3BDjPNGvWZq3OZwVbUpp1MDAT5Y9X1eo5BUal5wzKOu55pw1JlS4EamQqtVt1KRth2poox8OtdU09OsUAPXwgzwhymClqzHKFLtgQjUn_e-7btA/s1000/Hortense-de-beauharnais-anne-louis-girodet-de-roucy-triosson.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="813" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9ApHALJUh853MPl6699g6NDYvAaIpscO6Xi1xbWdH2WunzBsmIc2j8XUTiHLMK6UY9MsLePx1GOH3BDjPNGvWZq3OZwVbUpp1MDAT5Y9X1eo5BUal5wzKOu55pw1JlS4EamQqtVt1KRth2poox8OtdU09OsUAPXwgzwhymClqzHKFLtgQjUn_e-7btA/s320/Hortense-de-beauharnais-anne-louis-girodet-de-roucy-triosson.jpg" width="260" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Lady Augusta Colebrook is quite a character. Tell us a bit about her.</b><br /><br />Lady Augusta, or Gus as she is known to her twin sister Julia, is the main character and narrator of <i>The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies</i>. She is 42 years old, unmarried, smart, and a wee bit snarky. She is bored by the high society life she leads and is looking for purpose in her life beyond what society says a woman of her age and rank is allowed to do. And so, the Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies is born—Gus and her sister decide to use their privilege and invisibility as “old maids” to help other women in peril. <br /><br /><b>Her sister Julia is quieter and more biddable, yet she always seems to come through in a pinch. How would you describe her?</b><br /><br />Julia is, I think, very much the “middle” child. She is the peacemaker between her fiery older twin, Gus, and their younger brother Lord Duffield or Duffy, as his family calls him. Julia seeks harmony and peace in her life, but that does not mean she won’t answer the call to adventure. She has a grounded serenity, and if Gus is ever in any trouble, Julia will come out swinging on her twin’s behalf. She has a lot of quiet gumption.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmAqQMpC-uMaToL5YQMmPcMa0nFbOgzwMjqoFC7lPaJ5KiQw3a_WRHAH1U2m53E0HlIB_vQ7vZAFRFW4CSIjapA4QkoTpT2bOdgKEHuMEhY2hXBWUO6Hv-B8gbnhJ9VOrRAPIGq0eu-WlSpffisqjjwudKTMXsGzqOO-YsWfK4Y9Ti0NKMi_Tvmg2ihw/s1045/1815_English_and_French.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1045" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmAqQMpC-uMaToL5YQMmPcMa0nFbOgzwMjqoFC7lPaJ5KiQw3a_WRHAH1U2m53E0HlIB_vQ7vZAFRFW4CSIjapA4QkoTpT2bOdgKEHuMEhY2hXBWUO6Hv-B8gbnhJ9VOrRAPIGq0eu-WlSpffisqjjwudKTMXsGzqOO-YsWfK4Y9Ti0NKMi_Tvmg2ihw/s320/1815_English_and_French.jpg" width="184" /></a></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>The twins, like many twins, have a special bond. Among other things, they often communicate without words. Why did you include that element?</b><br /><br />I love the idea of a secret language between twins, which has been well documented in real twins, and it provides a lot of fun in the book. Gus and Julia communicate through their expressions: a flick of an eyebrow, a frown, a particular smile. Their secret language gives them an advantage in both social situations and on their adventures, and it really adds to their closeness as sisters in the novel. <br /><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Do introduce us to Lord Evan Belford. He is an absolute delight.</b></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9sScsLgDipPOkDkVJN1Xed9lasMx4k6jtAjP4lEj9Em_UP1VFbdQ1e0E2e_LZFFotodzUpVsHVtCy1hdOofZ8k02Mkpv1v-0xWUi7J6HmYF5CSbQbTdkemoA5IknUFY7JGhhq9s6C4cc_-fbjooiQNrD6AhGT0kewUIVNdS2WY7b78-SGegy_5QZzbA/s1478/Kochubey_Viktor_Pavlovich.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1478" data-original-width="1244" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9sScsLgDipPOkDkVJN1Xed9lasMx4k6jtAjP4lEj9Em_UP1VFbdQ1e0E2e_LZFFotodzUpVsHVtCy1hdOofZ8k02Mkpv1v-0xWUi7J6HmYF5CSbQbTdkemoA5IknUFY7JGhhq9s6C4cc_-fbjooiQNrD6AhGT0kewUIVNdS2WY7b78-SGegy_5QZzbA/s320/Kochubey_Viktor_Pavlovich.jpg" width="269" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Ah, Lord Evan. What a honey! He’s had a bit of rough time of it: fought a duel twenty years earlier as a young man and apparently killed his man so was charged with murder, found guilty, and transported to Australia. Now he’s back in England for his own reasons and happens across Gus and Julia on one of their adventures. And when I say “happens across,” I mean he attempts to hold up their coach and Gus accidentally shoots him. However, he is exceptionally forgiving and so starts a wonderful partnership. His circumstances have forced him to live outside the privilege of his upbringing as the son of a marquess and so he is a rather appealing blend of gentleman and rogue.<br /><br /><b>In contrast, neither the twin’s brother, Lord Duffield, nor Evan’s, Lord Deele, could be considered at all delightful. Could you give us a brief description of them?</b><br /><br />To be very brief, Duffy is Mr. Pompous! He is very much a man of his time—literally titled and very much entitled. Since their father’s death, he is the head of the Colebrook family and he believes it is his right to control his unmarried sisters’ lives. As you can imagine, that does not sit well with Gus at all. Lord Deele is Lord Evan’s younger brother but through circumstances has inherited the family title and wealth and is guardian to their younger sister. He, too, feels that as head of the family he can control the women within it, with disastrous consequences. Both of these characters are emblematic of the misogyny of the period but also have their own needs and goals that, unfortunately, get in Gus’s way. And woe betide anyone who gets in Lady Augusta Colebrook’s way!</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><b>Sketch for us, please, the cases that occupy Augusta and Julia in this book.<br /><br /></b>Without giving too much away, I have structured the novel into three cases (a nod to the wonderful Conan Doyle), each with its own story, but each also part of the overarching story. The first case takes Gus and Julia to a country house to save a wife in dire peril. The second takes them to Cheltenham and a nefarious situation in a brothel. And the third case takes them to a heinous asylum. I call the novel a serious romp, because it is fun and full adventure but also deals with some of the darker aspects of the Regency period.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6QH5y4TKYK8BOvPJagVBA4_0k2n5xtYi9dKl6SdcqDo4aNM4dfx13sWvpBseSrOr4q1rICVbueBSySdsxYXL3i0eT_oA0TEeZFbZZ0Ezxi_-TlN3CVBzgxAiZyt2OtCyC_PNDzcb-RAhO5e-t3kKiDJaS6kgj686ReVxQGLtoM5q80I3Pr4w1wL5zVw/s489/Dickturpin.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="489" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6QH5y4TKYK8BOvPJagVBA4_0k2n5xtYi9dKl6SdcqDo4aNM4dfx13sWvpBseSrOr4q1rICVbueBSySdsxYXL3i0eT_oA0TEeZFbZZ0Ezxi_-TlN3CVBzgxAiZyt2OtCyC_PNDzcb-RAhO5e-t3kKiDJaS6kgj686ReVxQGLtoM5q80I3Pr4w1wL5zVw/s320/Dickturpin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>This novel leaves Lady Augusta with an uncompleted mission. Are you working on the next book now, and can you give us any hints about what to expect?</b><br /><br />I am, indeed, working on the next book and having as much fun with this one as I did while writing <i>The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies</i>. It’s another serious romp, this time with two longer cases rather than the three cases in the first book (yes, I’m having fun playing around with structure again!). Anything more, I think, would start to head into spoiler territory for the first book, so I will end by saying you can expect Gus and Julia to be just as resourceful, ill-mannered, and indomitable.<br /><br /><b>Thank you so much for answering my questions!<br /></b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOKtYWRB0lq7QgcnxVd8cv31vCgyzLMPraZc0SFJTy7PIKXDWzgxFqyDGHKCs6xRUl9LU4aeOLi6TfyRphlE1wLRsy2MdN7q_vpXyggxJEsLGpJh4QGUQW6LBllehspVXyU92fweUXKA5VKj6XXqhyy0FLIOXlVQnlnQ1SLmSuXx2Faaimy872uS7RkA/s2048/AlisonGoodman_cTaniaJovanovic.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1363" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOKtYWRB0lq7QgcnxVd8cv31vCgyzLMPraZc0SFJTy7PIKXDWzgxFqyDGHKCs6xRUl9LU4aeOLi6TfyRphlE1wLRsy2MdN7q_vpXyggxJEsLGpJh4QGUQW6LBllehspVXyU92fweUXKA5VKj6XXqhyy0FLIOXlVQnlnQ1SLmSuXx2Faaimy872uS7RkA/s320/AlisonGoodman_cTaniaJovanovic.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Alison Goodman is the award-winning author of eight novels—<i>The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies</i>, the <i>Dark Days Club</i> trilogy, the fantasy duology <i>EON</i> and <i>EONA</i>, <i>Singing the Dogstar Blues</i>, and <i>A New Kind of Death</i>. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. Find out more about her at <a href="https://www.alisongoodman.com.au/">https://www.alisongoodman.com.au/</a>.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Portrait of Alison Goodman © Tania Jovanovic. Images of Regency ladies, gentleman, and highwayman public domain via Wikimedia Commons.<br /></i></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-27865845014712626742023-05-19T09:00:00.010-04:002023-05-19T09:00:00.146-04:00Overlooked Women Artists<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc427sGlf3QnHY7YPjo3E5Gf97WTvmcB6d4GVioW33OjB3-KIp6-jPOqoRqzhbsBGHdcLRc0nrw_5PFGNi47YYYtX7azTa5_fEcgRL1jD-rAw890TVWNQeBaqIZrx1Tlc8hYqCq3akkc7w2l0AwG_OgZuydcXA11QGGiIDbXCpslB5V8WaYALBLxm09g/s2560/Friday-Night-Club.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc427sGlf3QnHY7YPjo3E5Gf97WTvmcB6d4GVioW33OjB3-KIp6-jPOqoRqzhbsBGHdcLRc0nrw_5PFGNi47YYYtX7azTa5_fEcgRL1jD-rAw890TVWNQeBaqIZrx1Tlc8hYqCq3akkc7w2l0AwG_OgZuydcXA11QGGiIDbXCpslB5V8WaYALBLxm09g/s320/Friday-Night-Club.jpg" width="205" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Although as a Russian specialist I had long known of the abstract art that became popular in the early twentieth century as part of the Bolshevik experiment, I hadn’t realized until I read this novel that the first abstract painters included a group of five Swedish women, three of whom—Hilma af Klint, Anna Cassel, and Cornelia Cederberg—were painters. <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Friday-Night-Club-Artist-Creative/dp/0593200497/" target="_blank">The Friday Night Club</a></i>—so called because the women met every Friday—counterposes the historical story and letters of the group with a contemporary timeline featuring Eben Elliott, an employee of the Guggenheim Museum charged with organizing an exhibit of Klint’s paintings. <br /><br />Like the Friday Night Club itself, the novel is a collaboration among three authors—Sofia Lundberg, Alyson Richman, and M.J. Rose. I was eager to find out more about both their subject and their writing process, so read on to find out what they have to say.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpKA7oowMdTc1jlt5HIgZXRwD6VJH0INLfOMdLyJAnGvYRhoosOB2xANaWelTbpiK-F3ZQjQOsystKOeg3WD74L6nBW7FDc9IHF4itnhiD329jOve5x3pZNP5y7ymHJilVzLIJJJGhcTZYDCtZNL80D5uhg9e42CNXBjK0ROqsNKhq-yEcixupeaiDYg/s800/Hilma-af-Klint.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpKA7oowMdTc1jlt5HIgZXRwD6VJH0INLfOMdLyJAnGvYRhoosOB2xANaWelTbpiK-F3ZQjQOsystKOeg3WD74L6nBW7FDc9IHF4itnhiD329jOve5x3pZNP5y7ymHJilVzLIJJJGhcTZYDCtZNL80D5uhg9e42CNXBjK0ROqsNKhq-yEcixupeaiDYg/s320/Hilma-af-Klint.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Although I’ve long known about Wasily Kandinsky, it was news to me that Hilma af Klint preceded him and the other, better-known abstract artists. Indeed, like one of your characters, I at first confused Klint with Gustave Klimt. What made you all want to write a novel about Hilma and her collaborators?</b><br /><br />The inspiration for our novel, <i>The Friday Night Club</i>, first came about after a visit to the Hilma af Klint exhibit, <i>Paintings for the Future</i>, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2019.<br /><br />At the museum, one of us noticed a small caption underneath a black-and-white photograph of Hilma that mentioned the artist had created a special group called the Friday Night Club, which consisted of her and four other women—Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Mathilda Nilsson, and Sigrid Hedman—who gathered each week to provide one another artistic and spiritual sustenance and often performed séances in an attempt to channel spirits to guide them in their work. None of the other four were mentioned anywhere else in the exhibit, and, as we later learned, for all intents and purposes, they have since been relegated to being just a footnote in the now famous and celebrated Hilma’s personal history. Immediately, the question of who these four women were began to simmer, and the idea of a novel started to unfold around our desire to discover more about them.<br /><br /><b>The three of you collaborated on this novel. The end product is seamless, but what was the experience of collaboration like? What pluses and minuses come from working together?</b><br /><br />It was actually seamless. While all three of us would divide and conquer our research—Sofia Lundberg in Sweden examining the journals and written materials of Hilma af Klint and Mathilda Nilsson in the Royal Swedish Archives, and Alyson Richman and M.J. Rose using materials written in English—we transcended the distance between us to work on a unified objective. We wanted to learn what drove these women to come together to seek higher knowledge and to pursue an artistic endeavor like <i>The Paintings for the Temple</i>, at a time when women had such few opportunities, outside of their traditional roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers. There really weren’t any minuses to the collaboration because we all had tremendous respect for each other as writers and we were always exchanging information we were uncovering through our research. Probably the only challenge was trying to make sure when we began working on each of our sections each morning that we retrieved the most current manuscript from Dropbox!<br /><br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizt7ZCeBTLo9vQ1gQIalRNV2OrkefqZN9djoPe-k-mmpfdafb5k3BtXR1cXyIqXF0qyGRFMmPb5QH559gSNlhR9L-sVzMyKWz2tNlHxZ7YPtJir5COCIfmsdd5JtpIJ0zOv9EVVyeALcOBH8d2l_q5ktBZKgApLqWh8ed2KtevIgb_ZfIteof8m9Hqww/s640/Eftersommar_Hilma_af_Klint_1903.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="640" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizt7ZCeBTLo9vQ1gQIalRNV2OrkefqZN9djoPe-k-mmpfdafb5k3BtXR1cXyIqXF0qyGRFMmPb5QH559gSNlhR9L-sVzMyKWz2tNlHxZ7YPtJir5COCIfmsdd5JtpIJ0zOv9EVVyeALcOBH8d2l_q5ktBZKgApLqWh8ed2KtevIgb_ZfIteof8m9Hqww/w400-h169/Eftersommar_Hilma_af_Klint_1903.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>How did you decide to counterpose the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century story of Hilma and her friends with a twenty-first-century (fictional) story about the (real) exhibit at the Guggenheim that inspired your work?</b><br /><br />Being an art lover usually means being curious about the shows themselves and how they’re curated—so we wanted to build upon those parallels. The idea of showing the creating of the modern-day exhibit was part of the idea from the beginning. Once we began doing our early research about the Friday Night Club, or De Fem as they called themselves, we realized there were serious questions about how the group helped Hilma. And it seemed only natural that those questions should be explored in the present-day storyline. <br /> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Spiritualism plays an important part in this novel, represented by the characters Mathilda and Sigrid. Could you talk a bit about that element and what, if anything, it meant for you as authors?</b><br /><br />At least one of us is heavily interested in spiritualism and we knew it had to play an essential part of the book once we learned through our research that every Friday night this group of creative women held séances in an effort to speak to the spirits and find artistic guidance and inspiration for their work.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6dOyy9IsPxyRH1IeCSxMJF0QODRsfBfooNhUR0fdcV49V7McI71j71cBP4gZbiNPi7KKStZkE4pNmaoISSYCB_RU2uYr08yNJG1cOVoOfH95LnDnZvRADa08jjzol-IpV7A3i5gQuXFhDX3XB8Hz_ATrNo6dm7_u82WbcTxkXPuy0l-uPTjCX29IfLQ/s1080/780px-Hilma_af_Klint,_1906-07,_Primordial_Chaos_-_No_16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="780" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6dOyy9IsPxyRH1IeCSxMJF0QODRsfBfooNhUR0fdcV49V7McI71j71cBP4gZbiNPi7KKStZkE4pNmaoISSYCB_RU2uYr08yNJG1cOVoOfH95LnDnZvRADa08jjzol-IpV7A3i5gQuXFhDX3XB8Hz_ATrNo6dm7_u82WbcTxkXPuy0l-uPTjCX29IfLQ/s320/780px-Hilma_af_Klint,_1906-07,_Primordial_Chaos_-_No_16.jpg" width="231" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Since Hilma, although underestimated, has still received more recognition than her fellow painters Anna Cassel and Cornelia Cederberg, could you tell us a bit about them?</b><br /><br />Anna Cassel and Cornelia Cederberg’s early artistic training mirrored Hilma’s. They both received artistic training in Slöjdskolan (now known as Konstfack), a premier art school in their teenage years, and this is actually where they met each other. After they graduated, only Anna and Hilma were accepted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, which was a very big milestone for a woman and aspiring artist in the nineteenth century. Anna leaned toward landscape painting, and from what we learned from our research and interviews with family members, she was perhaps more reserved than Hilma but still extremely determined to carve out a unique life for herself as an artist.<br /><br />We learned Cornelia also made a significant contribution within the group as she was responsible for making the automatic drawings during the Friday night séances. She also allegedly created many of the shapes that occur in Hilma’s paintings. <br /><br /><b>And what of the fictional Blythe and Eben Elliott? Could you give us a brief description of them and how their story parallels or contrasts with the lives of “The Five”?</b><br /><br />Eben and Blythe are both art historians and lovers in the past who attended graduate school together at the Courtauld in London. She is very engaged in spiritualism, and Eben doesn’t believe in it—and that is part of what drove them apart. In some ways we think their relationship will mirror some of our readers who will come to this story as skeptics but in the end might wonder if there is another realm out there. <br /><br /><b>Where do the three of you go next? Will there be more collaborations?</b><br /><br />We are each working on our own novels now but very much hope we can find another topic to collaborate on!<br /> <br /><b>Thank you so much for answering my questions!</b><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Images: </i>Photograph of Hilma af Klint (1895), <i>Late Summer</i> (1903) and <i>Primordial Chaos, no. 16</i> (1906–7) </span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">by Hilma af Klint—all public domain via Wikimedia Commons.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJDeN1JSI3KY92j3Y3SfLedlPdu_yqPitNl61iiMREqNTLtlaq0oCsAA67nsNBiGM3mlrMDoOaNyueDYctuCUW8WbwpTZqIZmuIfgkNgaDGzaec6A4p1ruHw0jN9EsdHQz5AnrKITwiuxPu1nsPo61jawE3zHTOYzctTvten7iuYDdNCj5zc3H3Ferag/s450/Sofia%20Lundberg%20-%20Author%20Photo%20(credit,%20Viktor%20Fremling).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJDeN1JSI3KY92j3Y3SfLedlPdu_yqPitNl61iiMREqNTLtlaq0oCsAA67nsNBiGM3mlrMDoOaNyueDYctuCUW8WbwpTZqIZmuIfgkNgaDGzaec6A4p1ruHw0jN9EsdHQz5AnrKITwiuxPu1nsPo61jawE3zHTOYzctTvten7iuYDdNCj5zc3H3Ferag/s320/Sofia%20Lundberg%20-%20Author%20Photo%20(credit,%20Viktor%20Fremling).jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Sofia Lundberg is an internationally bestselling author, journalist, and former magazine editor. Lundberg is the shining new star of Scandinavian fiction, translated into nearly forty languages. She lives in Stockholm with her son.<br /><br /> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm-5Gct3_r_eh0FKyIo_UFHPwqSpsTk4dMhrdvraBvm3HTh7ITMWMQ3P_KPZelZBriz_bfZa6c3MSPfkRG4RUf_wGgviVXpy3PRV2fUBJ7TFrt-I2oiWbPdD-OKhY51hVZPH9b5z2csKbVsIDmzcFbQigrtML1gFImcylrfT-wD02WyzZ2dDuOzVltOw/s450/Alyson%20Richman%20-%20Author%20Photo%20(credit,%20Jeanine%20Boubli%202018).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm-5Gct3_r_eh0FKyIo_UFHPwqSpsTk4dMhrdvraBvm3HTh7ITMWMQ3P_KPZelZBriz_bfZa6c3MSPfkRG4RUf_wGgviVXpy3PRV2fUBJ7TFrt-I2oiWbPdD-OKhY51hVZPH9b5z2csKbVsIDmzcFbQigrtML1gFImcylrfT-wD02WyzZ2dDuOzVltOw/s320/Alyson%20Richman%20-%20Author%20Photo%20(credit,%20Jeanine%20Boubli%202018).jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Alyson Richman is a <i>USA Today</i> and #1 international bestselling author. She is an accomplished painter, and her novels combine her deep loves of art, historical research, and travel. She lives on Long Island with her husband and two children.<br /><br /> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwXxnPDrde22-GvQfpSMfF2wd-pMZqUZtycm5wM8I8WZExlf0mr-B5rAVv73DWsuXRQJHMGsw_OTuHAo9fGhWmM2IaDGg-BiDPcgZtaVAWnnB5kLhXpW8Z1WbS2JDH_-Y9QLgdI2iVBTO8laPb6cldOXq03dobfYPt2S51wY3Jdw6BRl66Ea-F6tNLiw/s450/M.J.%20Rose%20-%20Author%20Photo%20(credit,%20Doug%20Scofield).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="392" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwXxnPDrde22-GvQfpSMfF2wd-pMZqUZtycm5wM8I8WZExlf0mr-B5rAVv73DWsuXRQJHMGsw_OTuHAo9fGhWmM2IaDGg-BiDPcgZtaVAWnnB5kLhXpW8Z1WbS2JDH_-Y9QLgdI2iVBTO8laPb6cldOXq03dobfYPt2S51wY3Jdw6BRl66Ea-F6tNLiw/s320/M.J.%20Rose%20-%20Author%20Photo%20(credit,%20Doug%20Scofield).jpg" width="279" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">M.J. Rose is a <i>New York Times</i> and <i>USA Today</i> bestselling author. She grew up in New York City exploring the labyrinthine galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the dark tunnels and lush gardens of Central Park.<br /><br /></span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-73180731588987786952023-05-12T09:00:00.001-04:002023-05-12T09:00:00.139-04:00Out of Ireland<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwyBLG7RMia1J8qi9vSanV6P9Lje7CVqmH9s3viqOhBWBTyo5eEEtyv519i1VNHMFLRo-0c3KFDzIj37cpJ6EBd0KaWlmFHRM6x3QGisASRhQoUQyvCkRRoI_mLItGN9vsEi4AKg3Isy4UkVJytP7JzvinoLyso6EU-Mc0A-GSi0jrfwkQo7LiFc_FCg/s2560/Out-Ireland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1662" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwyBLG7RMia1J8qi9vSanV6P9Lje7CVqmH9s3viqOhBWBTyo5eEEtyv519i1VNHMFLRo-0c3KFDzIj37cpJ6EBd0KaWlmFHRM6x3QGisASRhQoUQyvCkRRoI_mLItGN9vsEi4AKg3Isy4UkVJytP7JzvinoLyso6EU-Mc0A-GSi0jrfwkQo7LiFc_FCg/w260-h400/Out-Ireland.jpg" width="260" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">The United States, as people say, is a nation of immigrants. There have been waves of immigration from various parts of the world, as well as a shameful history of involuntary immigration, but—although some people like to deny this part—what most of us have in common is that our ancestors came from somewhere else.<br /><br />People don’t pick up and leave home unless driven by a need more powerful than the natural love of all things familiar. Poverty, hatred, fear, desperation, the yearning for a better life—these are natural sources of tension and drama. As <a href="https://www.marianosheawernicke.com" target="_blank">Marion O’Shea Wernicke</a> discusses in <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/out-of-ireland" target="_blank">our New Books Network interview</a>, she found inspiration in her grandmother’s story. Read on—and listen—to find out more.<br /><br />As always, the rest of this post comes from <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical fiction" target="_blank">New Books in Historical Fiction</a>.<br /><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqIkcuJIGkXCDtFX8y_VWUBsDav71YSNXBd97B8i8sH9Gh0VYpFiSaT4JPx2cwQiVj72f1de3o85nvGVe9Tr6M5yq8imqbb8s92evozBx1k1Woq5pfQeLV_C9eYtDO9C8vAUJV2LKoDZCLQtIAeWIdmAkRCyUz2MiUd5EwBfTg9KOOqJGXHqBAWIwasg/s3161/Emigrants_Leave_Ireland_by_Henry_Doyle_1868.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3161" data-original-width="2370" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqIkcuJIGkXCDtFX8y_VWUBsDav71YSNXBd97B8i8sH9Gh0VYpFiSaT4JPx2cwQiVj72f1de3o85nvGVe9Tr6M5yq8imqbb8s92evozBx1k1Woq5pfQeLV_C9eYtDO9C8vAUJV2LKoDZCLQtIAeWIdmAkRCyUz2MiUd5EwBfTg9KOOqJGXHqBAWIwasg/s320/Emigrants_Leave_Ireland_by_Henry_Doyle_1868.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Most people have heard of the Irish famine in 1848 and of the resistance movement against British sovereignty that consumed much of the twentieth century. In this attempt to understand her great-grandmother’s life, Marian O’Shea Wernicke examines the years between the famine and the Easter Rebellion of 1916. In the process, she creates a compelling tale of a young Irish girl, Mary Eileen O’Donovan, whose impoverished family forces her to marry a neighboring farmer in his forties when Eileen, as she’s known, has barely passed her sixteenth birthday.<br /><br />In material terms, it’s a good match, but it is not what Eileen wants from life. A bookish girl, she has ambitions of studying to become a teacher, but pressure from her family puts paid to those plans. Eileen grudgingly agrees to wed John Sullivan and does her best to make him a good wife. When she becomes pregnant, the couple’s newborn son unites them for a while, but John’s morose nature and frequent drunkenness make him a difficult man to love, especially for an idealistic girl.<br /><br />When the crops fail and Eileen’s younger brother falls foul of the Fenians, Eileen and John decide their only choice is to emigrate. But leaving Ireland turns out to carry a high price as well … </span><br /><p></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-10208320534561161342023-05-05T09:00:00.002-04:002023-05-05T09:00:00.145-04:00Interview with Shelley Noble<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6uW1lfuasBX4uLmVQzYEGdajZnekn5INOJ5jOUNUUQ0IkXXe91MlM7SmaQVUAsklq4-Ds63vakskt47TexI_zJKw7Ex8a0as7DXeYNhYm1FsBcwhZfywgK13u_H7jlWqaXQljYmr41DbNgJK6iL9rmI2t6pQ-Wb6ZPw5A1rOu1SgTb56e-vUnG5nxvA/s2400/Tiffany-Girls.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1594" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6uW1lfuasBX4uLmVQzYEGdajZnekn5INOJ5jOUNUUQ0IkXXe91MlM7SmaQVUAsklq4-Ds63vakskt47TexI_zJKw7Ex8a0as7DXeYNhYm1FsBcwhZfywgK13u_H7jlWqaXQljYmr41DbNgJK6iL9rmI2t6pQ-Wb6ZPw5A1rOu1SgTb56e-vUnG5nxvA/s320/Tiffany-Girls.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s 1899, and Louis Comfort Tiffany is preparing a series of dramatic artworks made of colored glass to show at the Paris World Exposition the next spring. His workshop is unusual by the standards of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: not only does he hire women artists, but he pays them at rates similar to those of his male employees. Shelley Noble’s new novel, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tiffany-Girls-Novel-Shelley-Noble/dp/0063252449/" target="_blank"><i>The Tiffany Girls</i></a>, due out on Tuesday, follows the intertwined stories of three of these women: Emilie Pascal, Grace Griffith, and the real-life Clara Driscoll—whose obituary was republished by the <i>New York Times</i> earlier this year. Shelley was kind enough to answer my questions, so read on to find out more.<br /><br /> </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>I noticed on your website that you have published, in addition to a lot of contemporary novels, a historical mystery series set in the early twentieth century. Did this lead into <i>The Tiffany Girls</i>, and if not, what did spark your interest in Tiffany and his female staff?<br /></b><br />My latest Gilded Age Manhattan series literally led me to the Tiffany Girls. I was researching turn-of-the-century (19th–20th) psychology for <i>A Secret Never Told</i>, which dealt with a group of particularly murderous psychoanalysts, when an article about the discovery of Clara Wolcott Driscoll’s family letters appeared in the feed. Being easily enticed into unexpected rabbit holes, I opened the link and read about the almost simultaneous discovery of two batches of her personal letters (1906) that shed light on this little-known department in the Louis C. Tiffany Glass Company and led to an exhibit and book titled <i>A New Light on Tiffany</i>. I was captivated. <i>The Tiffany Girls</i> became my next novel.<br /><br /><b>Emilie Pascal is the first of your women artists that we meet and the most troubled. How would you characterize her personality and her goals as an artist?<br /></b><br />Emilie is passionate and driven—passionate about art, about creativity, about life. But she has seen how passion can destroy, and she is determined to succeed in her art no matter what she must sacrifice.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo6qkgXrH7Y4ciKujazfAKnMTh26aLLJgUOuVc5E60x7K6LOWvnMFmFzgFpPFQ3nlrOO3SHYtY0Wh7Xkqfn-ZdzXnNaBIn2fVaewlqfJbDKTtOnqRO_MQUSGPT3bdxKW2NINSuefKrJK_pc8JoqVIZWpVQJI93OEAYolRwEI_AvTBvxE59KE17EIn5sw/s1080/811px-Paris_1889_plakat.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="811" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo6qkgXrH7Y4ciKujazfAKnMTh26aLLJgUOuVc5E60x7K6LOWvnMFmFzgFpPFQ3nlrOO3SHYtY0Wh7Xkqfn-ZdzXnNaBIn2fVaewlqfJbDKTtOnqRO_MQUSGPT3bdxKW2NINSuefKrJK_pc8JoqVIZWpVQJI93OEAYolRwEI_AvTBvxE59KE17EIn5sw/s320/811px-Paris_1889_plakat.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>And what takes Emilie away from Paris?</b><br /><br />Her father, a respected Parisian portrait painter, is abusive and is finally outed as a notorious art forger. He is sought by the police and Emilie knows she must reinvent herself far from the scandal if she is to realize her future as an artist. She has seen an exhibit of Tiffany’s glass works, has heard of his division of anonymous women artists, and determines to become one of them.<br /><br /><b>Grace Griffith helps Emilie out from the moment of their first meeting, but the two don’t entirely share the same goals. What does Grace want from life, and what stands in her way?</b><br /><br />Grace is down-to-earth with “the new woman” notions. She is fair and compassionate, and is one of the best drafters in the women’s division, but she aspires to be a political cartoonist and change society through her drawings. Of course, she can do this only under a pseudonym, because journalism is still a male domain. But one day …<br /><br /><b>Each of these young women has a male interested in her—indeed, Emilie has more than one. But both are reluctant to encourage romantic relationships. Why, and what can you tell us about Emilie’s Leland (and Amon) and Grace’s Charlie?</b><br /><br />Women of the time were just encountering widening work opportunities. “The new women” of the early twentieth century were interested in getting an education and pursuing a career, not only as teachers and nurses but as shop “girls,” typewriter “girls,” telephone “girls,” and so on. No married women need apply. And when a working girl became engaged or wed, she was immediately let go. Many of the girls at Tiffany’s were anxious to be married, but those who wanted careers had to make the decision to stay single. Grace and Emilie are both young, pretty, and intelligent, and they naturally attract young men. Charlie is older, a seasoned journalist, a bit world weary, but he sees Grace’s potential and nurtures her career. The glassblower Amon calls to Emilie’s passion, but she is afraid to allow him to get too close. Leland is cultured, rich, an art dealer who is charming and comfortable with an artistic eye. Of course, both men appeal to Emilie’s warring nature. But neither Grace nor Emilie is willing to sacrifice her goals by ceding them to matrimony.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPkYuetxiUJ2WkgmyT6xZcuNA-lmTZWLmnCYHSRuK50SJNq2N_0QXq7lLhUNp_A0IjiqgBuXHh41g0sxSAVkYtIdSiEls953cpUbz9jZPJfYHYhtPpE7EMRybKYYHNngHwPoVNwCeAnsVgx7yvMBfb1eXSiNU1c9sf91zmsSE9OQNIIjIzGcBGZMNhtw/s600/Clara_Driscoll_(Tiffany_glass_designer)_1901.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPkYuetxiUJ2WkgmyT6xZcuNA-lmTZWLmnCYHSRuK50SJNq2N_0QXq7lLhUNp_A0IjiqgBuXHh41g0sxSAVkYtIdSiEls953cpUbz9jZPJfYHYhtPpE7EMRybKYYHNngHwPoVNwCeAnsVgx7yvMBfb1eXSiNU1c9sf91zmsSE9OQNIIjIzGcBGZMNhtw/w400-h200/Clara_Driscoll_(Tiffany_glass_designer)_1901.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Clara Driscoll is the third of the Tiffany Girls to merit inclusion in your book description. She’s in a very different place in her life from Emilie, Grace, and their cohort, though. What’s most important for us to know about her?<br /></b><br />Clara was an actual person, the manager of the women’s division, but she was also an artist, responsible for some of Tiffany’s most iconic pieces. She did this, as did all the women, mostly without receiving personal recognition for her work. But from everything we know, she never resented Tiffany. It took several workers to complete a lamp or window or decorative item, a collaborative effort. But Tiffany was the driving genius of the work, and I like to think that his artists recognized that.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6WNds-PozvQ3nB4FfdBBQvV_ImB6ikp50lWoXApMDYre31eB9PfmdJtL6ma9smaSZbl-h5f2Xp_Lsb34T7E8NxYcF_AkvibfzgfpSOGnVlqibE5CrFe4j8kM5apQgOiK2CAext-fC7VJfJRvh0HaVhcOdZ5ZWJ5KwAXbk2lMSLhYsIevWDCfQYY3Z5g/s1536/Clara_Driscoll,_Dragonfly_Lamp,_ca._1900.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="1093" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6WNds-PozvQ3nB4FfdBBQvV_ImB6ikp50lWoXApMDYre31eB9PfmdJtL6ma9smaSZbl-h5f2Xp_Lsb34T7E8NxYcF_AkvibfzgfpSOGnVlqibE5CrFe4j8kM5apQgOiK2CAext-fC7VJfJRvh0HaVhcOdZ5ZWJ5KwAXbk2lMSLhYsIevWDCfQYY3Z5g/s320/Clara_Driscoll,_Dragonfly_Lamp,_ca._1900.jpg" width="228" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Last but not least, we have Louis Comfort Tiffany, who is simultaneously the center of the women’s working life and peripheral to their personal stories. Was he fun to write? What should we take away about him and his art?</b><br /><br />Tiffany himself was harder to write. He was definitely the center of his artists’ world; he is also a bit of an enigma. We have bits and pieces about him: he had to fight his father (the jeweler) constantly in order to be free to follow his own art. He was a philanthropist, loved the new automobiles and fast speed, was evidently a loving husband and father, and stuttered when he became upset. He did leave a few writings about art, and these helped me with his work and attitude to his art and artists. What I did imagine was that, most of all, besides being an artist and creator of brilliant works, he was also human.<br /><br /><b>And what of you? Are you already working on something else?</b><br /><br />I’m currently working on a new historical novel about three women who in the early 1900s must overcome scandal, the male patriarchy of New York society, the overbearing morality of the times, and their own preconceptions about each other to establish the first women's only club in Manhattan.<br /> <br /><b>Thank you so much for answering my questions!</b><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRn9rZkEVvXxP38LabpWL7dCyZ2D8PkYlywVHt0Rw8kAO3nNM92L7v9HXUjsOWwrCK-VWhemeoBcepL73P6-dwzUMznHRTeA0yN_Xks_peuOk8-X0Z5tmoB7N-4Gas7u7qsZUFRfubwbyFchG6Xarc0rR5-TkrYDHdyhJt3VP6pUNru54OfSBxmcI95A/s402/Shelley-Noble.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRn9rZkEVvXxP38LabpWL7dCyZ2D8PkYlywVHt0Rw8kAO3nNM92L7v9HXUjsOWwrCK-VWhemeoBcepL73P6-dwzUMznHRTeA0yN_Xks_peuOk8-X0Z5tmoB7N-4Gas7u7qsZUFRfubwbyFchG6Xarc0rR5-TkrYDHdyhJt3VP6pUNru54OfSBxmcI95A/s320/Shelley-Noble.jpg" width="239" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Shelley Noble is the <i>New York Times</i> and <i>USA Today</i> bestselling author of sixteen novels of historical fiction, historical mystery, and contemporary women’s fiction—most recently, <i>The Tiffany Girls</i>. Find out more about her at <a href="https://www.shelleynoble.com">https://www.shelleynoble.com</a>.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><i>Images:</i> poster for the 1889 <i>Exposition universelle de Paris</i>, photographs of Clara Driscoll in 1901 and of her famed Dragonfly lamp all public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Photograph of Shelley Noble from the author’s website.<br /></span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-78282710392351367342023-04-28T09:00:00.001-04:002023-04-28T09:00:00.148-04:00Interview with Olga Wojtas<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGBHAlcNMET9LlQmwJzNSjGgdyC6DZ1EXpZuuafuLnrqFDF7Btz6O5Vh8gtDp4CM-iXQuPFkIsIYngUCUFvaOXJ6NKbQyHSGyzH_byroiczvbjvmruapdnC_olZXTyZ_OVDlabgucbdMULQeO-M1TsU9EMfy3dLxb7zMd7_IB9APi5GEUUteYBU8wCrg/s2400/Miss-Blaines-Prefect3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1650" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGBHAlcNMET9LlQmwJzNSjGgdyC6DZ1EXpZuuafuLnrqFDF7Btz6O5Vh8gtDp4CM-iXQuPFkIsIYngUCUFvaOXJ6NKbQyHSGyzH_byroiczvbjvmruapdnC_olZXTyZ_OVDlabgucbdMULQeO-M1TsU9EMfy3dLxb7zMd7_IB9APi5GEUUteYBU8wCrg/s320/Miss-Blaines-Prefect3.jpg" width="220" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">A time-traveling Scottish librarian with a chip on her shoulder because the school she proudly attended (the Marcia Blaine School for Girls) was panned in <i>The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie</i> and a feminist philosophy that she does her best to inflict on a past where it is very much unwelcome—who could resist such a heroine? Certainly not me. Olga Wojtas’s tongue-in-cheek approach to history—a trait she shares with her main character, Shona McMonagle—makes a nice change from the more serious historical fiction that so often crosses my path. I have yet to read the second novel, </span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B58CLSP1" target="_blank">Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace</a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">, but I have read the first and the third.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blaines-Prefect-Samovar-Prefects-Adventures-ebook/dp/B08WQ42G6M/" target="_blank">Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar</a></i> (book 1) takes place in the Russian Empire on a date that is never specified but can be deduced from clues in the text. Shona knows she has a mission, but not what it is, and much of the action involves her swanning about St. Petersburg high society trying to figure it out before her assigned week ends and she is summoned back to contemporary Edinburgh in disgrace. It’s all very lighthearted, especially the contrast between Shona’s view of her own near-omnipotence and the reality that lies right under her nose.<br /><br />Book 3, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BRFVYP41" target="_blank"><i>Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Weird Sisters</i></a>, has just come out. For this one, Shona remains in Scotland but travels far into the past, where she encounters Macbeth. Yes, <i>that</i> Macbeth. Also Lady Macbeth, King Duncan, the three witches—I could go on, but you get the idea. There’s even a cat with three names, in an unspoken but, I assume, not unintended nod to T.S. Eliot. To celebrate her latest publication, Olga Wojtas agreed to answer my written questions, so read on to find out more about Shona and her various missions.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span></p><p><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This is the third novel featuring your time-traveling librarian, Shona McMonagle. What was your inspiration for this series?</span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> <br /></span></span></b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivtAWWa3cg2EMOypDvTe_CMgWtenI2x-clnkevtRm6oBVBL3rF-SUy3WcNaAYeRSgDmPkrfasxwnXkjpz12P7fHgRsNlS0Rrv4clroDx1FHtAwkgug0BzmIu9F8z7YWZNJY2T_r1WQMvXlIvug5m_7vgWCEVignT1KMPStHQXcTn5tdmVr1LHz7h_cVg/s2400/Miss-Blaines-Prefect1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1650" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivtAWWa3cg2EMOypDvTe_CMgWtenI2x-clnkevtRm6oBVBL3rF-SUy3WcNaAYeRSgDmPkrfasxwnXkjpz12P7fHgRsNlS0Rrv4clroDx1FHtAwkgug0BzmIu9F8z7YWZNJY2T_r1WQMvXlIvug5m_7vgWCEVignT1KMPStHQXcTn5tdmVr1LHz7h_cVg/s320/Miss-Blaines-Prefect1.jpg" width="220" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I’m a journalist and a news junkie and was getting stressed out by current events, so I decided to write a comic romp where the reader could relax knowing that everything would work out and there was no jeopardy. Normally there’s character development in novels, with the protagonist going on a literal or metaphorical journey. I don’t have anything like that—my heroine is exactly the same at the end of her missions as at the beginning and has learned nothing. A great influence was P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster books, where Bertie constantly gets into terrible scrapes and has to be bailed out by Jeeves. <br /><br /><b>Shona goes first to tsarist Russia and then to fin-de-siècle France. How do you pick your settings?</b><br /><br />I studied Russian and developed a love of its literature, especially Tolstoy. That was the inspiration for the first novel because I could steal some scenes: the grand ball; the duel in the forest; the drama involving a train. The second novel was inspired by the time I lived in Grenoble in France, which is in a valley surrounded by mountains. It had a vampire theme, and I imagined a French village surrounded by mountains so high that the sun never reached it. There’s a vampiric link with Aberdeenshire in Scotland, which led me to introduce a real person, the Scottish-American opera star Mary Garden. She became Debussy’s muse in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, which suggested the time period. <br /><br /></span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrsVMNnAWOyHZD8J_1H-tBULOXq5dfjbveUjtTKrSfgJpMZHyp4rwtSKDrFcWRCKyFyStGfu8BSwgGsukIJ4kI5z6Iw1PQwZXeMYeeZXsLhEQeS-MY7IIYpSgWQEQ6l1Uu17gyA7xDBMw9Lwu6eMUuL2skzGEjFeM4uxlM461hoUUqlbwti9qNtMcaww/s2400/Miss-Blaines-Prefect2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1650" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrsVMNnAWOyHZD8J_1H-tBULOXq5dfjbveUjtTKrSfgJpMZHyp4rwtSKDrFcWRCKyFyStGfu8BSwgGsukIJ4kI5z6Iw1PQwZXeMYeeZXsLhEQeS-MY7IIYpSgWQEQ6l1Uu17gyA7xDBMw9Lwu6eMUuL2skzGEjFeM4uxlM461hoUUqlbwti9qNtMcaww/s320/Miss-Blaines-Prefect2.jpg" width="220" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Before we get to the current novel, tell us a bit about the Marcia Blaine School for Girls and its proprietor. And how does <i>The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie</i> get in there?</b><br /><br />The Marcia Blaine School for Girls is where Miss Brodie teaches in Muriel Spark’s novel, <i>The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie</i>. It was based on James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh, Scotland, the school Dame Muriel attended and where I went as well. I’ve fictionalized the school even further, giving it the motto <i>Cremor cremoris</i>, the crème de la crème. My heroine, Shona, is appalled by Dame Muriel’s novel, which she believes has brought the school into disrepute. A librarian in Edinburgh’s Morningside Library, she spends her time preventing the book falling into the hands of readers. One day the school’s founder, Miss Blaine herself (who Shona calculates must be over two hundred years old but appears to be a woman in her prime, like Miss Brodie) turns up in the library, and Shona finds herself sent on a time-traveling mission. The aim of every Blainer is to make the world a better place, and time traveling means they can make previous worlds better as well. <br /><br /><b>From the title of this novel, it’s pretty clear that Shona will meet Macbeth and the three witches. What is her mission, to the extent that she knows herself?</b><br /><br />It has to be said that Shona rarely, if ever, has a proper grasp of what her mission is. She occasionally muses that it would be easier if there were written instructions, but this usually results in a pain in her big toe as though someone has trodden on it very hard, so she tries not to complain too audibly. In this instance, she knows that Shakespeare’s <i>Macbeth</i> is historically inaccurate but finds events panning out in such a way as to suggest they’re following the play. She’s afraid that this may change the whole course of history, so she decides that her mission must be to prevent King Duncan being murdered when he comes to stay with the Macbeths. <br /><br /><b>Your three witches are, shall we say, a little more approachable than their Shakespearean counterparts. Describe for us, please, Ina, Mina, and Mo.</b><br /><br />They’re sisters, Ina being the eldest and Mo the youngest. Ina and Mina always talk in verse, catalectic trochaic tetrameter to be precise. (Think of the Shakespeare version: “When shall we three meet again? / In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”) Unfortunately, Mo has never mastered poetry, and her two big sisters constantly mock her for this failing. They also tell her she’s a rubbish witch, but when there’s a genuine crisis, it turns out that family is the most important thing. <br /><br /><b>Another character we meet early on is a black cat known alternately as Hemlock, Spot, and Frank. Please say a bit about him and his multiple identities.</b><br /><br />He’s a typical cat in that he’s conned two households into thinking that he belongs to them, so that he gets fed twice. He mooches between the witches’ cavern, where Mo has named him Hemlock, and Glamis Castle, where Lady Macbeth has named him Spot because of the white spot on his chest. However, he explains to Shona that he’s not actually a cat but an inadvertent time traveler called Frank, who can’t stand William Shakespeare. <br /><b><br />Shona does, in due course, meet Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. What should we know about them in your rendering of the tale?</b><br /><br />First of all, that there’s no such person as Lady Macbeth. Her real name was Gruoch, which is the name I use. Second, she and her husband speak Scottish Gaelic—his name literally means “son of life.” They’re a devoted couple, although she’s very definitely the one in charge. He does what he’s told, or at least he tries to. She usually has to sort things out. <br /><br /><b>I assume that Shona will embark on additional missions. Do you know where Miss Blaine will send her next?</b><br /><br />I do. <br /><br />Ah, were you looking for a bit more? In that case, I can exclusively reveal that the title of the next episode may well include the word “gondola.”<br /> <br /><b>Thank you so much for answering my questions!</b><br /><br />A great pleasure—thank you!<br /><br /><i>Olga Wojtas is the author of the Miss Blaine’s Prefect series and of cosy crime novellas. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.</i><br /></span><br /><br /><br /><p></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-38115916342243320432023-04-21T09:00:00.001-04:002023-04-21T09:00:00.174-04:00Long Shadows<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBxlXM6N_hiEJY3sZHwxFjnLe7MpdwcSAbIA6JL7P5oJk_Lq7tfO0vDTk6XGVhEytfVSF2vWiU1i06HTPX-GQTOUGRREgO-HS3B19AJNUB9xaNqp5OHUy7u4-oUBd7JCMVCIIo_nflMP-aez-98J_CSL6wUrkzg7d2xaach97l9zIROTXm-5jwdka41Q/s2560/StCyr18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1695" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBxlXM6N_hiEJY3sZHwxFjnLe7MpdwcSAbIA6JL7P5oJk_Lq7tfO0vDTk6XGVhEytfVSF2vWiU1i06HTPX-GQTOUGRREgO-HS3B19AJNUB9xaNqp5OHUy7u4-oUBd7JCMVCIIo_nflMP-aez-98J_CSL6wUrkzg7d2xaach97l9zIROTXm-5jwdka41Q/s320/StCyr18.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">As anyone who read <a href="http://blog.cplesley.com/2022/04/interview-with-cs-harris.html" target="_blank">my written interview with C.S. Harris</a> to celebrate last year’s release of <i>When Blood Lies</i>, the previous installment in this gritty historical mystery series set during the second half of the Napoleonic Wars, must realize, I am a hard-core fan of the Sebastian St. Cyr novels.<br /><br />A large part of my enjoyment comes from following the maturation of Sebastian himself, as well as his relationships with various family members and love interests. But there are many other recurring characters—Hero Jarvis and her father; the actress Kat Boleyn; the Earl of Hendon, forever befuddled and somewhat appalled by the unconventional behavior of his heir; the Dowager Duchess of Claiborne; the pain-riddled surgeon Paul Gibson and, most recently, his live-in lover and fellow physician Alexi Sauvage—whose development I eagerly follow. So when I learned that another book in the series was in the works, I actively pursued the opportunity to <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/who-cries-for-the-lost" target="_blank">feature the author on my New Books Network</a> channel.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And the result was a wonderful conversation about how a young woman who set out to be an archaeologist wound up writing historical mysteries set in the 1810s. Read on—and most of all, listen—to find out more, including a hint as to what to expect from the next installment, <i>What Cannot Be Said</i>.<br /><br />The rest of this post comes from <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical-fiction" target="_blank">New Books in Historical Fiction</a>.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Fans of Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, know that the individual tales that form his saga combine complex, fast-paced, often political mysteries with a series of revelations about his family’s history that it would be churlish to reveal. All this takes place against the background of the Napoleonic Wars, mostly in Regency-era London with its vast social gap between the aristocratic rich and the starving, crime-ridden poor.<br /><br />The eighteenth of Sebastian’s adventures, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cries-Lost-Sebastian-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B0B5SRZPSH/" target="_blank"><i>Who Cries for the Lost</i></a>, begins a few days before the Battle of Waterloo, a cataclysmic event—unknown to the characters, obviously—that will end Napoleon’s military ambitions once and for all. A mutilated body is fished out of the Thames River and taken to Paul Gibson—a friend of Sebastian’s who served as a surgeon during the Peninsular War—for an autopsy. When Paul’s lover identifies the victim as her former husband and an aristocrat, the creaky wheels of the London policing system grind into gear. The Thames River Police may provide as much hope for justice as the costermongers and wherry boatmen of the city deserve, but a nobleman falls under the jurisdiction of Bow Street.<br /><br />As the number of corpses rises and pressure from the Prince Regent in Carlton House intensifies, Sebastian must race to solve a series of baffling, seemingly disconnected murders before the outcry demanding a solution leads to the arrest and execution of his friends. Meanwhile, the country anxiously awaits reports from the Duke of Wellington’s army on the Continent, further stoking the tension, even as Sebastian confronts the reality of his nation’s past misdeeds during the war and wonders whether those atrocities explain the crimes being committed in the present.</span></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-32298811125763256202023-04-14T09:00:00.002-04:002023-04-14T09:00:00.165-04:00Bookshelf, Spring 2023<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjjQdokbe00xDPEQYTA9ALnsl-PS9N9Dm0DmrLDpo6AHFKQbhWlvn3Zv-rOlyGKvkbYT-TeYNNEozOWjCKxXJxwfc4mjFu5GlRecc9tKwrIHro-HbSRp88BV4NszMrU33i01Iw0xVT2Q4P46MdjKyE7tPbbMKWv6GDvaE2afV1u--4wSZHLbQhCEyJKA/s2105/Intrigue-Istanbul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2105" data-original-width="1400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjjQdokbe00xDPEQYTA9ALnsl-PS9N9Dm0DmrLDpo6AHFKQbhWlvn3Zv-rOlyGKvkbYT-TeYNNEozOWjCKxXJxwfc4mjFu5GlRecc9tKwrIHro-HbSRp88BV4NszMrU33i01Iw0xVT2Q4P46MdjKyE7tPbbMKWv6GDvaE2afV1u--4wSZHLbQhCEyJKA/w133-h200/Intrigue-Istanbul.jpg" width="133" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">What follows is just a few of the many books that have recently been or are still on my bookshelf for the spring. I’d also like to remind you of Erica Neubauer’s <i>Intrigue in Istanbul</i>, which I included in my winter list although it came out just last week. Other Spring 2023 highlights include Molly Greeley’s <i>Marvelous</i>, Sherry Thomas’s <i>Tempest at Sea</i>, Kristen Loesch’s <i>The Last Russian Doll</i>, and C.S. Harris’s <i>Who Cries for the Lost</i>—all covered (or due soon to be covered) elsewhere on this blog.<br /><br />And now, on to the May and June novels I have been enjoying. All forthcoming books this time around, although I've made my way through a fair number of older novels as well in the last few months.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV2JwpSyzUl0ss_Y3bYZDh5lSImKa93O1ILQg6BofDp4-cV_sGYsaNxHp2QNERfmahJz6kH4Ty19KEKBK0yufvPulD9iweWRibpFy_9aqHjFqImbs400EyX-wwU_dzMuoYXNo-0Sv_4LfoyvWq2CHPtmTVI4hjOlpFLEUrA549sevY7ycSlXIdrd2OHQ/s1501/Morgan-McBride.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1501" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgV2JwpSyzUl0ss_Y3bYZDh5lSImKa93O1ILQg6BofDp4-cV_sGYsaNxHp2QNERfmahJz6kH4Ty19KEKBK0yufvPulD9iweWRibpFy_9aqHjFqImbs400EyX-wwU_dzMuoYXNo-0Sv_4LfoyvWq2CHPtmTVI4hjOlpFLEUrA549sevY7ycSlXIdrd2OHQ/s320/Morgan-McBride.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Amy Barry, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Marrying-Off-Morgan-McBride-Barry-ebook/dp/B0BCL5KJ2H/" target="_blank">Marrying Off Morgan McBride </a></i><br />(Berkley, 2023)<br />This classic historical romance matches Epiphany Hopgood, better known as Pip, with Morgan McBride—a free-ranging cowhand who has been stuck for years on a farm in Montana looking after his younger siblings. Pip, a fabulous cook whose outward appearance fails to attract the men of Joshua, Nebraska, answers an ad for a mail-order bride, not realizing that the person who placed the ad was not the intended groom but his young sister, Junebug, desperate for help in the kitchen. <br /><br />When the truth comes out, Pip insists on staying, because the alternative is to return to a place where she’s never felt wanted. And sparks fly, both angry and passionate, as a result. As with all romance novels, we have a pretty good idea of where things will end up, but the road to get there is long and winding, and the antics of the irrepressible Junebug will keep you laughing along the way. You can find out more from my blog Q&A with the author on June 2, just after the book’s release.<br /><br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbfQCHJEU5ONnmvd7XE6k-56hIJ5NMqpsqPZwhGyN7LK7Iq1GG92-27s5LBEG3o1miI_DWe0ieDvDgCeHbqr4Fjlacjw2arODnKcFL775YX6wRQp5VvQXYBa_s7gffbu-mZt5USZGDGu_7lgupvi1CXb9JJRAeXdvO3KoIfCtLlVMeNV1K4fhDmEzbwA/s2560/Killingly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1707" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbfQCHJEU5ONnmvd7XE6k-56hIJ5NMqpsqPZwhGyN7LK7Iq1GG92-27s5LBEG3o1miI_DWe0ieDvDgCeHbqr4Fjlacjw2arODnKcFL775YX6wRQp5VvQXYBa_s7gffbu-mZt5USZGDGu_7lgupvi1CXb9JJRAeXdvO3KoIfCtLlVMeNV1K4fhDmEzbwA/s320/Killingly.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Katharine Beutner, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Killingly-Katharine-Beutner-ebook/dp/B0BDDLKL1W/" target="_blank"><i>Killingly</i></a> (Soho Press, 2023)<br />As a Mount Holyoke alumna, I couldn’t resist this psychological suspense novel based on the true-life disappearance of Bertha Mellish, a student, from the campus in 1897. As the author notes in the book, the result is deeply fictionalized—it would have to be, given that the real case was never solved and the little hard evidence that remains of what happened is tantalizing but not conclusive—but that doesn’t make the story any less compelling. On the contrary, Beutner fleshes out the bare bones of the incident, delving into Bertha’s past in Killingly, Connecticut, as well as her relationship with Agnes Sullivan, a would-be doctor from a poor Boston family who has been forced to conceal her Catholic upbringing to gain admission to the college. Through the overlapping stories of Agnes, the missing girl’s sister Florence, Dr. Henry Hammond, and the inspector whom Hammond hires to find Bertha, Katharine Beutner keeps us on the edge of our seats as she unravels their tangle of secrets and lies. I’ll be talking with her on the New Books Network in time for the novel’s release in early June.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI72YW7Qa8gzOfxykfz2haRXsM_apAF9hMQRX8w5w6z_jJ_Ql7Ry60-hTCmFzCDFjZulyg51b4RRz64Ov65AnxXDdKKfZXw_Rzi2ieLU2fCp9mJ_ojhl5vNFm8Xo40xWKSimZg3GfWO8mTQx6KhZgPtTYFHkWk5MjDmBEz3u8O-h2zk99J4qLQSGNMsQ/s2560/Friday-Night-Club.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI72YW7Qa8gzOfxykfz2haRXsM_apAF9hMQRX8w5w6z_jJ_Ql7Ry60-hTCmFzCDFjZulyg51b4RRz64Ov65AnxXDdKKfZXw_Rzi2ieLU2fCp9mJ_ojhl5vNFm8Xo40xWKSimZg3GfWO8mTQx6KhZgPtTYFHkWk5MjDmBEz3u8O-h2zk99J4qLQSGNMsQ/s320/Friday-Night-Club.jpg" width="205" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Sofia Lundberg, Alyson Richman, and M.J. Rose, <br /><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Friday-Night-Club-Artist-Creative-ebook/dp/B0B9W5GDL3/" target="_blank">The Friday Night Club</a></i> (Berkley, 2023)<br />This co-written novel explores the lives of a little-known group of Swedish abstract painters. Three of the five—Hilma af Klint, Anna Cassel, and Cornelia Cederberg—were artists who drew their inspiration from the seances conducted by the other two during their regular Friday meetings. For reasons explained in the novel, the women’s artworks received so little recognition in their time that Klint secreted her paintings, stipulating that they could be viewed only twenty years after her death. <br /><br />This story is interlaced with a contemporary timeline featuring Eben Elliott, an employee of the Guggenheim Museum in New York charged with organizing an exhibit of Klint’s paintings—a choice that brings him face to face with his own past. Even more impressive than the interweaving of these disparate story threads is the collaboration of the novel’s three authors. Like their nineteenth-century counterparts, they have created a single, seamless work of art. They will be answering my written questions on the blog the Friday after their book’s release on May 16.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT7Jhcd0bQUazqU8nlFCvaNPOFZGJuqlPyqEO-M98Ng0xnTG9wXBXRy3-d2j0lMmwsCiLAMQSpbMh4hXi9b9-MoCsX_Hr-wSufNbCCI9KgZi7NcqWiAjNrNPc2Ok3mqNna4jFeGY4Xl7sax0vmka0LRzJw7pF5RK_gvUI3hcne1tFbWLRVT5bL81Cdig/s2400/Tiffany-Girls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1594" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT7Jhcd0bQUazqU8nlFCvaNPOFZGJuqlPyqEO-M98Ng0xnTG9wXBXRy3-d2j0lMmwsCiLAMQSpbMh4hXi9b9-MoCsX_Hr-wSufNbCCI9KgZi7NcqWiAjNrNPc2Ok3mqNna4jFeGY4Xl7sax0vmka0LRzJw7pF5RK_gvUI3hcne1tFbWLRVT5bL81Cdig/s320/Tiffany-Girls.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Shelly Noble, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tiffany-Girls-Novel-Shelley-Noble-ebook/dp/B0BCGF2BVR/" target="_blank">The Tiffany Girls</a></i> <br />(William Morrow, 2023)<br />We tend to think of Tiffany’s as a jewelry store, but its founder, Louis Comfort Tiffany, was perhaps best known for his dramatic artworks composed of colored glass. He was also unusual in that he both hired women artists and paid them the same rates as men. This novel juxtaposes the stories of three “Tiffany Girls,” as they were called at the time: Emilie Pascal, who flees France to escape possible criminal charges accrued by her abusive father, an art forger; Grace Griffith, who enjoys the security of her work at Tiffany’s but yearns to use her talents in producing political cartoons for the local papers; and Clara Driscoll, the real-life director of the women’s division and an artist in her own right. The result is a rich portrayal of working-class life in New York around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Shelly Noble will be answering my questions here on the blog in just a few weeks, after her novel comes out on May 9.<br /><br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitIl9UZrH_xzTp4Pd8FiQij1M6Aahz4bCTuUVbJSjbU9QWEixZVHIYreirZRZhN6vlpFvq8_8axgCuT1ye-ivj9V_U2VnK593osC3B5_afkxXEgRrDChEmA5O96Vh5itnoTU8AO6SEcMrFqwLmJeO25Sj7ff-r5FpJGpbljMe6SXISmamq3qu4t-BWtg/s2550/Seeing-Garden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2550" data-original-width="1650" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitIl9UZrH_xzTp4Pd8FiQij1M6Aahz4bCTuUVbJSjbU9QWEixZVHIYreirZRZhN6vlpFvq8_8axgCuT1ye-ivj9V_U2VnK593osC3B5_afkxXEgRrDChEmA5O96Vh5itnoTU8AO6SEcMrFqwLmJeO25Sj7ff-r5FpJGpbljMe6SXISmamq3qu4t-BWtg/s320/Seeing-Garden.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Ginny Kubitz Moyer, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Garden-Ginny-Kubitz-Moyer-ebook/dp/B0B8H7M7MM/" target="_blank">The Seeing Garden</a></i> <br />(She Writes Press, 2023)<br />Nineteen-year-old Catherine Ogden appears to have everything: youth, wealth, birth, breeding, and beauty. No one in New York high society is surprised when she attracts the attention of William Brandt, an up-and-coming business tycoon from California. It’s 1910, and the job of women like Catherine is to marry well and make their families proud.<br /><br />After a visit to the Brandt estate near San Francisco, Catherine accepts William’s proposal of marriage. But is it William himself who appeals to her, or his house and gardens? As the wedding day draws closer, Catherine must decide whether to fulfill her own expectations of marriage or those of her family.<br /><br />The author’s descriptions of the landscape and its effect on Catherine are exquisite. I look forward to talking with her about both her setting and her richly realized characters on the New Books Network in July. The novel, though, will come out in May. <br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcGLARZSTfdHvfT9poGkN_IFq_l8waffhYnZxUTgz4QAbD73w4XVlC3_zdl4YlfUKhRm9Q4CAeDboT_YMxMxlBSw_V1KOxRo6JzbgEE-juOwq0vHmFh3fj6dCIpUCk0WCnapRRS-rW7PTApNwkc3o8XIMG6KicU-j6JgcP1asbdB8Y8ONcfSOqAzRhug/s2560/Out-Ireland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1662" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcGLARZSTfdHvfT9poGkN_IFq_l8waffhYnZxUTgz4QAbD73w4XVlC3_zdl4YlfUKhRm9Q4CAeDboT_YMxMxlBSw_V1KOxRo6JzbgEE-juOwq0vHmFh3fj6dCIpUCk0WCnapRRS-rW7PTApNwkc3o8XIMG6KicU-j6JgcP1asbdB8Y8ONcfSOqAzRhug/s320/Out-Ireland.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Marian O’Shea Wernicke, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Out-Ireland-Marian-OShea-Wernicke-ebook/dp/B0B8H4BNG4/" target="_blank">Out of Ireland</a></i> <br />(She Writes Press, 2023)<br />This fictional look at the US immigrant experience in the late nineteenth century follows the life of a young Irish girl, Mary Eileen O’Donovan, whose impoverished family forces her into marriage when Eileen, as she’s known, has barely passed her sixteenth birthday. Giving up her ambitions to become a teacher, Eileen tries to be a good wife to John Sullivan, her much older husband. When the crops fail and her younger brother falls foul of the Fenians, she and John decide their only choice is to emigrate. After considerable effort, they reach the United States, only to discover that their troubles are just beginning. Find out more by listening to my New Books Network with the author, due in mid-May.<br /><br /></span><br /><p></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-59124174233334887282023-04-07T09:00:00.001-04:002023-04-07T09:00:00.161-04:00You Want Murder with That?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4TQBS7nVIYup_uvp2SosZ6Zib8LirVECsUTZeyIv6QfruOObjbnAEdm5d2u2vL0evuyX96GI4cR9nINVdvtpR1lTHJNEOdSptO2prrA1-fPdaJPH5Pq0DZ2oS_Vg0PJFlxxBJ-IAQwmft9Blj-EG2iUn21GEYb4d1SSwY31xMDSHvY5GPeVB8JQ7aBQ/s1360/Charred.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: georgia; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="893" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4TQBS7nVIYup_uvp2SosZ6Zib8LirVECsUTZeyIv6QfruOObjbnAEdm5d2u2vL0evuyX96GI4cR9nINVdvtpR1lTHJNEOdSptO2prrA1-fPdaJPH5Pq0DZ2oS_Vg0PJFlxxBJ-IAQwmft9Blj-EG2iUn21GEYb4d1SSwY31xMDSHvY5GPeVB8JQ7aBQ/s320/Charred.jpg" width="210" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">A couple of months ago, I wrote about the joys and discomforts of switching sides and <a href="http://blog.cplesley.com/2023/02/the-other-side-of-desk.html" target="_blank">talking about my own books on the New Books Network</a> rather than asking questions of other people. </span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Here I’m back in my familiar chair, talking with <a href="https://www.gpgottlieb.com/" target="_blank">G.P. Gottlieb</a> about the latest of her Whipped and Sipped Mysteries, a fun contemporary series featuring the amateur detective Alene Baron and her police officer boyfriend, Frank, who solves murders for a living.<br /><br />One thing I love about this series—in addition to the recipes at the end of each volume—is that Alene’s life inside and outside the café she owns are just as important to the story as the crime of the moment. For someone whose main preoccupations are taking care of her kids, her ailing father, and her employees, this seems very true to life. Murder is both horrifying and compelling, but for Alene solving one is at best a fascinating distraction—one that Frank and her family and friends often urge her to leave to the professionals. Read on—and listen to the interview—to find out more about Alene’s latest case.<br /><br />As usual, the rest of this post comes from the <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/charred" target="_blank">New Books Network</a>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br />In <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Charred-Whipped-Sipped-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0BLMFHSQX/" target="_blank"><i>Charred</i></a>, the third of G.P. Gottlieb’s Whipped and Sipped Mysteries, her heroine, Alene Baron, has a lot on her mind. Chicago is in lockdown, a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, complicating Alene’s already hectic life. The vegan café she owns can serve only takeout, and her three kids complain constantly about school via Zoom and the near-absence of opportunities to interact with their friends. Alene’s ex-husband is, as ever, no help. Her aging father also requires assistance, a reality complicated when his usual caretaker falls ill with the virus. Alene struggles to find time even to visit the café, never mind bake. But with her livelihood at stake, she must keep showing up, no matter how many conflicting demands tug her in other directions.<br /><br />On the up side, Alene’s romance with Frank, a police officer, is progressing—although they have yet to make the relationship permanent. And conflict among her staff members has eased, even though they still argue about the best approach to the pandemic and the homeless man who regularly stations himself outside the café and insults staff and customers as they go in and out, among other issues. <br /><br />All that changes when Kofi, the boyfriend of a Whipped and Sipped staff member, stumbles over a charred corpse while searching for wood he can use in his artwork. Kofi’s girlfriend begs Alene not to involve the police, despite Alene’s protests that keeping secrets will undermine her relationship with Frank. Soon Alene has no choice but to find out what’s behind the mysterious death, even if it means delving into the long-buried secrets of her own family.<br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-71535063948062470712023-03-31T09:00:00.001-04:002023-03-31T09:00:00.169-04:00Life as a Battlefield<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxPmfvRQzWdhBXQSkykzJ1_sfD2jLzrTnNqhUicmj3TtVnCUyZXlOvjSloqi1kyZBXH-rg4HitiRtL12y3QggD1uiQEbIj2jQ4aQyx4v0-V1ICSZ-mbecPVdjEsHOeMOJ8-kZN6eZV84wYhpd3xYGHhp9M_D6vjeMQ-4zY9gxcp21PgZsjzvW7fybcSQ/s2416/White-Lady.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2416" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxPmfvRQzWdhBXQSkykzJ1_sfD2jLzrTnNqhUicmj3TtVnCUyZXlOvjSloqi1kyZBXH-rg4HitiRtL12y3QggD1uiQEbIj2jQ4aQyx4v0-V1ICSZ-mbecPVdjEsHOeMOJ8-kZN6eZV84wYhpd3xYGHhp9M_D6vjeMQ-4zY9gxcp21PgZsjzvW7fybcSQ/s320/White-Lady.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://jacquelinewinspear.com" target="_blank">Jacqueline Winspear</a> is known to millions as the author of the Maisie Dobbs novels, which feature an intelligent, compassionate, upwardly mobile detective whose experience as a battlefield nurse during World War I informs her understanding of both the victims and the perpetrators of the cases she investigates. In <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/White-Lady-Novel-Jacqueline-Winspear/dp/0062867989/" target="_blank">The White Lady</a></i>, Winspear examines the long-term effects of war on those forced to become killers if they want to survive. <br /><br />As she notes during <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-white-lady" target="_blank">our recent New Books Network interview</a>, both Maisie Dobbs and Winspear’s latest heroine, Elinor White, were not so much created as encountered—Maisie at a traffic light and Elinor as a memory of a woman the author met in childhood. You’ll need to listen to the interview to hear those stories, but read on to learn a bit more about Elinor, recruited into espionage at the age of eleven and still fighting for justice and for peace more than thirty years later. <br /><br />As usual, the rest of this post comes from <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical-fiction" target="_blank">New Books in Historical Fiction</a>.<br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s just after World War II, and Elinor White (born Elinor de Witt, which also means “white”), a single woman in her mid-forties, lives as a recluse in a village near Tunbridge Wells. One day in 1947, while on a walk, she encounters a recent arrival named Rose Mackie and is drawn to Rose’s three-year-old daughter, Susie. When thugs from London threaten Rose and Susie, Elinor brushes off the skills she polished during the two world wars and, with the help of a former colleague who has risen through the ranks at Scotland Yard, sets out to discover exactly what the thugs have planned for Rose’s husband, Jim. While trying to put a stop to it, she uncovers a web of intrigue and corruption that reaches to the very top of society.<br /><br />This story occurs alongside an exploration of Elinor’s past, beginning with her girlhood in Belgium under German occupation during World War I and extending to her service as an intelligence agent against the Nazis twenty or so years later. Eventually the two threads of Elinor’s history and present intersect, revealing the achievements and the regrets that drive her.<br /><br />Here, as in her Maisie Dobbs series, Jacqueline Winspear demonstrates a deep and multifaceted understanding of the effects of war on those forced to fight. Her books are thought-provoking, emotionally satisfying, and well worth your time.</span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-45600443134117655942023-03-24T09:00:00.001-04:002023-03-24T09:00:00.166-04:00Beyond the Magic Castle<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO-Cq0c5CTNjTLIj4wxxCQDxmb8jgTvo0iok1hJ64qwwk6BO-wEWdGWHeuCoMBv9JT1nkY1MZ2ek15yYGkGD6D8ojPULSIYSMiH8Mg0ThGgzSPxRz2t0BaXYUvVY0cgDhGq24WWtaqGZUouWVXGNDbgynyi65-1G08CDzXaxDWk514GkXJ-sLrkoQ5bg/s2411/Marvelous.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2411" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO-Cq0c5CTNjTLIj4wxxCQDxmb8jgTvo0iok1hJ64qwwk6BO-wEWdGWHeuCoMBv9JT1nkY1MZ2ek15yYGkGD6D8ojPULSIYSMiH8Mg0ThGgzSPxRz2t0BaXYUvVY0cgDhGq24WWtaqGZUouWVXGNDbgynyi65-1G08CDzXaxDWk514GkXJ-sLrkoQ5bg/s320/Marvelous.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">We don’t often think of fairy tales as having much connection to real life. We talk about </span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">the fairy-tale endings of </span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">rom-coms or even real people living fairy-tale existences, but most of us recognize those seemingly idyllic situations as illusions. Life contains happiness but also sorrow, and relationships are always complicated. Even less do we see the magical elements—lonely, haunted castles; witches riding brooms and casting spells; princes turned into frogs—as anything more than delightful escapes from our prosaic everyday lives.<br /><br />But as Molly Greeley shows in her wonderful new novel, <i>Marvelous</i>—the subject of <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/marvelous" target="_blank">my latest interview on the New Books Network</a>—at least one well-known fairy tale, <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>, grew out of an extraordinary set of historical circumstances. Before Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—and long before Disney’s singing Belle—the story of Pedro Gonzales (Petrus Gonsalves) and his wife, Catherine, circulated out from the sixteenth-century French court of Henri II, acquiring layers of magic and meaning that gradually obscured the real-life couple at the heart of the tale. Stripped of its veils—although still fictionalized—it becomes a story for grownups who know that it takes more than a magic wand to make a marriage work. And watching Pedro and Catherine struggle with their own preconceptions and problems as well as the complex demands placed on them and the often careless insults meted out to them by their world makes for a rich and rewarding adventure.<br /><br />As usual, the rest of this post comes from <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical-fiction" target="_blank">New Books in Historical Fiction</a>.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMJJZYJ1Dp6ic10S6SLMC9KZQKCLriFoG5p4kb78YksFKHyloljFKK5SWjQP04nBdQrzT0s5Xib9Y_ciWqxnslBONjrpVwOTjYWYHzRnOHAmfMB9ESdKTL7Z24vRlS2OhmQmsv3uKNN1vyQkk6HHbSjRKOWGOFYX4WDVMdFxsVB8ztSyXwmSSU73H6wQ/s901/Warwick_Goble_Beauty_and_Beast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMJJZYJ1Dp6ic10S6SLMC9KZQKCLriFoG5p4kb78YksFKHyloljFKK5SWjQP04nBdQrzT0s5Xib9Y_ciWqxnslBONjrpVwOTjYWYHzRnOHAmfMB9ESdKTL7Z24vRlS2OhmQmsv3uKNN1vyQkk6HHbSjRKOWGOFYX4WDVMdFxsVB8ztSyXwmSSU73H6wQ/s901/Warwick_Goble_Beauty_and_Beast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="633" data-original-width="901" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMJJZYJ1Dp6ic10S6SLMC9KZQKCLriFoG5p4kb78YksFKHyloljFKK5SWjQP04nBdQrzT0s5Xib9Y_ciWqxnslBONjrpVwOTjYWYHzRnOHAmfMB9ESdKTL7Z24vRlS2OhmQmsv3uKNN1vyQkk6HHbSjRKOWGOFYX4WDVMdFxsVB8ztSyXwmSSU73H6wQ/s320/Warwick_Goble_Beauty_and_Beast.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Once in a while, a novel comes along that is both different and special. <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Marvelous-Novel-Molly-Greeley-ebook/dp/B0B256L9Z9/" target="_blank">Marvelous</a> </i> is such a book. Retellings of fairy tales are not unusual, and some of them are quite good. But here Molly Greeley explores the real-life story that gave rise to one of the best-loved tales, <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>. In doing so, she raises issues of inclusion, trust, acceptance, the effects of trauma, and basic humanity—all in a gentle, non-preachy way.<br /><br />Pedro Gonzales, later known as Petrus Gonsalvus or Pierre Sauvage (Pierre the Savage, which itself says a great deal about other people’s views of him), was born on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, around 1537. We know from early on that he was abandoned by his mother as an infant, presumably because he was born covered in hair—a rare genetic condition that was seen at the time as evidence that a child was the spawn of a devil. His adoptive mother, Isabel, belongs to the indigenous people of Tenerife, the Guanche, whose culture and religion have been all but obliterated by the conquering Spaniards. So she and her son, Manuel, are also, in a sense, outcasts.<br /><br />When Pedro is around nine, pirates kidnap him, and he winds up at the court of the French King Henri II and Henri’s wife, Catherine de’ Medici. Henri, charmed by Pedro’s combination of strangeness and acumen, takes the child under his wing and gives him a royal education, as well as financial support. But the effects of Pedro’s abandonment, early mistreatment, and capture—heightened by the suspicion and disrespect of his fellow nobles, most of whom see him as little better than a trained monkey—leave him feeling perennially unsure of himself.<br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDAya0qAw3BWhRfyejDCibpwZCjneI02CzEusMOQJ8FFaE1K81T-gpHqlBHypGx6qratYnTToef5Q8p3N5LsTjpF-Ns9uNpLVoG8XEvujpLLJN4JlUnijLFtWuYJlu6sfDs18rWp7VFLwccVbi_OU-5DTDQ6dO5ZGy0TV4-UgBWQdcdKTs4z70Z73rUw/s1371/1371px-Joris_Hoefnagel_-_Animalia_Rationalia_et_Insecta_(Ignis)-_Plate_I.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1371" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDAya0qAw3BWhRfyejDCibpwZCjneI02CzEusMOQJ8FFaE1K81T-gpHqlBHypGx6qratYnTToef5Q8p3N5LsTjpF-Ns9uNpLVoG8XEvujpLLJN4JlUnijLFtWuYJlu6sfDs18rWp7VFLwccVbi_OU-5DTDQ6dO5ZGy0TV4-UgBWQdcdKTs4z70Z73rUw/w400-h315/1371px-Joris_Hoefnagel_-_Animalia_Rationalia_et_Insecta_(Ignis)-_Plate_I.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">When Catherine de’ Medici arranges his marriage to her namesake, the beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter of a merchant who has fallen on hard times, Pedro has no idea how to talk to this girl who is half his age. Her discomfort—how many teenage girls want to marry, sight unseen, a taciturn man in his mid-thirties who looks like a Wookie?—plays into Petrus’s fears, and the newlywed couple struggles to find a connection. But when fate deals Catherine a hand she has both anticipated and feared, she rises to the challenge, and Pedro begins to realize that she is nothing like the mother he lost.<br /><br />Greeley does a great job in conveying the sensory experience of her two leads and, by alternating Pedro’s view with Catherine’s, charting their individual growth, which in turn creates a credible portrayal of their developing relationship. If you love books focused on family and identity, as well as stories set just a little off the beaten path, this is definitely a novel for you.<br /><br /><i>Images:</i> Nineteenth-century rendering of <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> and sixteenth-century depiction of Petrus Gonsalves and his Catherine, both public domain via Wikimedia Commons.</span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-39045904172453115362023-03-17T09:00:00.003-04:002023-03-17T09:00:00.179-04:00Interview with Kristen Loesch<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyADYpKihb3Cu5HBvPcDT3yb5juPDec8JVRSOZ5tLKVsf3VPrvNZ82Lvmx8LxvkoZKGPgy_nBrhGblpkHIyr-f2gQruVucu-AmyqRvwkoCAIma6pcriPwEU_dJN4rE4se-h6l0C4H8cWNV6TMVmgC_iH-pmHvHl3P2--fK7TLh4lnY9KEmVh_7FKF1OA/s2560/Last-Russian-Doll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1696" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyADYpKihb3Cu5HBvPcDT3yb5juPDec8JVRSOZ5tLKVsf3VPrvNZ82Lvmx8LxvkoZKGPgy_nBrhGblpkHIyr-f2gQruVucu-AmyqRvwkoCAIma6pcriPwEU_dJN4rE4se-h6l0C4H8cWNV6TMVmgC_iH-pmHvHl3P2--fK7TLh4lnY9KEmVh_7FKF1OA/s320/Last-Russian-Doll.jpg" width="212" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">As I write this post, Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified aggression against its neighbor Ukraine has entered its second year. With President Vladimir Putin apparently set on turning the country he leads into an international pariah, it is simultaneously dispiriting to recall and difficult to believe that just over thirty years ago, the Soviet Union dissolved into its constituent republics—the very agreement that Putin seeks to overturn, although at the time it sparked great joy and hope.<br /> <br />Thus it seems fitting that Kristen Loesch, the author of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Last-Russian-Doll-Kristen-Loesch-ebook/dp/B0B3GVJZZY/" target="_blank">The Last Russian Doll</a></i>, begins her debut novel in that period of celebration but quickly reverts to the Soviet experiment that preceded it, deftly intertwining the two threads as they build to a dramatic conclusion. I would have loved to chat with her for the New Books Network, but an overcrowded schedule made that impossible, so read on to find out more.<br /><br /><b>In the current climate, it’s hard to remember the optimism sparked by the changes that Russia underwent in 1991. What made you decide to set your story there and to contrast it with the preceding century?</b><br /><br />It may have all started when a friend of mine showed me her handwritten correspondence with someone she knew who was living in Moscow in 1991. The sense of destiny, of inevitability, in those letters was wondrous to behold. This was around the time I had completed a YA thriller set in contemporary Moscow, a manuscript that wasn’t in any way fit for publication. I’d already been toying with the idea of pivoting to a historical novel—I studied history with a focus on Russia and Eastern Europe for my undergraduate degree, and in my postgraduate work I looked at civil society in post-Soviet Russia. Profoundly moved by those letters, I decided to pluck the main character out of that present-day YA thriller and place her in 1991 Moscow instead. Needless to say, she became very different by the end of that process (she is Rosie, and more on her below!).<br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidgKF4PkH7rKFviMlwummP8LMfwq5TGU_1fqpGodNEu7AXOe4xipP0A3L4ZPlo4rS65veh8pN4MJImML-rjg0NkrbNfy8tQJI9pfAvD_WnHj9aMtnY5oKS0o_EnBbhAnxjSXqo5DGZCAr1ntgRWPQ4EWHrWohhrOCfXKMVtFjqD_aix6alpspLIWfXXA/s1500/RIAN_Belovezh-Accords.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1500" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidgKF4PkH7rKFviMlwummP8LMfwq5TGU_1fqpGodNEu7AXOe4xipP0A3L4ZPlo4rS65veh8pN4MJImML-rjg0NkrbNfy8tQJI9pfAvD_WnHj9aMtnY5oKS0o_EnBbhAnxjSXqo5DGZCAr1ntgRWPQ4EWHrWohhrOCfXKMVtFjqD_aix6alpspLIWfXXA/w400-h266/RIAN_Belovezh-Accords.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><br /> </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">As for choosing revolutionary Russia (and the ensuing decades) for the second narrative, I think whenever you examine the end of an era, it’s always illuminating to look at its genesis as well. It’s like holding up a mirror: Much of the optimism, as you say, for true political change, for an overhaul of society, for the disruption of the status quo, also existed in 1917. And I think I liked the idea of the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the collapse of the USSR acting as bookends. In between these two major events, of course, is a unique and devastating period of Russian history, the lessons of which should never be forgotten; that is where the majority of the novel takes place.<br /><br /><b>You have two heroines and two heroes, one each for past and present. Tell us what we need to know about Rosie at the beginning of the novel.</b><br /><br />At the outset of the story, Rosie is in incredible pain, and she is in denial of it. She’s a workaholic who keeps herself busy, keeps herself distracted, to avoid feeling that pain, confronting uncomfortable truths, and engaging with her trauma overall. She maligns her mother for always turning to fairy tales, but Rosie tells herself her own stories about her life and her future as a coping mechanism. To Rosie, her mother is a prime example of how pain can overwhelm a person, can drag them under, and on some level Rosie is terrified that that will happen to her.<br /><br />You could say that she’s someone who’s very out of touch with her true self, with her desires, with her deeper emotions, and that’s by design. Having become what her father (whom she idealizes) wanted her to be, Rosie’s real quest is not only to understand her family, to grapple with the past, or even to heal her wounds, but also to discover who <i>she</i> wants to be.<br /><br /><b>And who is Antonina? What is most vital to know about her?</b><br /><br />First of all, Antonina was named after Tonya in Pasternak’s <i>Doctor Zhivago</i>! (I always liked Pasternak’s Tonya; I feel she gets the short end of the stick.)<br /><br />Tonya is, at the beginning of <i>The Last Russian Doll</i>, somebody who has no idea of her own strength. As a privileged young bride, she starts out innocent and a bit dreamy, sort of mournfully drifting through life without much agency or ambition. Until she meets Valentin, the greatest passion she ever feels for anything is for poetry, long walks, and reminiscing about her childhood home. In a way, she seems like a “doll” both inside and out. But Tonya is, as we learn throughout the novel, capable of so much more than she appears to be on the surface. Her challenges are incredible, but so is she. <br /><br /><b>Rosie’s counterpart is Lev, although she also has a boyfriend in London. Antonina’s is Valentin, and she initially has a husband. How would you characterize these male characters of yours?</b><br /><br />Lev, as a member of the military in 1991, is the embodiment of many of the tensions that existed in Russia at that time. I think on the one hand, he’s been brought up to fear change; but on the other hand, deep down, he knows that the time has come. Part of his struggle is reconciling his upbringing, his lifestyle, his whole identity, with the often troubling reality of the military, the secret police, and the regime itself. His family are hardliners, but they’re losing their grasp on him, and alongside Rosie we begin to see the cracks appear.<br /><br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoztzOWwcdaJ21AV_1bye_JtuJvQ1_0V5p9F41qAW3-LRaJFT_-YRjK_37-Fqv6SdMGe9S0Abkk8m0f3_2KCHsBFouJgLVjhMwZQ9-HztmUxE30GTo6uAO36Ov_jOBloXZcqZprj0FCUywsbZKy5TADCxuk1I1jvfkhF7lAIQf9Qez7Ekg2tBeUJu-oQ/s1015/Kustodiev_Bolshevik_1920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1015" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoztzOWwcdaJ21AV_1bye_JtuJvQ1_0V5p9F41qAW3-LRaJFT_-YRjK_37-Fqv6SdMGe9S0Abkk8m0f3_2KCHsBFouJgLVjhMwZQ9-HztmUxE30GTo6uAO36Ov_jOBloXZcqZprj0FCUywsbZKy5TADCxuk1I1jvfkhF7lAIQf9Qez7Ekg2tBeUJu-oQ/w400-h284/Kustodiev_Bolshevik_1920.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Valentin, who begins the book as a Bolshevik orator in prerevolutionary Russia, is one of my favorite characters. You could call his idealism, his politics, his devotion to the cause very naïve, in the same way that his initial infatuation with Tonya is naïve. Valentin is a romantic; he believes in a utopia, he believes in happy endings (partly in response or reaction to a lonely childhood). In drafting his character, I had the thought that he’s not unlike Victor Laszlo from the film <i>Casablanca</i>; like Laszlo, he has the ability to stir great emotion in people; his passion is often contagious; but also like Laszlo, he can be blinded by his principles.<br /><br />The final version of <i>The Last Russian Doll</i> contains much more of Valentin’s perspective than the original version(s), and I loved writing those scenes. <br /><br /><b>Another important connecting force—although we won’t say what connects him!—is Alexey Ivanov. Sketch his character and his role in the story, please.</b><br /><br />As a famous writer and historian in 1991, Alexey starts off as an unobtrusive if enigmatic presence. He’s elderly, he’s mild-mannered, and he’s easily dismissed and overlooked by Rosie, who only sees him as a means to an end; he’s her ticket back to Russia. But as the story unfolds, we understand that there is more to Alexey than what he chooses to show to Rosie in the opening scenes of the novel. Alexey is one of the threads that binds the two narratives (Rosie’s and Tonya’s) together—but it takes time to discover how. I will add that people who know the landscape of Soviet dissident literature may pick up on a few biographical similarities between Alexey Ivanov’s character and the real-life figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but these similarities are superficial and arbitrary. Alexey is not based on anyone in real life.<br /><br /><b>As the title suggests, dolls play an important role in Raisa’s quest. The image of nesting dolls does appear, connecting the female characters to one another. But most of the dolls are rather creepy porcelain look-alikes. Talk to us about them, and why you decided to use them in your story.</b><br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNiiurkRyPuGPQJcr2kZYEqblQ9Bk19whw0ibqK0sIiVipk2QfWe0pJ9clYoEOju9f5tMTKG0kIvuq3UVDbRVUOXw-RQ3GVbi8vOYLi45eEPVwiDN-Kj596yw1mZVMg-GHn0C4VuMMqdgrjs_CeD0gwSmbLumbGD7Buk1HRwAoBj75x-0bt2sGiasaPQ/s1080/Bisque-dolls_St-Petersburg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="734" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNiiurkRyPuGPQJcr2kZYEqblQ9Bk19whw0ibqK0sIiVipk2QfWe0pJ9clYoEOju9f5tMTKG0kIvuq3UVDbRVUOXw-RQ3GVbi8vOYLi45eEPVwiDN-Kj596yw1mZVMg-GHn0C4VuMMqdgrjs_CeD0gwSmbLumbGD7Buk1HRwAoBj75x-0bt2sGiasaPQ/s320/Bisque-dolls_St-Petersburg.jpg" width="217" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Matryoshkas are lovely and inherently interesting, with their many layers, but I’ve never found them creepy or uncanny. Porcelain dolls, by contrast, have always unsettled me. That’s probably why I was first drawn to writing about them! But in terms of using dolls in the story, Tonya’s character was originally inspired by the Russian fairy tale “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” which features a talking wooden doll. Wanting to use dolls as a motif in the novel and to explore related themes (the interior versus the exterior; outer beauty versus inner; surface versus substance), I started to research them, and discovered that there is quite a proud tradition of porcelain doll making in Russia, one that receives almost no attention (by contrast to nesting dolls, which have come to symbolize Russia to the rest of the world, for better or worse). The more I learned about porcelain dolls, the more fascinated I became, and when I realized that their heads are often hollow—and that you can remove the top of the scalp to look inside the head—I just <i>knew</i> that that was where Rosie’s mother was going to hide her darkest secrets. <br /><br />For further reading on Russian porcelain dolls, check out the fantastic nonfiction book <i>The Other Russian Dolls: Antique Bisque to 1980s Plastic</i> by Linda Holderbaum.<br /><br /><b>This novel has just come out. Are you already working on something new?</b><br /><br />I’m currently revising my second novel, which is a gothic murder mystery set in 1930s Shanghai and 1950s Hong Kong. It’s partly inspired by my grandfather’s tumultuous early life in northern China and his harrowing escape following the Communist Revolution, as well as my grandmother’s experiences under Japanese occupation. I also wrote a tiny, 200-word “microfiction” story for the online journal <i>Flashback Fiction</i> about a young Chinese woman who swims from the mainland to Hong Kong—and that young woman has become the main character of my second novel! (A bit of parallel, there, with what happened with Rosie!) Overall, it’s been a joy and a revelation to draw on my family history and heritage for this project, and I’m incredibly excited for what will come next.<br /> <br /><b>Thank you so much for answering my questions!</b><br /><br />Kristen Loesch holds a BA in History, as well as a Master’s degree in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. <i>The Last Russian Doll</i> is her debut historical novel. Find out more about her at <a href="https://kristenloesch.com">https://kristenloesch.com</a>. <br /><br /><i>Images: </i>Leaders of the Soviet republics signing the Belovezh Accords, which dissolved the USSR, by U. Ivanov, RIA Novosti archive, image #848095, CC-BY-SA 3.0; Boris Kustodiev, <i>Bolshevik</i> (1920), public domain; collection of bisque dolls from St. Petersburg by Ninara from Helsinki, Finland, CC BY 2.0, all via Wikimedia Commons.</span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-56543033642554704162023-03-10T09:00:00.002-05:002023-03-10T09:00:00.194-05:00Interview with Sherry Thomas<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg80zUj6HAmAnqSRhQL7t2YzBw7wLfkW1XHfK9Soccq8vYjtyKBSN3GX-29_f1tyxd9wfIxIaTIuI0_yw1_oV4YolHumXOzvBeiiNNF6i3qfF0QXXrV8eG08ye2MF_d5-tFQVQ5uBXk9WLzxtTyP1edsd5VwOvbAyDRapNnDwZrXUVtIGu7VXSPzBR1EA/s2560/Tempest-at-Sea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1706" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg80zUj6HAmAnqSRhQL7t2YzBw7wLfkW1XHfK9Soccq8vYjtyKBSN3GX-29_f1tyxd9wfIxIaTIuI0_yw1_oV4YolHumXOzvBeiiNNF6i3qfF0QXXrV8eG08ye2MF_d5-tFQVQ5uBXk9WLzxtTyP1edsd5VwOvbAyDRapNnDwZrXUVtIGu7VXSPzBR1EA/s320/Tempest-at-Sea.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, despite having encountered them almost by accident. As with Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell, the charm of Charlotte Holmes more than makes up for the fact that I am not in fact nearly so enchanted with the original Conan Doyle stories. Since the moment I picked up <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/042528140X" target="_blank">A Study in Scarlet Women</a></i>—even the title is a delightful nod to the series’ light-heartedness—I have embraced this slightly skewed but always entertaining view of the Great Detective. <br /><br />I talked with Sherry Thomas when the previous book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Miss-Moriarty-Presume-Lady-Sherlock/dp/0593200586" target="_blank">Miss Moriarty, I Presume?</a></i>, came out, and you can hear that <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/miss-moriarty-i-presume" target="_blank">conversation at the New Books Network</a>. But whether you listen there or not, do read on to find out more about the series as a whole and the latest installment, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tempest-Sea-Lady-Sherlock/dp/0593200608/" target="_blank"><i>A Tempest at Sea</i></a>, in particular. And if you read madly all weekend, you’ll be ready when the book releases next Tuesday, March 14, from Berkley Publishing!<br /><br /><b>This is your seventh mystery featuring Charlotte Holmes. People who’d like to know more about the series can listen to our podcast interview on the New Books Network, but can you provide a short summary/refresher of who Charlotte is and how she becomes Sherlock Holmes? </b><br /><br />Of course! Everybody under the sun has a take on the great consulting detective and the Lady Sherlock series is my entry into the wild, wild world of Sherlock Holmes pastiche. <br /><br />Believe it or not, I’d originally intended for my gender-bent Holmes to be a teenage girl living in the suburbs of contemporary Austin, TX. But then my YA editor told me that mysteries don’t sell very well in YA, so I decided that I would write my Lady Sherlock for the adult commercial market. In order to capitalize on my historical romance readership, my Lady Sherlock mysteries would be set in the Victorian era, in the 1880s, the time period of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories.<br /><br />But that was when women had very limited public roles. What kind of a woman would become a consulting detective? Wouldn’t her family object? And what about the general public? Would they entrust their thorniest problems to a female investigator?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVXRFVr3OUR-W5o9gzIqF5PysPVSlXdnRMknmi6Q5hgr04ApCrT6e6GuWSjPhb-pyqYthVl262VtcBt_8haLfjv3YnjEmBgr_NzblfjHB3LrNp3MaN4PWD2nr6gNDL57RXq-Mof8x64SxIL5KDtXSwfsDHbFXmJTmQP8ZyvEqprECC2gBc8ST4PbDQXQ/s1920/Study-Scarlet-Women-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVXRFVr3OUR-W5o9gzIqF5PysPVSlXdnRMknmi6Q5hgr04ApCrT6e6GuWSjPhb-pyqYthVl262VtcBt_8haLfjv3YnjEmBgr_NzblfjHB3LrNp3MaN4PWD2nr6gNDL57RXq-Mof8x64SxIL5KDtXSwfsDHbFXmJTmQP8ZyvEqprECC2gBc8ST4PbDQXQ/s320/Study-Scarlet-Women-cover.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>Thus was born Charlotte Holmes’s backstory. In pursuit of some agency over her life, a scandal erupts and she becomes an outcast and has to run away from home in order to avoid being locked up for the rest of her life.<br /><br />But then her downfall turns into her salvation, as in this new wilderness she finds herself, and she encounters the lovely Mrs. Watson, former demimondaine, who encourages her to monetize her powers of observation and deduction. Who, in fact, puts up her own money so that Charlotte can hang out her shingle as Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. The nominal Sherlock Holmes is explained away as a bedridden invalid and Charlotte, his “sister” and oracle, then very logically receives clients on “his” behalf and leaves the house for investigations when such is called for.<br /><br /><b>And why does Charlotte board the <i>Provence</i>?</b><br /><br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP-V3eQ1NbloHS8e_yTuVOG3Y-fgaT4662u2LhH_bB7h_dx0yLIYVKs-ATj4DNk1z-hv0YOfxbsrYsf7rpN0J8NNRm0bXp0J6fopR95e29kE0M3A-ZdpssFtjdqIrjH3E6uhWR-U5CC_1gcj_nYpN2YajPblP3vYZsbDSIqbwhrf2-YYiAsKInHY8qhQ/s2048/LadySherlock6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1366" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP-V3eQ1NbloHS8e_yTuVOG3Y-fgaT4662u2LhH_bB7h_dx0yLIYVKs-ATj4DNk1z-hv0YOfxbsrYsf7rpN0J8NNRm0bXp0J6fopR95e29kE0M3A-ZdpssFtjdqIrjH3E6uhWR-U5CC_1gcj_nYpN2YajPblP3vYZsbDSIqbwhrf2-YYiAsKInHY8qhQ/s320/LadySherlock6.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Professor Moriarty featured very little in the canon stories but has become an iconic character for any modern Sherlock Holmes adaptation. So in the first six Lady Sherlock books, those two potential archenemies orbited ever closer to each other, until things came to a head in book 6, <i>Miss Moriarty, I Presume?</i><br /><br />In the wake of those events, Charlotte has been lying low. Until she gets something of an irresistible offer—help the crown retrieve an important dossier of documents, and the crown will tell Moriarty to back off.<br /><br />But this dossier proves harder to find than she originally anticipates, and her last lead leads her straight to the <i>RMS Provence</i>. She is in disguise, trying to find the dossier while eluding Moriarty’s minions. But during a storm-tossed night in the Bay of Biscay, a murder happens aboard the <i>Provence</i>. So now instead of investigating a murder, she has to try to avoid being swept up in the investigation as well.<br /><br /><b>One character we didn’t get to talk about during the interview, because we ran out of time, is Charlotte’s sister Olivia (Livia) Holmes. Livia is quite different from Charlotte in personality. How would you characterize her and her role in the novels? And what does she seek from her steamship voyage?</b><br /><br />Charlotte is fearless and largely immune to peer pressure—she is Sherlock Holmes, after all. Livia, on the other hand, stands for all the wonderful women I’ve met in my life and career who do not see how wonderful they are and who have lost a portion of their self-belief along the way because they have for one reason or another been criminally undervalued. <br /><br />Charlotte ran away from the oppressive Holmes household. Livia, however, is the dutiful, browbeaten daughter who has stayed. Their wonderful cousin Mrs. Newell invites Livia to accompany her on this ocean voyage. At the beginning of the trip, all Livia is hoping for is a lovely respite from her parents. But at the end of the books, she will be asking for a great deal more.<br /><br /><b>Trouble starts even before everyone boards the steamer, and Livia is the one who witnesses it. Who is Roger Shrewsbury, and how does he come into conflict with his future fellow passengers, the Arkwrights?</b><br /><br />Roger Shrewsbury is one of the people Livia despises the most, because he unwittingly compromised Charlotte, leading to Charlotte’s exile from polite society. But he isn’t remotely evil, just a complete dumbass, one from a privileged enough background to have never really needed to grow up.<br /><br />On the day of the <i>Provence</i>’s departure from Southampton, when passengers are gathered in the hotel lobby, waiting to be ferried to the pier, Shrewsbury simply can’t stop staring at Miss Arkwright. And when her brother—Mr. Arkwright, an Australian millionaire—angrily demands why Shrewsbury is so rudely gaping, Shrewsbury blurts out that it’s because he has seen Miss Arkwright before, as the centerpiece at a bachelor party—the <i>naked</i> centerpiece, no less.<br /><br />Even today, in most places and most circles, this would be a bombshell announcement, let alone in Victorian England, where people covered up piano legs because they were, well, legs. <br /><br />Needless to say, trouble ensues!<br /><br /><b>To Charlotte’s and Livia’s dismay, their mother, Lady Holmes, also finds her way onto the boat. What troubles them about her being there?</b><br /><br />On a most visceral level, Livia is dismayed because it tries her soul to be around Lady Holmes, especially as the unmarried daughter Lady Holmes deeply disdains.<br /><br />Charlotte, who is in disguise and does not have to deal with Lady Holmes as a dutiful daughter, is more concerned about how and why Lady Holmes has turned up on the <i>Provence</i>.<br /><br />Lady Holmes has no use for foreign travel. And she has no money to afford tickets for herself and her maid. Yet here she is, on a steamer bound for Egypt and India. Who put her on the <i>Provence</i> and what is <i>their</i> purpose?<br /><br /><b>No Lady Sherlock novel would be complete without Lord Ingram Ashburton. He too is traveling by sea, with his children and their nanny. Will you tell us a bit about his contribution to this story?</b><br /><br />This is Lord Ingram’s most prominent outing in the entire series. Charlotte, in disguise, has to maintain a low profile. Which leaves Lord Ingram to participate in the murder investigation in an official capacity, and we will be seeing a good bit of how it unfolds from his point of view. <br /><br /><b>Last but not least, we have Mr. Gregory, who is assigned to help Charlotte whether she needs him or not, and Inspector Brighton, who has been more adversary than assistant in previous books. What can you tell us about them?</b><br /><br />Readers first met Inspector Brighton, a ruthless Scotland Yard investigator, in book 5 of the series. In this book he is headed to Malta to train the local constabulary in modern detection methods and the <i>Provence</i> happens to be his ride. So when the murder happens, the captain asks him to take charge of the matter.<br /><br />Mr. Gregory is referred to at times as The Great Lover in the book. He is a very handsome older gentleman who has had a storied career as a seducer in the crown’s more clandestine services. 😀<br /><br /><b>I love this entire series, so I hope Charlotte will accept many more cases. Will she, and will you give us a hint of what mystery will occupy her next?</b><br /><br />Thank you! I have just recently signed the contract for books 8 and 9 in the series, so there will be two more books at least. <br /><br />And I wish I could tell you more about what will happen in book 8, but I am still trying to wrap my own head around what seems a very fractured plot at the moment. (No worries, it’s always like that at the beginning of a Lady Sherlock book.) But from what I have written so far it seems like Charlotte herself might be in a bit of trouble, as in she might have to account for her movements and whatnot to the police. <br /><br />We shall see!<br /> <br /><b>Thank you so much for answering my questions!</b><br /><br />It is my very great pleasure. Thank you for having me and thank you for your support of the series!<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp7xJBDcHSB9b92xU_uOg6uuj1f7N-C_RuLdYJ_oCVi1ervN_Pxv-EILIeWcf9Tg1AiZ0ujA2IUki5B2JSV5Iq1okEEsrIUlOEkT8KfFJRKbqOmw88IBOVEnQQqcuSJeft4tJQRWupc6tJCloP0N6z5Dawt__wSBeF8joS70Jh8CKdG95-oYlAcS9d1w/s600/Sherry%20Thomas_c%20Jennifer%20Sparks%20Harriman%20(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp7xJBDcHSB9b92xU_uOg6uuj1f7N-C_RuLdYJ_oCVi1ervN_Pxv-EILIeWcf9Tg1AiZ0ujA2IUki5B2JSV5Iq1okEEsrIUlOEkT8KfFJRKbqOmw88IBOVEnQQqcuSJeft4tJQRWupc6tJCloP0N6z5Dawt__wSBeF8joS70Jh8CKdG95-oYlAcS9d1w/s320/Sherry%20Thomas_c%20Jennifer%20Sparks%20Harriman%20(2).jpg" width="256" /></a></div><br />Sherry Thomas is the author of historical romances, YA fantasy, and the Lady Sherlock series, which begins with <i>A Study in Scarlet Women</i>. Find out more about her at <a href="https://sherrythomas.com">https://sherrythomas.com</a>.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Photograph © Jennifer Sparks Harriman.<br /></span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-22919180558658873492023-03-03T09:00:00.001-05:002023-03-03T09:00:00.168-05:00Defeating Infantile Paralysis<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvKkjovUJPdocw6djdhEv7YfrbLF1rYodd3woAMv-dE3NDv_WpjpyPl0G3cRKE4wvLRT6mO1LJN3nQOV-6_C_QgUec_7m9EM9o0O9jNtRJYZWsooT72otDbyK5gFaxw4IEUYRNWK77PAH7yv-QYQokgx1Goj6AiY-0HAesHhbdsum3ZyGxCCp7pL8C3g/s2560/Woman-Cure.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1706" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvKkjovUJPdocw6djdhEv7YfrbLF1rYodd3woAMv-dE3NDv_WpjpyPl0G3cRKE4wvLRT6mO1LJN3nQOV-6_C_QgUec_7m9EM9o0O9jNtRJYZWsooT72otDbyK5gFaxw4IEUYRNWK77PAH7yv-QYQokgx1Goj6AiY-0HAesHhbdsum3ZyGxCCp7pL8C3g/s320/Woman-Cure.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">One of the tragic side-effects of the politicization surrounding COVID-19, its origins, and the remarkably rapid development of vaccines aimed at preventing infection has been the resurgence of polio—another highly transmissible, devastating disease that was once close to eradication. In part, the vaccination campaign for polio was so successful that most people now, although they have heard of the disease, have never encountered anyone stricken by it. They have no idea just how terrible—and terrifying—it was in the days when it appeared to be both incurable and impossible to prevent.<br /><br />In my latest <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-woman-with-the-cure" target="_blank">interview for the New Books Network, Lynn Cullen</a> takes us back to that time in the 1940s when even the world’s most dedicated scientists did not know how polio moved through the body, how it was transmitted from one person to another, and how it wreaked so much havoc on vital organs. In particular, Cullen follows the career of one woman, Dorothy Horstmann, a doctor and medical researcher who devoted her life to finding out how polio worked and where intervention might be successful. She went on to apply the same skills to other illnesses, but only after she devoted more than twenty years to studying the disease known as infantile paralysis, although it did not only affect children. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one notable example.<br /><br />It’s a gripping tale, a fictionalized but mostly true story, and one particularly relevant to our time. So give the interview a listen, and then read the book.<br /><br />The rest of this post comes from <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical-fiction" target="_blank">New Books in Historical Fiction</a>.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />The essential contribution of this novel can be summarized in one sentence: like most of its future readers (I assume), I had never before heard of Dorothy Horstmann and her fundamental role in the research that led to the near-eradication of polio, despite having benefited hugely from her work. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s, she devoted her considerable talents and endless hours to tracking how polio spread throughout the body, but like the other remarkable women portrayed in this novel, she was forced because of her gender to play second fiddle to Doctors Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, her academic colleagues. Their contributions, of course, were also real and worthy of acclaim, but it was Dr. Horstmann—too often dismissed as “Dottie” or “Dot,” as if she were someone’s secretary—who made the crucial discovery that early in its path from the digestive to the nervous system, the polio virus created antibodies in the blood. That finding made the polio vaccine possible by defining an entry point for medical intervention.<br /><br />Reading this novel has a particular resonance at this moment, when polio outbreaks are again affecting US cities because of vaccine hesitancy and the final eradication of the disease has been deterred in certain countries by political concerns—not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, which has changed everyone’s experience of quarantine and disease. But I would like to emphasize that this is, first and foremost, a novel, centered on complex characters, a gripping plot, and the age-old battle between science and nature. I don’t know, for example, whether Dorothy’s love interest is a real person or the author’s way of contrasting the attractions of home with the pull exerted by fulfilling work. In the end, it doesn’t matter, because <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Cure-Lynn-Cullen/dp/059343806X/" target="_blank">The Woman with the Cure</a></i> works as a story, provoking questions about the choices its heroine makes and what we might do in similar circumstances—and that’s what counts.</span><br /></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-67509734654733107962023-02-24T09:00:00.004-05:002023-02-24T09:00:00.170-05:00Interview with Joanna Lowell<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaPeka5P1jGId8Ywr3RSkYHFaP7SwZv-fPadXvqnZohYNq0QaS_dqU4IUbWaEH8ijUron4fAz2sRKjX84xJkPrskfYerjIeV_DQcy4iEjiJtu-UELVj113p9GRbPRJy1WC97mp8fHUiFkD77Sgg8s8QU4kWjXaiBzCC0ro75RUHbf08Wic6XVHCy2GAA/s2560/Artfully-Yours.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1660" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaPeka5P1jGId8Ywr3RSkYHFaP7SwZv-fPadXvqnZohYNq0QaS_dqU4IUbWaEH8ijUron4fAz2sRKjX84xJkPrskfYerjIeV_DQcy4iEjiJtu-UELVj113p9GRbPRJy1WC97mp8fHUiFkD77Sgg8s8QU4kWjXaiBzCC0ro75RUHbf08Wic6XVHCy2GAA/s320/Artfully-Yours.jpg" width="208" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">In college, I read romances, both historical and contemporary, by the bucketful. These days, not so much. A romance novel has to have a real hook in terms of characters and plot if it’s to draw me in, and those characters and that plot need to be strong enough that the final falling in love—which is, after all, the most predictable part of a romance novel—seems not only inevitable but part of a resolution to broader problems presented in the story world. If the book also features sparkling dialogue and a sense of humor, I’m hooked.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Artfully-Yours-Joanna-Lowell/dp/0593198328/" target="_blank"><i>Artfully Yours</i></a> is such a book. Nina Finch is a talented artist, but late nineteenth-century English society has little use for women painters, especially those of limited means and reduced social standing. Her brother Jack also has artistic aspirations, but after a series of misfortunes, he has turned his talents to forging the great masters and lured—not to say forced—Nina into helping him. As a result, Nina has redirected her aspirations toward baking Victoria sponges and gooseberry tarts to sell from a shop of her own. <br /><br />But she can’t turn her back on the brother who raised her, and when it becomes clear that London’s foremost art critic, a duke’s son who goes by the name of Mr. Alan De’Ath (yes, the pun on “death” is deliberate, and he is in reality Lord Alan), has Jack’s forgeries in his gun sights, Nina agrees to accept the position of Alan’s amanuensis so she can keep track of his investigation and save Jack’s neck—and her own. With her pet marmoset, Fritz, she infiltrates Alan’s household, where she runs into a cast of eccentric characters, including a group of woman painters led by a cross-dressing firebrand determined to bend the artistic elite of London to her will.<br /><br />It's all delightfully tongue-in-cheek, and although we can predict that Nina and Alan are meant for each other, how they will cross the vast divide that separates them remains far from clear well into the book. So too does the family secret, hinted at early on, behind Alan’s ongoing conflict with his aristocratic relatives. And if that’s not enough to draw you in, the antics of Fritz and the many humans desperate to wring a good review out of Alan will keep you flipping pages right to the end. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Joanna Lowell was kind enough to answer my questions, so read on to find out more.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span>
</p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>This is your
third historical romance set in 1880s England. What draws you to this
particular period?</b></span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">My aunt gave me
two big volumes of Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young, so Sherlock Holmes
stories were my gateway to late Victorian London. All the gaslights and
broughams! I’ve read other things
since—novels of the late Victorian period or set in the late Victorian period,
and also histories—and I still find the end of the nineteenth century fascinating.
That may be partly because I grew up at the end of the twentieth century
(1980s/90s). There’s something familiar about the fin de siècle feeling. People
looking toward the future and imagining new realities. By 1881, London had
nearly five million people. It was by far the biggest city in the world. There
was enormous wealth and staggering poverty. Everything was speeding up due to
industrialization, which was fueled by exploited workers and by raw materials
thieved from the colonies. Class struggle intensified. Imperial wars raged.
Women mobilized for political rights. We can see so many throughlines to the
present, but it’s very much <i>not </i>our time as well. Different laws.
Different social norms. (And of course, the gaslights and broughams!) That
tension is very generative for me. I want to write characters that speak to
readers now, and I also want to transport readers into the past so they can
feel the (fictionalized) historical context come alive.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Some of the
characters from the two previous novels are mentioned in passing in this one.
Could you give us a quick summary of <i>The Duke Undone</i> and <i>The Runaway
Duchess</i>?</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkDJXBiS4VxybL8ieXUJnU1Mzx97NLqU0PdO6ymhP9R-WF6wWqLWIr-ljRp25wZSEHe_APyMiVrBKlRI5qKrnYagPLnAJD9rCt3xr0j0NV_YkTSO0Fvy7VTkSA5JZ9l9nNwzOvwr4S9oJskM5hKTkgZQy5LN-M9PLsy7GTqxelO-Gdxe3IQ9jHE0Vn1w/s1920/Duke-Undone.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkDJXBiS4VxybL8ieXUJnU1Mzx97NLqU0PdO6ymhP9R-WF6wWqLWIr-ljRp25wZSEHe_APyMiVrBKlRI5qKrnYagPLnAJD9rCt3xr0j0NV_YkTSO0Fvy7VTkSA5JZ9l9nNwzOvwr4S9oJskM5hKTkgZQy5LN-M9PLsy7GTqxelO-Gdxe3IQ9jHE0Vn1w/s320/Duke-Undone.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>The Duke Undone
</i>is the story of an
aspiring artist from London’s East End and an angsty duke haunted by his demons
and struggling to repair a brutal family legacy. They come from completely
different places and stations in life, and they meet by chance when Anthony is
sprawled passed-out drunk and naked in an alleyway. Lucy paints him from memory,
just for herself, but one thing leads to another, and she sells the picture. Anthony
sees it and is most displeased. A confrontation ensues, and the two realize
they each have the power to help or hurt the other. Lucy is trying to save her
condemned home and launch her painting career. Anthony is trying to find his
missing sister while seeming to comply with the rules set down in his father’s
will. They strike a bargain and get much more than they bargained for.</span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i></i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL4hRQh6ztcY8vv9393hMp0Xc8O5bW7NgvScHcT-QXE-wNXd3ZmdYEsJhJopaOetJVo-YqGWgOYGt98uboSQB-Law3UDNVhWRnw6SCRKpakcfadZfFffwwZcKZOAtR-nSqxoZqzYcr40O0o6wonIu5YLUZLQLZJE5hN0NEfbW6QeVG1BEa-JMQ5YR6JQ/s1920/Runaway-Duchess.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL4hRQh6ztcY8vv9393hMp0Xc8O5bW7NgvScHcT-QXE-wNXd3ZmdYEsJhJopaOetJVo-YqGWgOYGt98uboSQB-Law3UDNVhWRnw6SCRKpakcfadZfFffwwZcKZOAtR-nSqxoZqzYcr40O0o6wonIu5YLUZLQLZJE5hN0NEfbW6QeVG1BEa-JMQ5YR6JQ/s320/Runaway-Duchess.jpg" width="213" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>The Runaway
Duchess </i>unfolds across the
moors of Cornwall. It follows Lavinia, the mean girl introduced in <i>The Duke
Undone. </i>She escapes the horrible duke she just married by stealing someone
else’s identity. Pretending to be another person makes her think more deeply
about who she is. She realizes that she wants to change, and that she’s falling
for the man she’s deceiving—not a great way to begin a relationship! (Even if
you’re not a runaway bride.) Neal is true-hearted and sunny and doesn’t want to
play games or get involved with a spoiled London socialite. He hopes to settle
down with a fellow botanist. When the truth comes out, he and Lavinia are
already too entangled for either of them to walk away, but finding a way
forward requires a whole new order of growth. </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Neal is best
friends with Alan De’Ath, the art critic. Alan plays a role in the last quarter
of <i>The Runaway Duchess. </i>He’s the hero of <i>Artfully Yours, </i>which
brings the series back to the London art world.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Introduce us to
your heroine, Nina Finch. What does she want out of life, and what is her
reality when the novel opens?</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Nina wants peace
and quiet, a life that’s simple and sweet and free of risk. Her dream is to run
a village bakery. She’s practical and organized, and she has it all planned out.
The problem isn’t that she doesn’t know her own mind, it’s that her heart tells
her she can’t leave her brother. Jack raised her after their mother died. When
the novel opens, they’re living in a noisy, chaotic curiosity shop. Jack has a
forger’s workshop upstairs. He trained Nina to paint in the style of Old
Masters, and they make their living off their forgeries. This means there’s
always the threat of discovery and punishment hanging over their heads. It’s
horribly anxious-making for Nina. She worries for Jack, and that worry—along
with her powerful loyalty—makes it difficult to imagine leaving unless he comes
with her.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>How did Nina’s
brother Jack wind up in his current predicament?</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Jack would say
it’s because the deck was stacked against him from the start. He was as
talented as his fellow students at the Royal Academy of Art but, unlike most of
them, he lacked financial resources. Stepping up to care for Nina meant that he
had to change how he was living, and ultimately led to his losing his place at
the Royal Academy. He and Nina both understand this as a major sacrifice, one
that bonded them together and put Nina in his debt. Jack realized he could make
the most money forging art, and so he established himself in the Royal
Academy’s shadow. He got caught fairly early on, and his experience in prison
made him angrier and left him with even fewer options, so he went back to
forging, with Nina’s reluctant help. I don’t entirely disagree with Jack’s
social critique, but his refusal to take responsibility for his decisions and
the way he manipulates Nina create a central tension in the book. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq7x-UKi3hZFCoj9N7pCjs6A9t9vXHt512OUNaZyc6802XP0x_G8TaNO40h9xcQWilbZOFN28JSbu_LuscHMUP7Gp9InBUQQe1W6sSVJONCXsxThWJeICfdbJxDg02KjyZW7XRuocTPJXeWeK_tvu9dM3CvJOXQ5c0SayDxsWqiyYE4fHGEEk-r6pDeQ/s2200/Frith_A_Private_View.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1155" data-original-width="2200" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq7x-UKi3hZFCoj9N7pCjs6A9t9vXHt512OUNaZyc6802XP0x_G8TaNO40h9xcQWilbZOFN28JSbu_LuscHMUP7Gp9InBUQQe1W6sSVJONCXsxThWJeICfdbJxDg02KjyZW7XRuocTPJXeWeK_tvu9dM3CvJOXQ5c0SayDxsWqiyYE4fHGEEk-r6pDeQ/w485-h254/Frith_A_Private_View.jpg" width="485" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Alan De’Ath
is in every way Nina’s opposite. Without giving away any of his secrets, give
us a sense of him at the moment when he enters her life.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Alan is an art
world insider, one of the most respected critics in England. He thrives in
London’s elite and bohemian circles. Born into an aristocratic family, he inhabits
a place of privilege, operating with confidence and social ease. For all that,
he’s a very guarded person. He has dozens upon dozens of friends and
acquaintances, but he’s careful to show them only what he wants them to see. He
uses humor as a mask. When he meets Nina, things have just started to crumble.
His extremely troubled family relationships (past and present) are threatening
his ability to live the life he built for himself. He’s trying to use his wits,
as usual, to fix the situation. Only in this case, he’s going to have to dig
deeper, and that terrifies him. He felt vulnerable once and doesn’t want to
feel that way ever again. This avoidance is going to compound his
problems.<span> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Tell us,
please, about the Sisterhood and the part they play in this novel.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The Sisterhood is a
group of women artists that Lucy Coover (heroine of <i>The Duke Undone</i>)
started with her friends while they were students at the Royal Academy of Art.
They’re dedicated to making art education more equitable for women, and to
supporting each other and other women in the art world. They’re friends with
Alan, and so Nina finds herself interacting with them. They’re the first
contemporary artists she’s ever known, and meeting them forces her to see
forgery in a new light. It also gives her a glimpse into a way of living that
appeals to her and that she never thought possible for herself. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>And perhaps
Fritz deserves an introduction. What made you decide to include a marmoset?</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHhLPKkAv-e-UvhqfDKfLtG-87tlum7jQmn9wiDz4ghoMWADYW3akD6uZwH1jbF3pXzMlTsGW9R3nyhMOUOOJKSGnGsnUfDV2FEdQ_0TgZQRGZyNNBjGucbKn0mxzZnluXZFKWgmh8Xllgz7mUwEKeVNR6Q7bJ6bY4olgXpWkttXKtCW8lmGKebZx6jA/s752/Marmoset_copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="752" data-original-width="501" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHhLPKkAv-e-UvhqfDKfLtG-87tlum7jQmn9wiDz4ghoMWADYW3akD6uZwH1jbF3pXzMlTsGW9R3nyhMOUOOJKSGnGsnUfDV2FEdQ_0TgZQRGZyNNBjGucbKn0mxzZnluXZFKWgmh8Xllgz7mUwEKeVNR6Q7bJ6bY4olgXpWkttXKtCW8lmGKebZx6jA/s320/Marmoset_copy.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Many of the human
relationships in Nina’s life have been changeable and explosive, so she feels
particularly close with her animal friends. I wanted her to have one comrade in
particular that traveled around with her, providing support and also causing
some mischief. Virginia Woolf lived with a marmoset named Mitz. Sigrid Nunez
wrote a wonderful book about her, <i>Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, </i>which
I highly recommend. I created Nina’s marmoset, Fritz, in homage to Mitz. The
animals most present in my life at the time of writing were the neighborhood
squirrels, so Fritz has some squirrel in him as well.<span> </span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>For all the
sparkling humor—of which there is a good deal—Alan makes an important point
about forgery and its effect on art. Could you summarize that for us, please?</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Jack sees forgery as
a victimless crime. So long as the fake isn’t discovered, buyer and seller both
get what they want. Where’s the harm in that? Alan thinks that forgery harms
art itself, that allowing a fake Rembrandt to stand as a real Rembrandt does a
disservice to our understanding of what makes painting matter. But beyond that,
he thinks forgery hurts living artists. There was a growing demand for artworks
by famous dead painters in the nineteenth century. This was linked to the rise
of national museums and business elites who wanted to establish prestige
through private art collections, and forgers took advantage of the opportunity,
creating fakes galore, which fed the buying frenzy. Alan wishes this would all
settle down, and attention could turn to riskier, contemporary work, such as
the paintings and sculptors by the members of the Sisterhood. Fewer forgeries
of old stuff, more room for new stuff. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>What are you
working on now?</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A beach-set queer
Victorian romance. It’s part of the same series. There’s more art, there’s also
lots of seaweed, and bicycles with big front wheels. </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Thank you so much
for answering my questions!</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Joanna Lowell
lives among the fig trees in North Carolina, where she teaches in the English department
at Wake Forest University. She is the author of <i>The Duke
Undone</i>, <i>The Runaway Duchess</i>, and <i>Artfully Yours</i>. When she’s not writing historical
romance, she writes other things as Joanna Ruocco.<span> </span>Find out more about her at <a href="https://www.joannalowell.com">https://www.joannalowell.com</a>. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Images: </i>William Powell Frith, <i>A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881</i> public domain, and photograph of a marmoset © Carmem A. Busko CC BY 2.5, both via Wikimedia Commons.<br /></span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</span></font></style></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-88074959115503201212023-02-17T09:00:00.002-05:002023-02-17T09:00:00.159-05:00Interview with Dan Jones<p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsR6AyRON7KUpq-DsEvZykMkQ1IIYT8iUjDOQHxDAGZGjDeJGI6QlqawrdomOqofG5lp4WRwl-SrBFb7w35s9DOf0yrGIsAetsa0wTmsLyu-5BInE7C9bXQaXCoZLy7kndydsRfTyXtsJXB_Thx02cgJ2pGeIzbRd44_fpHfwBmBXuiWVScM0t0vn7Jw/s2560/Essex-Dogs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1695" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsR6AyRON7KUpq-DsEvZykMkQ1IIYT8iUjDOQHxDAGZGjDeJGI6QlqawrdomOqofG5lp4WRwl-SrBFb7w35s9DOf0yrGIsAetsa0wTmsLyu-5BInE7C9bXQaXCoZLy7kndydsRfTyXtsJXB_Thx02cgJ2pGeIzbRd44_fpHfwBmBXuiWVScM0t0vn7Jw/s320/Essex-Dogs.jpg" width="212" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Despite having interviewed Bernard Cornwell three times for the New Books Network, and as a result having enjoyed all of his Saxon Chronicles, I am not a big fan of war books in general. So I agreed to read Dan Jones’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Essex-Dogs-Novel-Dan-Jones/dp/0593653785/" target="_blank"><i>Essex Dogs</i></a>, which released this past Tuesday, with some trepidation. I was pleasantly surprised.<br /><br />For those who love gritty descriptions of battles and campaigns, behind-the-scenes peeks at the daily life of soldiers in all its filth and profanity, and the push-and-pull between the medieval equivalent of enlisted men and their noble officers, there is plenty here for them to love. Dan Jones is first and foremost a historian, and his grasp of the details and his easy confidence in describing scenery, events, and the many hardships of a military operation on foreign soil make for a compelling tale. The novel follows the English army during its first major campaign of the Hundred Years War, from its landing on the coast of Normandy to the crucial battle at Crécy in August 1346. Suffice it to say that several historical characters—including King Edward III’s son, the chivalric hero known as the Black Prince—appear in an unfamiliar but amusing light.<br /><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJGb3CXMKY8gNm8jv0WP8Kd8bFV8NyYaiyb6OIQhVbjmNM3WSd_NX9qqpdlXZLVxXzrPFZ_VJeDOCxOcMkXhPC3RORU5zIGzlg0wHQ-nIrab4hkdRwMmDc8bJiHIwk-mE4noNh08nUvDOxLOc8ehf8N9l-Zm0iL8cNipaPB0IrH57pmTRsl7gynVTk2g/s889/Edward_III_Black_Prince_14thc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="889" data-original-width="771" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJGb3CXMKY8gNm8jv0WP8Kd8bFV8NyYaiyb6OIQhVbjmNM3WSd_NX9qqpdlXZLVxXzrPFZ_VJeDOCxOcMkXhPC3RORU5zIGzlg0wHQ-nIrab4hkdRwMmDc8bJiHIwk-mE4noNh08nUvDOxLOc8ehf8N9l-Zm0iL8cNipaPB0IrH57pmTRsl7gynVTk2g/s320/Edward_III_Black_Prince_14thc.jpg" width="278" /></a></div></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The story moves fast, and the main characters—a small group of fighting men who call themselves the Essex Dogs—emerge as distinct individuals, each with his own past, personality, and problems. But it is their leader, variously referred to as FitzTalbot and Loveday, who dominates the story. On the rebound from personal tragedy, in a struggle to stay alive under difficult circumstances, and intent on fulfilling what he perceives as a sacred trust from the group’s prior leader, known only as the Captain, Loveday is determined to keep his small group together no matter what fate throws at them.<br /><br /></span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">What follows is an interview between Dan Jones and his publicist, Ben Peterson (questions in bold). Although I normally insist on conducting my own interviews, I made an exception in this case because Ben has asked the same questions I would have, so it seemed pointless to require a busy author to spend time repeating himself.<br /></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><b>A Conversation with Dan Jones</b></i></span></span></h2><p style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">You’re best known for writing books about British history. What prompted and inspired you to write your first novel, <i>Essex Dogs</i>, and why now? How did you prepare?</span></span></b><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />For some years I’ve been yearning to try my hand at fiction set in the Middle Ages. And plenty of my readers had been asking me when I was going to get around to doing it. As though it were the obvious natural progression in my career. I suppose it figures. My nonfiction books are built on narrative structures borrowed from screenwriting. They celebrate character and explore history through strong, colourful scenic narrative. They smuggle big ideas in under the guise of in-your-face entertainment. These are traits shared with fiction. <br /><br />I conceived this novel in several stages. The idea of writing about a rogue band of freebooter-soldiers known as the Essex Dogs came to me while I was dozing on a flight from Prague to London in 2017. I began writing about them, but could not settle on the right adventure for them to have. So I shelved the project, and forgot about it until the winter of 2018/2019, when I rented a house in Normandy, quite near Saint-Lô. During a New Year’s Day walk on Omaha Beach with friends, I began to think that having the Dogs take part in Edward III’s 1346 landing a little further up the coast (near Utah Beach) might be viable and fun. A medieval D-Day, kind of like Saving Private Ryan but in fourteenth-century costume. Medieval American hardboiled. Yeah. That felt cool. <br /><br />Yet even then I dithered. It was not until that summer, after a wide-ranging conversation over dinner with George RR Martin, a history lover whose works of fiction I admire enormously, that something clicked. I went home and started work. George had nothing to do with the writing of this story. His contribution ended at being an inspiration and a personal hero. But it was an important contribution all the same.<br /><br /><b>The novel is based on the Hundred Years’ War. How much of the book is based on actual events, and which parts are complete fiction? Which characters really existed, and who’s invented? Did the Essex Dogs and its members really exist?<br /></b><br />The Crécy campaign of 1346 is every bit a real historical campaign. On 12 July Edward III—who claimed to be the rightful king of France as well as England—landed 15,000 men on the Normandy beaches. It was his “medieval D-Day.” For the weeks that followed, his troops marched and burned and pillaged their way through Normandy, raiding cities and indulging in a <i>chevauchée</i>—a terror campaign designed to frighten and intimidate French people and to disillusion them with their leaders. (This is exactly the same tactical approach to warfare that Vladimir Putin adopted in the first weeks of the recent invasion of Ukraine.) The English came within a few miles of Paris, before forcing a crossing of the river Seine and then heading north towards the Somme, now pursued by a hastily assembled but very large French army. The two armies collided near the Forest of Crécy in late August. It was a spectacular battle with an improbable outcome. <br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig_LWYScg1RAnNKPtUYoib-8UodlMkMUqKzCFHKvjN17xj2VcjtzvIengIWA68znge2wRcapc6sLZ8HGxYFES-jWOXWWXOFxuVR2vSj14Wg0wG3-zVK95o532rZQtbYRL6NV1q83eoR13ZFe7_lR8KCezX5DwJA7ybdFjefJDnGQk6bsd1asZ_l3QmSw/s1059/Edward_III's_1346-chevauche%CC%81e.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="988" data-original-width="1059" height="374" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig_LWYScg1RAnNKPtUYoib-8UodlMkMUqKzCFHKvjN17xj2VcjtzvIengIWA68znge2wRcapc6sLZ8HGxYFES-jWOXWWXOFxuVR2vSj14Wg0wG3-zVK95o532rZQtbYRL6NV1q83eoR13ZFe7_lR8KCezX5DwJA7ybdFjefJDnGQk6bsd1asZ_l3QmSw/w400-h374/Edward_III's_1346-chevauche%CC%81e.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">So that much is known. But the historical accounts we have for these events are mostly written either by royal/noble/clerical/knightly participants in the war; or else by chroniclers sympathetic to such a class of people and interested in the ideals of chivalry rather than the “ordinary” experience. It would be impossible to write a straight nonfiction book about the adventures of a medieval Easy Company—such as the Essex Dogs are—because there are no soldiers’ diaries from this age. That’s why I chose fiction and elected in my approach to invent an imaginary “platoon” but have them interact with real historical characters such as King Edward, his son the Black Prince, the earls of Warwick and Northampton, and so on. It’s a similar approach to that adopted by one of my favourite American writers of historical fiction, James Ellroy. Think of <i>American Tabloid</i>: the three viewpoint characters are running blind through history, running into grotesque imagined versions of the Kennedy brothers, J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, etc., etc. My Essex Dogs do exactly that, only in the white heat of a war for medieval France.<br /><br /><b>What was your process for weaving together fact and fiction? How did you create dialog and what research and sources were involved? Did you learn anything new or come across something that surprised you?</b><br /><br />Well, as I’ve hinted above, all the plot points in <i>Essex Dogs</i> are real. I’ve pulled them from the sources of the time, which I know pretty well: we’re talking chronicles, letters, administrative records, and such. At the start of each chapter I’ve inserted snippet quotes from those sources to show you how fact and fiction intersect. But the Essex Dogs, my imaginary platoon, come at the events from a perspective not seen/cared about by the men who wrote those original sources. So there are many times when, in exploring the ordinary soldier’s view of events, my chapters run deliberate counterpoint to the official history. That also means there are a ton of Easter Eggs and jokes hidden in the text for aficionados who know their medieval history. (It doesn’t matter if you don’t spot them, it won’t spoil the read.)<br /><br />As for dialog, that’s a really interesting point. There is no way to accurately mimic fourteenth-century speech on the page and remain intelligible to approx. 99.89% of modern readers. I also loathe the affected “Hollywood” rendering of “ye olde” dialog, which is about weird passive verb structures, phoney formality, and vaguely archaic vocabulary. For example, “be not troubled, my liege, the French want not this fight, I warrant.” Ugh. Gross. And lame. <br /><br />I approached this as a translation task. Dialog in <i>Essex Dogs</i> is blunt, modern, often bracingly military and somewhat profane. The main concession I’ve made to fourteenth-century manners of speech is to include a colourful repertoire of high blasphemy—for in the later Middle Ages, cursing was done by references to God’s wounds or St Anthony’s bloody toenail, rather than leaning on scatology and urology. I had a ton of fun doing that. A TON. Maybe too much. You will have to be the judge.<br /><br /><b>Which characters did you enjoy writing the most and why? Which parts of the novel were the most challenging to write?</b><br /><br />In light of the above, the earl of Northampton was my favourite. He’s the one noble character in the book who speaks a language the “grunts” can understand. Think General Patton’s speech to the Third Army in 1944, and you’ve got the general idea. When we first meet Northampton, he seems to be quite an atrocious individual because he doesn’t sugar-soap his speech like the other nobles do. Yet as the story goes on we learn that this man, the constable of the army (therefore roughly the fourth in chain of command), is the only one who can really communicate—and even sympathise—with the ordinary troops. And he’s prepared to put himself in harm’s way to lead them. I kind of love the guy, and I definitely lit up whenever he walked into a scene.<br /><br />That being said, Northampton is not one of the Essex Dogs, and they were obviously my viewpoint characters. I spent most time living inside the head of Loveday, the leader, who is nursing a lost love and a lost brother-in-arms. Loveday consistently conveys the deeper themes of the book that transcend the period—about loyalty and regret, about the uncomfortable conflict between what you might call toxic masculinity and the deep-rooted male urge to be a good role model—a heroic father-figure and a brother. So he’s very dear to me. So too is Romford, the sixteen-year old, very damaged, very abused, a fiend and an addict, a sexually uncertain teenager figuring out a brutal world, but also at times just a tender little boy. Romford was the one who made me cry. When I was writing the last three chapters of the book I cried so much I almost shorted out the electronics on my laptop. Romford did that.<br /><br /><b>What are some of your favorite historical novels, and what about them do you find appealing?</b><br /><br />Well, I mentioned Ellroy already. His American Underworld trilogy (<i>American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, Blood’s A Rover</i>) made a huge impression on me when I read it—it was a different sort of historical fiction than I’d seen before. Don Delillo’s <i>Libra</i> I guess kind of the same thing. I love Mary Renault’s visions of the Bronze Age world—her book <i>The King Must Die</i> took the Minotaur story and told it like nothing I’d ever known. Of course, right now there’s a really interesting creative moment around the Middle Ages, particularly among American writers, who I suppose are drawn to previous ages of great change when it felt like DOOM was coming down the line pretty fast. Lauren Groff’s <i>Matrix</i> and Otessa Moshfegh’s <i>Lapvona</i> impressed me. Then, of course, there are the medieval big guns. Bernard Cornwell has given me some great advice on the couple of occasions we’ve spoken, and I think his work is sensational. I’m a big admirer of Ken Follett. George RR Martin—goes without saying. What connects them all? World-building. Heart. Thrills. Ideas.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVwOE0VWZ4YDNznJT6smikdaYvPuMZaEAyjhwLq_QODXP29dEqDPl9mtl-2H65Mz_CtVWtv33c8nc5wewim8sdx7vgqz2ZTIztgvrACxEsd9S6GnzSWgOBN-sr-xgf1U12D9RYvaDgqd-S36n8Q4WwMLtmahVvv8gEAoQu22wIN_yinEMARXITvxBFMg/s1998/Battle_of_crecy_froissart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1755" data-original-width="1998" height="351" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVwOE0VWZ4YDNznJT6smikdaYvPuMZaEAyjhwLq_QODXP29dEqDPl9mtl-2H65Mz_CtVWtv33c8nc5wewim8sdx7vgqz2ZTIztgvrACxEsd9S6GnzSWgOBN-sr-xgf1U12D9RYvaDgqd-S36n8Q4WwMLtmahVvv8gEAoQu22wIN_yinEMARXITvxBFMg/w400-h351/Battle_of_crecy_froissart.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><i>Essex Dogs</i> is the first novel in a trilogy on the Hundred Years’ War. What do you have in mind for the other two novels?</b> <br /><br />Volume 2 is called <i>Wolf Moon</i>. It follows continuous from <i>Essex Dogs</i>. Only now, rather than marching into the unknown, the Dogs find themselves caught up in the siege of Calais—a brutal eleven-month blockade of a small port on the French coast.<br /><br />Why are they there? Why does the king care so much about taking it? What are they really fighting for? All this will be revealed as in <i>Wolf Moon</i> we peel back another layer of the war and discover who really wants it to last for a hundred years. <br /><br /><i>Wolf Moon</i> is about money, merchants, and the medieval “deep state,” which cares nothing for chivalry or the loyalty to kings, only about the naked pursuit of power and profit. We will travel inside and outside Calais, from the siege city built outside the walls, to the pirate ships patrolling the harbour, and into the dark corners of oligarchs’ houses, where the deals that shape—and end—lives are made.<br /><br />And at the end, we hear the first, faint, chesty rattle of a natural disaster that is sweeping towards the Dogs and their world—and which will set the stage for the epic third book in the series, <i>The Last Knight</i>. <br /><br /><b>When can we expect your next nonfiction book and what will you be taking on?</b><br /><br />I’m writing a biography of Henry V. It’s the missing link between my big chronicles of medieval England: <i>The Plantagenets</i> and <i>The Wars of the Roses</i>. It’s a huge project and a challenge. But that’s the way I like it.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Images:</i> Miniature of Edward III granting Aquitaine to his son, Edward the Black Prince, and of the Battle of Crécy from the <i>Chronicles</i> of Jean de Froissart public domain via Wikimedia Commons; map of Edward III’s <i>chevauchée</i> in Normandy in 1346 CC-BY SA 4.0 Goran tek-an, via Wikimedia Commons.<br /></span></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-69023820355887813812023-02-10T09:00:00.017-05:002023-02-10T09:00:00.161-05:00The Other Side of the Desk<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjGzeC5daaPtihoAeHl0tSKZDB0DGXW0Wy0MHPAk5neZ9b5rwMlelU9AOU7ZqX4Anw_fTDE9RDOiwXaSMqMic4H2J2TWz3HqEn4dF7w1wjQSsTAJfZ7MulN7dBBn4ShNOshX6Gca1GQ6aSk2miaSF8jhrN6_xBZ-8XfU2v0uWfFRBQU8Ubh0gpNYP4zg/s1920/Storyteller-ad-velvetTT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1080" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjGzeC5daaPtihoAeHl0tSKZDB0DGXW0Wy0MHPAk5neZ9b5rwMlelU9AOU7ZqX4Anw_fTDE9RDOiwXaSMqMic4H2J2TWz3HqEn4dF7w1wjQSsTAJfZ7MulN7dBBn4ShNOshX6Gca1GQ6aSk2miaSF8jhrN6_xBZ-8XfU2v0uWfFRBQU8Ubh0gpNYP4zg/w225-h400/Storyteller-ad-velvetTT.jpg" width="225" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">One of the perks of having hosted New Books in Historical Fiction for more than ten years—as long as I’ve been publishing novels, although both twists along the road of life seem like turns I took yesterday, not in 2012—is that once in a while I get to shift gears and talk with one of the other hosts about a new book of my own. With <i>Song of the Storyteller</i> officially released as of January 17, the time has come to let the world know of its existence. G.P. (Galit) Gottlieb, the host of New Books in Literature and the author of three charming contemporary novels collectively known as the Whipped & Sipped Mysteries, offered to conduct this interview. It went live just before January gave way to February, and you can find the results at both the <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/c-p-lesley-song-of-the-storyteller" target="_blank">New Books Network</a> (NBN) and various podcast subscription services such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.<br /><br />This isn’t my first interview for the New Books Network. I previously talked with Joan Schweighardt about <i>The Swan Princess</i> and with Galit about <i>Song of the Siren</i> and <i>Song of the Sisters</i>. You can find those previous conversations, if you’re interested, by searching for C. P. Lesley on the NBN site. Each time, I gain more insight into how my guests may feel when it’s their turn at the far side of the microphone—or, more often, just the receiving end of a telephone call. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I was shy as a teenager, and although I thought I had conquered that particular source of anxiety, my first forays into podcasting terrified me.<br /><br />That was 140 or so interviews ago, and I have long since learned to take the host position in stride. But I was surprised by how nervous being a <i>guest</i> still makes me. That was especially true this time, because it was my first wholly unscripted conversation: I had no idea what Galit would want to know. And like many historians, I tend to ramble, so I worried that I would go down a conversational rabbit hole and emerge twenty minutes later to the online equivalent of glazed eyes.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9wNza4x4EWP_i3WBLYrVFVN__a47n5KLpY_z8DQB6q5cB_w6vPD5e67Cfjvte3oZLmI5gQ5TUvM-97X1r1S-sOqcIcY2TSeJmhtXvWtN-JbxOU7Qios4bs1leKfnXNZzt83zW3WzkThzy2dJsmsu2HQyPrOlYi_lMJv9BBUWhF3vpcmmN4DQ1GW9elw/s1597/Facial_Chronicle_-_b.20,_p._293_-_Wedding_of_Ivan_IV_and_Anastasia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1597" data-original-width="856" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9wNza4x4EWP_i3WBLYrVFVN__a47n5KLpY_z8DQB6q5cB_w6vPD5e67Cfjvte3oZLmI5gQ5TUvM-97X1r1S-sOqcIcY2TSeJmhtXvWtN-JbxOU7Qios4bs1leKfnXNZzt83zW3WzkThzy2dJsmsu2HQyPrOlYi_lMJv9BBUWhF3vpcmmN4DQ1GW9elw/s320/Facial_Chronicle_-_b.20,_p._293_-_Wedding_of_Ivan_IV_and_Anastasia.jpg" width="172" /></a></div></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Of course, none of that happened. Long before we actually started recording, I had relaxed into chat mode. Galit was as delightful as ever; she asked wonderful questions, and I mostly managed to rein my naturally discursive tendencies while answering. I didn’t say everything as perfectly as I would have liked, or tip my hat to every nuance, and I hem and haw more than I would have thought possible. But I did manage to get at least a few big points across. And the next time a guest forgets what she meant to say or tells me how nervous she is, I will be able to extend my condolences and assure her that I know exactly what she’s going through.<br /><br />Galit and I talk mostly about the historical backdrop of the novels: the boyar politics, the religious differences, the bride show itself, a few of our favorite characters, what’s next for the series. So whether you listen to the interview first (you can find it at the link above) or <a href="https://www.fivedirectionspress.com/song-of-the-storyteller/" target="_blank">read the book</a> and then listen, I hope you’ll enjoy them both for different reasons.<br /><br />You’ll also find out a little more about me, my background outside fiction, how I came to write these novels, and why I use a pen name to do so.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Galit’s latest novel, by the way, is due out later this month, and I will be interviewing her not long after the release. You can find out more about <i>Charred</i> and the series of which it is a part at <a href="https://www.dxvaros.com/charred-preorders" target="_blank">her publisher’s website</a>. At the moment, e-book editions of both the first book and the third are discounted.</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNqm2MNX07OGiDAeHystxpTp5oD-qR3cW6vyvmyAljgbO10sBs3m7b7kGbn9jv7uLvlPCJuJ0_bnbcNh-vM5VTqglhaYYm-iwltcMfJUeDGWyht9L9Aus76xbjSLyFda7DBQUsf5TLvQuOfrCVcHxJXbqdB8OFVvDe1KyGOlChk_OfnIk12jg3hHlOVg/s344/Whipped&Sipped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="344" height="349" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNqm2MNX07OGiDAeHystxpTp5oD-qR3cW6vyvmyAljgbO10sBs3m7b7kGbn9jv7uLvlPCJuJ0_bnbcNh-vM5VTqglhaYYm-iwltcMfJUeDGWyht9L9Aus76xbjSLyFda7DBQUsf5TLvQuOfrCVcHxJXbqdB8OFVvDe1KyGOlChk_OfnIk12jg3hHlOVg/w400-h349/Whipped&Sipped.jpg" width="400" /> </a></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>Image:</i> <i>Song of the Storyteller</i> ad © C. P. Lesley; Ivan IV’s first bride show, from the 16th-century <i>Illustrated Chronicle Codex</i> (Litsevoi letopisnyi svod), public domain via Wikimedia Commons; covers for G. P. Gottlieb’s novels © D. X. Varos, reproduced under the fair use doctrine.<br /></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span> </div></span></span><p></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-10122785430449396032023-02-03T09:00:00.002-05:002023-02-03T09:00:00.188-05:00Finally, a Truce<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Well, it took fifteen weeks, a mesh screen door, a ton of patience, and even a couple of Eagles victories, but I’m happy to report that my older cat, Mahal, has more or less agreed to live and let live with the kittens introduced into her life, against her will, in mid-October.</span></span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIdc6icKpm_eoeFcNCY3ebNrloUgoYEwrsyXKnxghwPMDYKIclJaQBqBYYVlIlpEbPOAt1rRcGXxjmb87Vh-HQTt-sVTmPqxK4AqwTXnf9PEsPpL9OLwz8F4Os9eB4AHumjwPPpCecSdgC6LkUjnoy6eBdRIRWDKlOFFX5NAhEorCVuce0GwzTr0rO8g/s3264/Mahal-Eagles-post-cave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2448" data-original-width="3264" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIdc6icKpm_eoeFcNCY3ebNrloUgoYEwrsyXKnxghwPMDYKIclJaQBqBYYVlIlpEbPOAt1rRcGXxjmb87Vh-HQTt-sVTmPqxK4AqwTXnf9PEsPpL9OLwz8F4Os9eB4AHumjwPPpCecSdgC6LkUjnoy6eBdRIRWDKlOFFX5NAhEorCVuce0GwzTr0rO8g/w400-h300/Mahal-Eagles-post-cave.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">It helps, I’m sure, that the boys have quadrupled in size during the intervening four months and can now defend themselves if need be. If nothing else, knowing that they can hold their own makes us more comfortable with the idea of letting the threesome work it out without human interference. Decades of living with cats have taught me much about how to read their behavior, but I’ve also developed a deep appreciation of how much I <i>don’t</i> know about how cats communicate with one another.<br /><br />The crucial turning point, in this case, seems to have been time—assisted by that mesh screen door. Made of nylon, it includes zippers and attaches to the existing frame, allowing people to pass through at will and cats to see, hear, and smell one another. In this case, we set it up in the room where the kittens had spent their first two weeks, so that most of the furnishings already bore their scent. Mahal had her own food and water dishes, her own cat box, a steady supply of Feliway pheromones (not sure how much difference those actually made, but they are supposed to calm cats), and frequent visits from her humans. She could watch us as we went about our daily tasks and, most important, interact with the kittens but not attack them. <br /><br />They, in turn, were forced to respect her space, dialing down the opportunity for conflict. (I would be the first to admit that Mahal had ample cause for complaint, since the boys thought nothing of cleaning out her food dish, drinking up her water, or soiling her cat box.)<br /><br />You may wonder why we put Mahal behind the screen, when she was the long-time resident. The answer is two-part. First, she was the one whose behavior we wanted to modify, and shutting them up and leaving her the run of the house would convince her she had won the day rather than give her an incentive to change. But more fundamentally, kittens are like children. They’re busy figuring out the rules of their world and what’s expected of them. The last thing we wanted to do was convince them that they should spend the rest of their lives immured in a single room. Instead, we wanted them to feel comfortable exploring and bonding with us—just as Mahal already did and continues to do.<br /><br />At first, she did her best to leap at them whenever they appeared. The first time we let her out, she hunted for them and attacked them, and we had to return her to her cave. But then something interesting happened. She started calling for attention.<br /><br />Was she calling for the kittens? I don’t know. But the kittens were the ones who responded, dashing from wherever they happened to be to station themselves outside her door. Throughout December and January, the three cats gradually moved closer, even touching noses through the screen. The next time we let Mahal out, she hissed only once, when Rafi—who has made it his prime objective to climb the screen and break into her room—dashed in the moment the door came down, then ran past her on his way back out again. And last Sunday, when we let her out again, we could watch her and the boys sussing each other out, advancing and retreating, visibly testing how close they can get to each other without crossing a boundary only they can see.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvzn8jtG-5AV4NIqsRvCXfKnA7xfZcgw9_r-LPZ1OSsjQFmD8jhJMWfolD2-owuwhAnjpdBT0aOhoicQkURAVdhptdhZ7YoyOHlDPOblokDFbE1Zcyqhcgh7AHVmjv2QA-RDs_FOvWd43cyCBme7p_6Eq15bFDIlSQENWkokbmIv8ZCDHeIBcJoaOieA/s2242/Kittens-Resting_Dec22.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="2242" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvzn8jtG-5AV4NIqsRvCXfKnA7xfZcgw9_r-LPZ1OSsjQFmD8jhJMWfolD2-owuwhAnjpdBT0aOhoicQkURAVdhptdhZ7YoyOHlDPOblokDFbE1Zcyqhcgh7AHVmjv2QA-RDs_FOvWd43cyCBme7p_6Eq15bFDIlSQENWkokbmIv8ZCDHeIBcJoaOieA/w400-h285/Kittens-Resting_Dec22.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">And that’s the main thing we wanted: a détente. Knowing Siamese, I suspect they will eventually snuggle on the couch, but if we can maintain “no teeth, minimal claws,” the rest can develop at its own pace—or not. A cold war is better than a hot one, and a working truce better still.<br /><br />So here I raise a glass to Mahal. It’s not easy dealing with such a fundamental change when you’re the cat equivalent of seventy-five. Some great cat treats and a nice belly rub for you. And despite the occasional setback—such as the one that occurred a few days after I drafted this post—we feel confident we will get you through this, sooner or later.<br /><br /><i>Images: </i>Mahal relaxing on the couch, sending good thoughts to the Eagles, who had just won their division title; Rafi (front) and Ruslan relaxing while they wait for the next summons—both © 2023 C. P. Lesley.</span></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-46123813638952552202023-01-27T09:00:00.001-05:002023-01-27T09:00:00.190-05:00The Pull of the Past<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7UV8My_cp3LhlUW4662YbU4W2N1wVbZjVwo9TSJDY_EfrowQwrSNH2QnNCXdG8hed5Q34D5qbl6hkgbF1HLTNgNTflZiicD79Iii6jlnfOEwMWPe_DepEJDrWoj3n2pGg7DMQp_UtoPffVxFm4BoNn4edfnEAphtwQJkN2gwrK1kBpYA2ehJi0Md-qw/s2405/Pandora.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2405" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7UV8My_cp3LhlUW4662YbU4W2N1wVbZjVwo9TSJDY_EfrowQwrSNH2QnNCXdG8hed5Q34D5qbl6hkgbF1HLTNgNTflZiicD79Iii6jlnfOEwMWPe_DepEJDrWoj3n2pGg7DMQp_UtoPffVxFm4BoNn4edfnEAphtwQJkN2gwrK1kBpYA2ehJi0Md-qw/s320/Pandora.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">It’s said that there are no new plots for novels, only a recircling and revisiting of a few foundational stories, many of which date from antiquity. Boy Meets Girl, Hero’s Journey, Separation from Parents, Who Killed X and Why?—most fiction, especially genre fiction, can be shoehorned into categories like these. This is not an accident: stories exist to meet the needs and expectations of readers. Each of us is unique, to be sure, but we all go through a similar process of maturation, whatever distinctive forms our own families, cultures, and selves take as we traverse the path.<br /><br />As a result, the creativity and freshness that a given author applies to the fundamental questions expressed in these plots inherited from antiquity (or the Renaissance) are what sets a particular novel above the rest. As <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/pandora" target="_blank">Susan Stokes-Chapman discusses in her recent New Books Network interview</a>, she began with a historical event but ended up transposing the ancient Greek myth of Pandora’s Box to eighteenth-century London. There the fight for possession of a massive urn recovered from a Mediterranean shipwreck releases into the world the many ills that beset humanity: greed, envy, anger, dishonesty, and more—leaving its shattered survivors with only hope, as in the original myth. <br /><br />Bits and pieces of the genre plots I list above also appear, but the whole is so deftly handled that we barely notice them because of the originality of the approach. So give the interview a listen, then read the book. It’s not an accident that the <i>New York Times Book Review</i> picked <i>Pandora</i> for its short list on historical fiction the very week of its release in the US.<br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQhUzJmZgpDR0RpUwnvv6tj9QFx5xbTmUNfyXTr1u0GKML2sY_JcyDeQdkTQ5M-Jm2DYVBQnpcs0PD0P9CdwLQkWpEHDQIJRyH_5Z9MieajCFNs1BB0K58J_PwP8WdYMs4vxUMjbi4qiC4COTsynUSn1YPM0BMxyGI3yaZfuS8cum1lOgQWQUdHltONg/s2240/Pithos_Louvre_CA4523.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2240" data-original-width="1488" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQhUzJmZgpDR0RpUwnvv6tj9QFx5xbTmUNfyXTr1u0GKML2sY_JcyDeQdkTQ5M-Jm2DYVBQnpcs0PD0P9CdwLQkWpEHDQIJRyH_5Z9MieajCFNs1BB0K58J_PwP8WdYMs4vxUMjbi4qiC4COTsynUSn1YPM0BMxyGI3yaZfuS8cum1lOgQWQUdHltONg/s320/Pithos_Louvre_CA4523.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">As usual, the rest of this post comes from <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical-fiction" target="_blank">New Books in Historical Fiction</a>.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />It is the very end of the eighteenth century, and Pandora Blake—known as Dora—lives at the edge of London society. Despite the opposition of her obnoxious uncle Hezekiah and his live-in housekeeper/mistress Lottie, neither of whom has much interest in their orphaned charge, Dora has a dream. She wants to sketch jewelry designs that will appeal to the beauties of the haut ton, in the process earning Dora a livelihood sufficient to free her from her family’s antique shop, now in decline due to Hezekiah’s mismanagement. To that end, Dora spends hours in her attic bedchamber drawing with only her beloved magpie, Hermes, for company.<br /><br />Even before we meet Dora in this enchanting yet troubling tale, we have encountered an unnamed diver bent on retrieving the cargo from a scuttered ship somewhere in the Mediterranean. It soon becomes clear that the mysterious cargo includes a massive Greek vase (more properly, a <i>pithos</i>, used for storing wine or grain), which Hezekiah acquires, together with a shipment of Greek pottery. Dora at first believes this is an attempt to save the store, but her uncle’s behavior raises questions—not least whether he obtained the <i>pithos</i> legally. To find out what Hezekiah has in mind, Dora enlists the help of a bookbinder, Edward Lawrence, setting them off on a journey that will lead deep into Dora’s past.<br /><br />This is a novel of many layers, as intricately plotted as Dora’s jewelry designs, which seem to have inspired the book’s gorgeous cover. The characters and setting are Dickensian, yet the themes are modern and the reconsideration of the mythical story of Pandora’s Box rings true. Definitely a book worth reading. <br /><br /><i>Image: Pithos</i> from Crete, ca. 675 BCE, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.<br /></span></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-66611976818628839682023-01-20T09:00:00.001-05:002023-01-20T09:00:00.167-05:00The Bachelor, Medieval Russian Style<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPdFVGWafWyj7CBOI98CmoILzGuS-w8uCi7nfpVVDQAo5up45-Sjeqqj-zpdzVr2lvI_ApDE3pBchxAODBnIbQJc4UpkCUuekczLu3D7gr1n4UfJHKWG3YjMJ-Rn6ZJh86mNMJaG28LrWaMTtFkRmMvrrFuQEMcYVjxJ6EH86LZ6_vE4kQ3iR1LSBTcQ/s1197/Song-Storyteller800x1200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1197" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPdFVGWafWyj7CBOI98CmoILzGuS-w8uCi7nfpVVDQAo5up45-Sjeqqj-zpdzVr2lvI_ApDE3pBchxAODBnIbQJc4UpkCUuekczLu3D7gr1n4UfJHKWG3YjMJ-Rn6ZJh86mNMJaG28LrWaMTtFkRmMvrrFuQEMcYVjxJ6EH86LZ6_vE4kQ3iR1LSBTcQ/s320/Song-Storyteller800x1200.jpg" width="214" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">As promised, this past Tuesday Five Directions Press formally announced the release of my latest Songs of Steppe & Forest novel, <a href=" https://www.fivedirectionspress.com/song-of-the-storyteller" target="_blank"><i>Song of the Storyteller</i></a>. As you might guess from the title of this post, I had a lot of fun writing this particular novel—and for several reasons.<br /><br />First, Lyuba is the kind of heroine I find easy to connect to: strong-minded yet thoughtful, self-aware, and in love with words. Although I accept that every character, even the villains, represents one or more elements of myself, Lyuba—like her predecessor Nasan—is not so much me as the person I wish I could have been at sixteen. She has a poise I lacked (I was neurotically silent and shy), yet she loves stories, just as I have since before I even learned how to read. And although she’s beautiful—another trait I wouldn’t lay claim to—she has little awareness of and no interest in that fact; she cares far more about people’s minds and hearts than their looks—even her love interest Timur’s, although she’s certainly not immune to his charms.<br /><br />Best of all, from the perspective of storytelling, Lyuba is a writer, so she naturally thinks in terms of describing the scenes she experiences, the settings in which they take place, and the characters she meets—and she meets some real doozies in the course of this book. She’ll exaggerate for effect and dramatic impact, but she’s also alert to hidden vulnerabilities and subtexts. The more I submerged myself in her world and her way of seeing, the more readily the story flowed. Even her passing remarks—grumbling when people interrupt her while she’s crafting a sentence, for example—fit both who she is and the unique experience of producing fiction.<br /><br />Other writers will understand what I mean by that. People who, in Lyuba’s words, “don’t live with stories buzzing inside their heads” may find it strange. Aren’t all characters the author’s creation, like paper dolls dressed up and moved around a cardboard stage? Why would one heroine be easier to write than another?<br /><br />But in fact, novel writing doesn’t work like that at all. Characters emerge from the subconscious, and the writing flows naturally from letting them chart their own course. My only experiences with the dreaded writer’s block have been when I tried to force a character into behavior that met the needs of the plot but not the personality of the character. Like real people, though, not all characters move comfortably in the larger world. The shy and ungainly, the poorly educated, the girls trained to silent submission (so common throughout much of history)—discovering what makes such heroines unique and memorable can take months, if not years. So when I come across a self-aware, active, fiery heroine like Lyuba, with her vast vocabulary and her talent for nailing in a few words what distinguishes each person she encounters, that’s a gift.<br /><br />The second factor that eased the writing of this novel was the historical backdrop. From the moment I realized that Lyuba would be just a month or two younger than Ivan the Terrible when the tsar reached the age of coronation and marriage, I knew I must find a way to set her story during his first bride show. Long before I figured out how she would navigate this historical incident that to a modern mind almost defies belief, I wanted to examine the bride show from her perspective. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Indeed, the natural drama in this incident lets the story almost tell itself. In a country where it might take half a year in travel time to obtain a license to buy a horse, a small group of nobles and government officials were allotted less than six <i>weeks</i> to fan out across the provinces, summoning girls from the local towns. The idea was to bring the best (defined as the most beautiful, healthiest, most likely to be fertile, and, of course, virginal) highborn young women to Moscow. There they would be examined by the wives of the Moscow aristocracy, who would then whittle down the selection to a small group considered to be suitable as a potential royal bride. In addition to the qualities of the candidates themselves, the political loyalty of their male relatives and, in particular, the ease with which the new family could be incorporated into the existing pecking order among the elite were prime factors. The tsar got to pick the wife he wanted from that select group, but he probably had no more than fifteen minutes with each of them before deciding. The real work was done before the royal presentations began.<br /><br />How well that worked in practice is hard to determine. The call for potential brides went out on December 12, 1546, and by February 3, 1547, the tsar had made his choice and held the wedding. What happened between those two dates is pretty much anyone’s guess, although we do have documents detailing the histories of some potential brides and the assignments of roles during the ceremony itself. And, of course, we know who won. It is probably not a coincidence that the girl who made the cut came from the Moscow aristocracy, although at least a few maidens from other towns did undergo the equivalent of background checks.<br /><br />But from the perspective of fiction, that is not the important element. For reasons <a href="http://blog.cplesley.com/2013/09/the-kremlin-beauty-pageant.html" target="_blank">I’ve explained in a previous post</a>, bride shows were held before every ruler’s wedding and even for some of the collateral heirs (the “spares,” in modern lingo) between 1505 and 1689. The stakes were high, and as a result, bride shows were rife with behind-the-scenes negotiations and outright skullduggery. Successful candidates died before, or right after, their weddings. Prospective brides developed bizarre illnesses that vanished as quickly as they had arisen after the girls returned home. Nasty rumors of inappropriate behavior ruined reputations—one reason provincial fathers hid their daughters from view rather than let them be selected for the journey to Moscow. The whole thing was a dramatist’s dream, and I had a great time deciding which of the many boulders would obstruct Lyuba’s path to success as she defined it and which would eventually let her reach her chosen goal.<br /><br />The book description is below, and I hope you enjoy the novel as much as Andrea Penrose (whose Wrexford & Sloane Regency mysteries you should absolutely read if you have not already), who wrote, “C. P. Lesley brings an exotic setting to life with richly textured historical details and a wonderful cast of fascinating characters—it’s an enchanting tale worthy of her clever storyteller heroine!” </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">If you do, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or GoodReads. I know time is scarce and the demands on it many, but reviews help other readers find my books by increasing their visibility, and they tell those who do discover the novels whether this is something they might like.<br /><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh571GConfMTVdjqVyE7UXFjSzI5tz7JeBDpUrtRYUGOb8SvmJWFbHFkpspcOgji2niXgAViCG-4joQw_KKIzwb9gVCgmK8dns2RmxeX0gj4SRbAv9YP5G8G7ApAh__y5khk3Wr1OziwsoqIxtWMngBbGHft1WrSiVoxyRq1lXfaZmaMUf0eQmdnbgECw/s2074/Sedov_AlexeiM's_1648_bride-show_1882.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="2074" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh571GConfMTVdjqVyE7UXFjSzI5tz7JeBDpUrtRYUGOb8SvmJWFbHFkpspcOgji2niXgAViCG-4joQw_KKIzwb9gVCgmK8dns2RmxeX0gj4SRbAv9YP5G8G7ApAh__y5khk3Wr1OziwsoqIxtWMngBbGHft1WrSiVoxyRq1lXfaZmaMUf0eQmdnbgECw/w400-h309/Sedov_AlexeiM's_1648_bride-show_1882.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /><br />Lyuba Koshkina has long known that her father, an ambitious and unscrupulous nobleman, will stop at nothing to see her wed the grand prince—soon to be crowned as Russia’s first tsar, Ivan the Terrible. A few months after her sixteenth birthday, the call for the tsar’s bride show goes out. But Lyuba has goals of her own, and they do not include a royal marriage. She wants to record the tales that fill her head from morning to night, including the adventures of her own family. One day, she catches a handsome stranger reading her work and realizes that here stands the man she has loved since childhood—and that neither her father nor the Church will permit them to wed.<br /><br />Timur Alexeevich has spent years away from home, learning from his uncles how to rule a Tatar horde. An unexpected summons brings him back to Moscow and the girl he once thought of as a little sister, now a scintillating, learned, and self-assured beauty destined—at least according to her father—to become Russia’s first tsaritsa. Even the grandson of a khan cannot compete with so exalted a future. All seems lost, until Lyuba discovers that a storyteller has the power to weave her own future from the twists of fate.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /><i>Image:</i> Grigory Sedov, <i>The Choice of a Bride</i> (1882), public domain via Wikimedia Commons.<br /></span></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1535945814378030694.post-45799454697490739572023-01-12T16:00:00.002-05:002023-01-19T12:11:05.863-05:00Sneak Peeks<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">On Tuesday, January 17, Five Directions Press will formally announce the release of my latest Songs of Steppe & Forest novel, <a href="https://www.fivedirectionspress.com/song-of-the-storyteller" target="_blank"><i>Song of the Storyteller</i></a>. I’ll talk more about the book itself next Friday. This week, I’d like to focus instead on the always thorny (from my perspective) topic of promotion. Even in the days when all publishing was commercial, books could not just appear and make a splash. In the current climate, where publishers are huge conglomerates and indie publishing has exploded, even authors lucky enough to land a traditional contract with one of the Big Five have to put in a lot of sweat and toil on social media if their years’ long writing projects are not to sink like ten-ton rocks beneath the roiling waves of public attention.<br /><br />And that’s too bad, because while I love diving into my story world and exploring its nooks and crannies, its heroes and villains, then letting the writing flow onto the page and even cleaning it up afterwards, I am not cut out for the job of touting my work to the world. I tolerate social media—some sites more than others, but none for long. I’m happy to hold in-person events, but Covid pretty much put a lid on those. Advertising has never paid for itself, nor have reduced sale prices, and although I certainly have a group of fans, as luck would have it, they don’t generally leave reviews. My most consistent ways of reaching out have been this blog and my interviews for the <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/historical-fiction" target="_blank">New Books Network</a>.<br /><br />But one way of promoting a new book that I do love is book teasers. These are one-liners added to vivid, compelling images that offer glimpses into the action and visuals of a particular novel. They are fun to create, and they get me thinking about what <i>are</i> the most dramatic lines of a given story. So I decided to share how I create them, since you might enjoy making your own. <br /><br />First and foremost, it helps to have the right software. I used Adobe’s InDesign until this book. It’s a wonderful program, but available only for a hefty monthly fee, so unless you use it for work, as I do, a better alternative is Serif’s Affinity Publisher, which costs $50–60 for a lifetime license even when it’s not on sale, which it often is. If you have serious Word chops, you could probably use that or one of the free alternatives, but personally I wouldn’t. I like to be able to place things very precisely, and the publishing programs are designed to do that in a way that word processors are not.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOy8v8lq-9dzyfcqtt7LV-gWFBYWjWDrmNjx1nDm48I300usMfvuhdvCppjifjEuB31m0bTbhriaMKpSHvdRoj-Kg80ePUQDrZtDzOZeaXdqT0cSjd8Rni6uXEpVU9cRZ4oaiI0X-1QsRhjjJadhS770V_TpnFNJOusha1ixdvVYcAGcH-H3PTAqnWsw/s800/AA-Sophia6-2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOy8v8lq-9dzyfcqtt7LV-gWFBYWjWDrmNjx1nDm48I300usMfvuhdvCppjifjEuB31m0bTbhriaMKpSHvdRoj-Kg80ePUQDrZtDzOZeaXdqT0cSjd8Rni6uXEpVU9cRZ4oaiI0X-1QsRhjjJadhS770V_TpnFNJOusha1ixdvVYcAGcH-H3PTAqnWsw/w400-h300/AA-Sophia6-2.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Next you need a source of good images that are royalty free. There are paid sites like Shutterstock and iStock, but those costs add up fast if you make 15–20 teasers per book. Try Pixabay, Unsplash, and other free sites. (Affinity Publisher will connect to several of them directly from within your files.) A subscription service like Clipart.com or iClipart.com (run by the same company), which charges a set rate per year, can be a good investment—and there are often discount coupons available on the Internet, especially for first-time users. But make sure they have a wide-ranging selection of photographs, not just clip art, suitable for your particular novel.<br /><br />And don’t forget public domain images, especially if you write historical fiction. Anything produced by the US government is public domain by requirement, since the public pays for the government through taxes. That includes most of the Digital Collections of the US Library of Congress, although you need to check to ensure that the donor has surrendered all rights. <i>Meisterwerke der Malerei</i> is a great source for European paintings, and the files are often very high quality. Other museum collections may or may not permit free use; it’s important to validate each museum’s policy. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFdn2GuynxbAEoGsWuyppnTfNaXY8UZ-DNOBnrxuRKFwVO_AulfD9L3UGixXeFl-FKke87iOontsCg_dg8_Zro3KMEw0rLG3wlqY320-NynDgG5nV7ZP4lB9xXjDv2XvqME0kMfN-p036t3cOqvsIqlFWoiGSTZRv5VEIYMsng6lVxoxWCaCd2qelXxw/s800/CPL-SD5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFdn2GuynxbAEoGsWuyppnTfNaXY8UZ-DNOBnrxuRKFwVO_AulfD9L3UGixXeFl-FKke87iOontsCg_dg8_Zro3KMEw0rLG3wlqY320-NynDgG5nV7ZP4lB9xXjDv2XvqME0kMfN-p036t3cOqvsIqlFWoiGSTZRv5VEIYMsng6lVxoxWCaCd2qelXxw/w400-h300/CPL-SD5.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Wikimedia Commons is a fantastic storehouse of great art and, unlike images for print covers, book teasers don’t require high-resolution backgrounds because they are destined for the World Wide Web, where 72 dots per inch look just as good as the 300 needed for print. So you should be able to make use of all but the smallest images. Book teasers sized for the Web should be no larger than 800 x 600 pixels (900 x 1200 for TikTok; 900–1,200 square for Instagram). I make them proportionally larger in Affinity but shrink them on export, which tells me also how much space they will take up (under 1 megabyte is ideal).<br /><br />The third essential is good dialogue or description—single sentences that capture essential elements of the story and make a reader want to know more. These should be intrinsic in the writing, but some authors are better at dramatic statements and cliffhanger endings than others. A story can have lots of action yet few single lines that convey a sense of threat or intrigue in a catchy and comprehensible way. It’s worth thinking about that—not while you’re writing but perhaps when you’re revising, after all the main plot points and characterizations are set.<br /><br />Last, it’s helpful to echo the look of the published novel by replicating the fonts used in the book, which should themselves be matched in style to the novel and its contents. If you create your own covers and texts, you will know what those fonts are; if you hire a designer, ask. If the exact font is not available, there are lots of free alternatives designed for the Internet. Google Fonts is one place to look. Try to find something as close as possible in style to that used on the cover.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeeRUjKgjvApHcksdjXkWey7inMALPxv045ExjBBiwyzNCi72kIO41_xzbVf9X0R0DdfujSvw4jASB1D4hJKSLV38JXZqiu7AV6NlK2fmA43iMTn6A8_EIth-i8vpx_pFbxZSGiJOuCuuYNsCGvaqQtCS0VfnhlbrAJKbU6tw-P7OGqfE4PUcJYgFZ_A/s800/GM-Girl10.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeeRUjKgjvApHcksdjXkWey7inMALPxv045ExjBBiwyzNCi72kIO41_xzbVf9X0R0DdfujSvw4jASB1D4hJKSLV38JXZqiu7AV6NlK2fmA43iMTn6A8_EIth-i8vpx_pFbxZSGiJOuCuuYNsCGvaqQtCS0VfnhlbrAJKbU6tw-P7OGqfE4PUcJYgFZ_A/w400-h300/GM-Girl10.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /><br />In illustration, I have scattered throughout this post a few teasers I’ve created for past novels, my own and other people’s. Each of them corresponds to the principles above, although they range from contemporary romance to historical drama.</span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span style="font-family: georgia;">Note that these images all have a central image but lots of relatively free space where you can put text without either element overwhelming the other. Think about that as you are selecting between two equally good representations of your prose.<br /></span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />In closing, I offer the first teaser for my new novel, taken from chapter 1. Follow me on Facebook (cplesley.authorpage), Twitter (cplesley), Pinterest (cplesley), Goodreads (C.P. Lesley), Instagram (authorcplesley), and TikTok (authorcplesley) for new hints of what’s to come over the next month or so, as well as general updates on books I’m reading, interviews, and life in general. And of course, buy the book! If you like historical fiction set in a place just a bit beyond the ordinary, with a bit of adventure and a dollop of sweet romance, I promise you will enjoy it.<br /><br /><br /></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih-h3XM25sQmnsuMTzGUAZpa2fXTkK4afB9i5fEs0LGuAF2EsWZfttJDMsJNXxECAHTS1Ey-yceNPmt8oWqPfVDl6B4JtGC1_h9BN90KxaLHm4uLJbw9XZfdgfEYgRXMEuXiwSpfD5gZQrjxKiskcYX0eG4TOfeesJmxC5PDRo9V5mfg1osSyOD7xI5Q/s800/CPL-Storyteller1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="800" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih-h3XM25sQmnsuMTzGUAZpa2fXTkK4afB9i5fEs0LGuAF2EsWZfttJDMsJNXxECAHTS1Ey-yceNPmt8oWqPfVDl6B4JtGC1_h9BN90KxaLHm4uLJbw9XZfdgfEYgRXMEuXiwSpfD5gZQrjxKiskcYX0eG4TOfeesJmxC5PDRo9V5mfg1osSyOD7xI5Q/w400-h300/CPL-Storyteller1.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">So if the idea of creating book teasers appeals to you, give it a try. They don’t always sell books, but in my experience, few “sure-fire” techniques exist. Promotion is like exercise: you have to focus on a few activities that you enjoy, or you’ll spend all your time making excuses and see no progress at all.<br /><br /></span></span></p>C. P. Lesleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00887581040629930222noreply@blogger.com0