Hi everyone! It’s a real treat to be here at Fresh Fiction. Before I start, I’ve a quick question to ask you: How often do you read authors outside your own gender? Based on my formative reading material, I should by rights be the worst chauvinist author imaginable. I’m not kidding when I say the first time I read a complete book by a female writer was THE LOVELY BONES in 2005. And before that, most of the female literary characters I’d read were either barbarian queens or damsels-in-distress, women locked away in modes of male fantasy inside stories written about men, for men. I know the hero journey inside out, sideways, jutting jaw to bloody hilt. Growing up with the tales of H Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and JRR Tolkien will do that to a boy. And it was wonderful. Wonderful…and incomplete. Then something bizarre happened. Carl Sagan’s rambling but extraordinary novel, CONTACT, introduced me to a larger-than-life heroine in a traditionally (at least in my SF) male pursuit. Ellie Arroway didn’t just dream of becoming an astronomer and discovering the secrets of the universe, she went out and made it happen. She had flaws, deep scars from…

A Blessings Novel January 2010 On Sale: January 1, 2010 Featuring: Bernadine Brown 400 pages ISBN: 0061547816 EAN: 9780061547812 Paperback $13.99 Add to Wish List Multicultural Inspirational, Fiction Buy at Amazon.com Everyone deserves a second chance, right? A Second Helping by Beverly Jenkins With the millions she received after divorcing her faithless tycoon husband, Bernadine Brown saved the historic town of Henry Adams, Kansas, from financial ruin and found loving homes for five needy children. Now there are other “projects” crying out for rescue. If ever a town institution needed rescuing, it’s the beloved Dog and Cow diner. Once it was Henry Adams’s social center—or gossip central!—now it’s in danger of becoming duct-tape central. But there are other distractions pulling Bernadine from the task at hand: a plethora of romantic entanglements, including her own with a disturbingly attractive Malachi July; a bitter young boy newly arrived in town with his widowed father; and a fugitive on the run with a six-hundred-pound pet pig that’s wanted for murder (the pig, that is). And when Bernadine’s philandering, trouble-making ex-husband rolls into town looking for a second chance, life in Henry Adams gets very interesting indeed. A novel about community with something for…