Hello! I’m Tina Gabrielle and I write adventurous historical romance featuring feisty ladies and bold heroes. I’m excited to be on Fresh Fiction to celebrate my new historical release, HOW TO CAPTURE A DUKE, the third book in my Raven Club series. All my books are standalone reads. Did you know Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, James Earl Jones, and Nicole Kidman have all struggled with stuttering? Many more famous people can be added to this list. This book is straight from my heart, and I purposely chose a hero with a speech disorder. All through grammar school, I was treated by my school’s speech therapist. First, English was my second language. I’m a first-generation Armenian-American, and we spoke Armenian at home. Second, I had an articulation delay and struggled to pronounce certain words and sounds. As a five-year-old, I remember my speech therapist quite fondly. She had pretty long, brown hair to her waist, wore colorful high heels and gave me candy after each session. She also helped me a lot, and over my entire grammar school career, my speech difficulties were resolved. I went on to become an attorney, and I’ve argued cases in front of judges in crowded…

When I announced to my friends, family, and writing colleagues that I finally secured a contract to publish a novel-in-stories, Floating in the Neversink, about growing up in Brooklyn and the Catskill Mountains from 1955-1961, I received unexpected enthusiasm. Certainly, my older family members anticipated memories of gossiping on city brownstone stoops and grabbing a Chinese lunch on Flatbush Avenue, and my growing-up friends hoped to recapture memories of make-out parties in the Catskill day camp meeting house during humid summer nights. But I was surprised by the interest of the younger relatives and friends, my daughter’s Generation X and the Millennials. Some were movie buffs and loved cult favorites like Dirty Dancing, Sweet Lorraine, and A Walk on the Moon, romanticizing the summers of that era, or more recent movies like immigrant life in Brooklyn. Many had heard their parents’ and grandparents’ stories; others were obsessed by Amazon’s 1950s-set comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. But I suspected this interest was more layered: young and old were attracted to a time when life was seemingly more humanly connected. I looked for verification of my theory, and I lazily began on social media. I searched Facebook for groups relating to the…