Jen: What inspired you to write OUR DARKEST NIGHT? Jennifer: After finishing work on THE GOWN, I jumped into work on a book set in…well, I don’t really want to say, since I may return to it some day! I spent months researching and plotting it, but when it was time to buckle down and write the thing, I just couldn’t do it. I was trying to figure out what to do next when my son came to me and asked if it was true that his great-grandparents, my husband’s maternal grandparents, helped to hide Jewish families from the Nazis during the war. And I had to admit that I wasn’t sure – but I told him I would try to find out. It didn’t take a lot of digging for me to discover that San Zenone degli Ezzelini, the small town in northern Italy where my mother-in-law grew up, was a focus of resistance against the Nazi occupation in World War Two, and specifically that the local priest had organized shelter for dozens of Italian Jews. Father Oddo Stocco was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2010, and while I wasn’t able to prove conclusively that…

1–What is the title of your latest release? Tidewater Bride 2–What is it about? A young woman who is the head matchmaker for a 1634 Virginia colony yet lacks her own match. Selah Hopewell is tasked with bringing ‘Tobacco Brides’ to the male-dominated New World but she never realizes by doing so she is arranging her own nuptials.  3–What do you love about the setting of your book?  Early Virginia is an explosion of all the things that make pages turn – a brave New World, handsome tobacco planters, treacherous politics, precious few women, ships, Indians, and the accompanying tumult that settling a new nation brings.  4–How did your main character(s) surprise you?  Sometimes they did things I wasn’t expecting, taking a scene in a direction I hadn’t thought of or anticipated. The mystery of creating! There’s even a bit of humor within.  5–Why will readers relate to your characters?  Their faults and foibles became very apparent to me. We all have them and characters should have them, too. Pride and false assumptions play a large part in this story, as troubling then as now.  6–What was one of your biggest challenges while writing this book (spoiler-free, of course!)?  Keeping…

It’s both a blessing and a curse to have two big passions in life. That’s been me from a very early age. I wrote my first story about a girl getting a pony for Christmas when I was six (not in ANY way meant to manipulate my parents into getting said pony). I tried to write my first novel when I was twelve, also about a girl and a horse. After that, my writing strayed into the fantasy lane, with a horse making a cameo here and there. Until I had the idea a few years back to write a fantasy western. And to make that fantasy western a feminist twist on the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Fast forward to today. A WAR OF DAISIES, the first book of seven in the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse series, released in late October. It has been a super fun ride (pun intended) combining my two passions into one. I even got really crazy and decided to star in my own book trailer with my horse Max. In it, we portray Death and her pale horse. It made perfect sense when the idea popped into my head – I mean, I…

Half a dozen women, standing by a makeshift bar in Didcote’s Air Transit Auxiliary’s mess turned appraising faces toward us. For one panicky moment I felt I was back at boarding school on the first day of term. “Good morning, Miss Redfern, I’m Vera Abercrombie, Didcote’s commanding officer.” A compact looking woman with a direct no nonsense gaze introduced herself. I suppose, like everyone else who first met her, I was surprised that the Didcote ATA commanding officer wasn’t the standard issue senior male RAF officer with a waxed moustache. Vera Abercrombie was probably in her mid-thirties, but her fair northern skin was deeply lined, either from years of flying, or put there by the burdensome responsibility of her war-time job. She carried a clip-board with a sheaf of papers pinned to it and her glance strayed to it often, as if she might have inadvertently overlooked some small but important detail. There are not many women who have shot to the heights of command that Vera Abercrombie had achieved, without being conscious of their seniority every hour of their long working day, but there was no arrogance in her greeting and no feeling that this was her ‘show,’ and…

As we approach the (much different this COVID year) Thanksgiving holidays, traditionally a time of fetes and family gatherings, this month’s selection of novels explores families and family-like relationships that can be either blessing or curse. We begin with THE WRIGHT SISTER by Patty Dann.  While everyone is familiar with the famous brothers who made the first flight at Kitty Hawk, few know about the sister who supported and took care of her famous brothers for most of her life.  After Wilbur’s death, at age 52, Katherine married a widowed friend of the family, Harry Haskell.  Furious and feeling betrayed, Orville remained with a housekeeper in Dayton, Ohio, while his married sister began a new life in Kansas City.  The story is told via her (unanswered) letters to the brother who never forgave her for “abandoning” him and her “marriage diary,” detailing her joy in her new life, her enthusiastic support for the suffragette cause, and her never-realized hopes to reconcile with her brother. A vivid portrait of a woman who was long restrained from becoming all she could be by the demands of her restrictive family. We continue with a better-known woman in LEARNING TO SEE: A NOVEL OF…

Like many, I’ve posted ironic images on my Facebook pages comparing the 2020 Year of COVID to many things–a hula hoop made of barbed wire, a pinata that’s actually a hornet’s nest, a time clock that sent us in March from Standard Time not to Daylight Savings Time, but into the Twilight Zone. So perhaps more than in “normal” times, we can identify with protagonists who are attempting to reconstruct their lives in the aftermath of unprecedented upheaval. And aside from a world-wide pandemic, nothing uproots people and disturbs lives like war. We begin with a novel by three of the most talented writers penning historical fiction today, Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White.  The trio collaborated to create ALL THE WAYS WE SAID GOODBYE, using an iconic Parisian hotel as a locus for their stories.  Aurelie de Courcelles is devastated when, at the outbreak of World War I, her home is taken over as a German headquarters.  The dilemma is made more difficult when she discovers the commander’s aide de camp is the handsome young man who charmed her during her debut season in Paris.  Despite their opposing loyalties, friendship deepens into love…until betrayal drives Aurelie back to…

Years ago, when my kids were younger, I took my family to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. It was billed as the “Greatest Show on Earth,” and it certainly lived up to its name. We had seats front and center, so the whole spectacle was laid out before our eyes. The children in the audience weren’t the only ones oohing and aahing at the grand performance. The adults were amazed, too. All the regular elements were part of the show. The ringmaster led the events with his booming voice. The clowns made us laugh with their silly antics. The dancers entertained us with their choreographed routines. But it was the skill of the acrobats that really made an impression on me. At one point, a group of them climbed poles whose tops swayed in the rafters far above the floor. The performers weren’t attached to safety lines, nor was a net stretched below them to break a fall. Apparently unbothered by this, the acrobats scampered up the pole to a tiny platform, where they did handstands on even hung by their feet. One slip and they would have been in big trouble. Yet they seemed perfectly at…

Jen: What inspired you to write Millicent Glenn’s Last Wish? Tori: When I was around five years old, I was at a big family reunion and overheard some older, distant cousins allude to the tragedy that I’ve fictionalized here. That mental vision of what happened stayed with me throughout my life. Years after the woman who was involved had already passed, I asked three people close to her if she’d ever spoken about it. They each said they’d had but one conversation in all the time they’d known he–—and they each had a different detail to share with me. I took those few details and built a whole story around them. The novel is set in two time periods. How much research was needed in order for the story to ring true with readers? I began with a sweeping search for information about the late-WWII years and early 1950s. Besides learning about fashion, media, foods and so forth, I discovered things like the need for prefabricated houses for growing families, and I wove that into my story. I read accounts written from women of the period, too–some of whom felt confined in their suburban homes and by a society that…

History is replete with examples of women who, despite the restricted roles their society intended them to occupy, manage to break out and become extraordinary.  With all of us now living in such unprecedented times, it seems fitting to immerse ourselves in the stories of women who managed to excel despite their societies and circumstances. We begin in England and earliest chronologically with MARGARET THE FIRST by Danielle Dutton, based on the life of seventeenth-century duchess Margaret Cavendish.  Daughter of a Royalist family and one of the queen’s attendants, Margaret was exiled with the royal household after the overthrow of Charles I.  She meets the worldly and much older William Cavendish, who becomes fascinated by this shy but unconventional woman who writes poetry and philosophy.  William becomes her husband and life-long advocate who champions her writing and encourages her unusual pursuits.  With the return of the monarchy under Charles II, she and her husband are established at the heart of the Restoration court, where she earns fame as “Mad Madge,” a newspaper celebrity both feted and mocked for her feminist writings, utopian plays, and the scientific work that made her the first woman invited to be part of the Royal…

Forgiveness is one of the themes woven throughout the pages of my historical time-slip novel, Under the Tulip Tree. In it, Frankie, a 101-year-old former slave, tells the story of her life to Rena, a young white woman who works for the Federal Writers’ Project, a government program that employed thousands of out-of-work writers, teachers, librarians, and others during the Great Depression. As an unlikely friendship emerges between the two women, a startling revelation threatens to undo the bond of respect and admiration they’ve nurtured. Can they overcome it? The answer hinges on one word: forgiveness. Forgiveness means different things to different people, but in Under the Tulip Tree and in this article, I’m referring to the biblical definition. The original Greek word that appears in the New Testament is aphiemi, a verb with several meanings: to send away; to expire; to let go; to disregard; to give up a debt; to keep no longer. In Under the Tulip Tree, both Frankie and Rena are faced with situations that require them to forgive someone, yet forgiveness is not easy. In fact, it can be one of the hardest things we’ll ever do, especially if the offense left us traumatized. As…