Historical romance novelist Rose Lerner debuted last year with IN FOR A PENNY, and immediately won my forever-fanhood with her brilliant prose and unique characters.
She solidified my adoration with her September release, A LILY AMONG THORNS, which I had the pleasure of reading early for review. If you love thoughtful-yet-sensuous stories populated with intricately drawn characters, take my advice: pre-order LILY now.
Rose: EEEEEE! I’m so excited you’ve read and liked the book! It’s always nervewracking when something new comes out and not very many people have read it–there’s this irrational fear in the back of your mind, “Oh no, I’ve lost it, everyone’s going to hate it.” Hearing nice things from friends really helps.
I’m thrilled to welcome Rose to my blog today as part of my Hearts and Minds giveaway, where we’re giving away a copy of either IN FOR A PENNY or A LILY AMONG THORNS (winner’s choice). Welcome, Rose!
1. Other than a love of Georgette Heyer, what draws you to the Regency period?
Well, I think it’s mostly that. Not just Georgette Heyer, of course, but that I read a lot in the genre and the stories being told about the Regency era are the kinds of stories I like to read. I love the way that Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer comedy-of-manners stuff blends with the more passionate stuff. (See question 5 below!) So I already knew I was going to write Regencies before I ever did any research or really learned much about the era.
That said, it’s a really fascinating period. A lot of things were in flux, economically and socially. England was making the shift to an industrial society, and from a limited monarchy to…well, to a much more limited monarchy, but the whole way people thought about government and their relationship to it was changing. The modern past-time of Talking About How Reading Girly Books Rots Women’s Brains was just gaining popularity.
The more I read about the era, the more familiar it sounds in many ways, and the more neverendingly, incomprehensibly different it sounds in others. I love that contrast.
2. Your novels are so richly detailed that I imagine your bookshelves are bursting with historical reference books. What are your favorite sources for research?
Well, I do a lot on the internet. If I need a small detail, I’ll use Google or check Wikipedia or use my Seattle Public Library subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary. If that fails, I’ll ask my Regency writers’ loop.
When I need a lot of background knowledge about something, though (for A Lily Among Thorns, it was chemistry as practiced in the Regency, London’s criminal underworld, women’s property rights, England’s queer subculture, to name a few), then it’s time to hit the library.
I used to rely on interlibrary loan, but I finally got a card at the University of Washington library last year. They have a fabulous collection. I’ll just do a catalog search and bring home a giant stack of books, then throw it all at the wall and see what sticks. If I really love a book and think I’ll come back to it, I’ll buy it. Sadly a lot of scholarly nonfiction is very expensive, but my collection does keep growing…
I put a partial bibliography on my website for each book. The one for Lily isn’t up yet, but the one for In for a Penny is here.
3. I’ve written before about the wonderful way you write characters’ accents, and how you use those accents to highlight differences in their class situations. Now that I’ve read A LILY AMONG THORNS, I can see even more emphasis on how characters struggle against their own class expectations and prejudices. What made you so interested in these aspects of British culture?
You know, I was just thinking about this myself. The heroine of my WIP is solidly middle-class and that’s an important part of the book (and has required loads of new research! Almost all my Regency knowledge is aristocrat-based). I don’t set out consciously to write stories about this, but it just keeps coming up.
It does seem to be part of a trend in the genre–I’ve read more historicals with middle class and working class characters in the last two years than I did the whole time I was in high school.
When I was five or six, my mother took me to a costume exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. I’d never seen a corset before and was horrified when my mother explained what it was. “Don’t worry, Rosie,” she told me. “No one in our family ever wore anything like that, because they were peasants.”
The idea was planted in my mind early that “the past” as presented in museum period rooms and Hollywood costume dramas and most history textbooks (except for the often boring and poorly presented “social history” sections) was specifically the rich past. And not only was it not the whole story, but it wasn’t my story. A world where every single character comes from old money leaves me feeling vaguely uneasy and out of place if I think about it too hard.
I love reading those stories and I love fantasizing about enjoying fabulous wealth (the clothes! the jewels! the autocratic tone of command!), just as I love superhero movies despite being vaguely uncomfortable with the whole “vigilante justice” thing. But it takes months and months to write a book and I just can’t suspend my disbelief that long, I think.
4. As a writer, I have to ask you: did you do anything as an unpublished writer that helped prepare you for the rigors of being a published author (like establishing a daily writing time, or developing a support network of other writers)?
Well, I had experimented with different writing schedules and knew a lot about my process, and that was very important. I joined my local RWA chapter and gone to our local conference several times, and made a lot of contacts and friends and learned a lot about the industry and the craft and marketing and pitching, and that was very important.
And I wrote a lot and had (and continue to have) a great critique group, which brought my writing to a place where I could write a good book in a reasonable amount of time, and that was very important too.
But in some ways the toughest things about the shift were the parts I couldn’t really prepare for: the amount of time I suddenly had to spend marketing, and the emotional pressure of deadlines and being responsible for my career. Suddenly the stakes are much, much higher, and that makes writing (and procrastination!) feel different.
You just have to deal with that when it hits, so I think the number one most important thing you can do is have people to deal with it with you.
In my case, the most important part of that support network was my critique group, the Demimondaines: Susanna Fraser, Alyssa Everett, Vonnie Hughes, and Karen Dobbins. They have always been there for me, before and after publication. I don’t know what I would have done without them.
5. On your website, you answer several either/or questions to help readers get to know you better. One of your questions—Colin Firth or Hugh Grant?—is clearly wrong. The answer should be neither of the above because there’s no one hotter than Jonny Lee Miller in Mansfield Park. But I have another one for you: Jane Austen or Emily Brontë?
Well, definitely Jane, Wuthering Heights isn’t really my bag. However, I’m just going to change it to “Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte” and answer that instead, because that’s a really tough one for me. My relationship with Jane Austen is really complicated and my relationship with Charlotte Bronte is really simple.
I adore Jane Eyre on every level. Sometimes I’m a little embarrassed by how earnest Charlotte is about everything and wish she had more of a sense of humor. Okay, I’m done.
When it comes to Jane Austen, though, there’s a whole Dostoyevskian love-hate thing going on, where I love her and then I resent her because I love her and that gives her the power to reject me. Here’s the thing: I identify with Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. I talk too loud and I love things too much. I’m not particularly elegant or refined or reserved. I’d probably shamelessly ogle militia officers, too.
Jane Austen is brilliant and incisive and talented and insightful and she makes hilarious jokes. I admire her unreservedly as a writer. But…I think it’s easier to unreservedly like her as a person if you can imagine yourself snarking with her about other people at a party, whereas I can never shake the feeling that she and her friends would be snarking about me.
The last time I read Mansfield Park, a couple of parts made me actually physically shake with anger.
You have to be pretty invested, to reread a book for the third or fourth time even though you know it’s going to make you shake with anger. I owe a lot more, creatively, to Jane Austen than I do to Charlotte Bronte (although I firmly believe the Regency historical genre is a marriage of the two literary traditions!). In for a Penny occasionally shares JA’s verbal tics and contains probably a dozen references to her books, many of them thematically integral to the book.
But Jane Austen’s books don’t work for me as romances. Whereas Jane Eyre, for me, embodies the intense, perfect connection with another human being that romance is all about and that I try to capture in my books.
You can read various contemporary and Victorian reactions to Austen here. I found them while searching for Charlotte Bronte’s own thoughts on her (which are there, but a more complete version is here).
And I found that I was as annoyed by some of the criticism (Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Never was life so pinched and narrow….All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with?…Suicide is more respectable”) as I was by some of the praise (“[…]No dark passages; no secret chambers; no wind-howlings in long galleries; no drops of blood upon a rusty dagger–things that should now be left to ladies’ maids and sentimental washerwomen”).
I guess what it comes down to is that I have pretty strong opinions about both authors, and I can talk about which I like better and why, but a lot of times (I don’t at all mean you, obviously, but look at those quotes I just quoted!) the choice between Austen and the Brontes is set up in this weird symbolic way where you’re being asked to choose What Kind Of Woman You Are, or to choose between Realism and Melodrama, or between Repression and Sexual Liberation, or whatever dichotomy has been set up.
Even Charlotte Bronte’s negative comments on Austen were a direct reaction to her publisher’s suggestion that she write more like Austen! It’s nuts. Female authors are not in competition and they aren’t all role models for each other, either. We can all write different kinds of books that appeal to different people and all of them can be great.
Um. Sorry that got a little ranty…
Giveaway!
Rose is giving away one of her novels to someone who leaves a comment on this post. Seriously, you want to read her books, so make sure you leave a comment!
And, because this interview series is to celebrate my husband finishing his PhD, I’m also giving away a copy of one of the books he studied: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.
Leave a comment by Monday September 5 to be entered!
I loved this interview thanks so much!!
Myself, I’m a huge fan of Georgette Heyer, I love her sense of humour. And I agree, for me, Jane Eyre is the ultimate romance.
faefever25(at)hotmail(dot)com
Great interview! I too have a love/hate relationship with Jane Austen books but for some strange reason I do love most of the films…I have to agree with Kat though…not enough attention is paid to the yumminess that is Jonny Lee Miller in Mansfield Park. Thanks for the giveaway!
Thanks!
Karen–I know, right? And it’s funny, I’d probably be put off by most of Rochester’s behavior in any other romance, but Bronte pulls it off completely! Maybe it’s that “there’s a thread connecting a spot under my ribcage” speech….Did you like the new movie?
Maria–I agree, I have a less ambivalent time with most of the Austen movies. I wonder why! Though I think sometimes I like the looser adaptations best–I loved the Keira Knightley P&P which I think a lot of Austen fans disliked. And I think most of her heroes are actually the Regency equivalent of the socially awkward nerd, but it doesn’t always work for me the way she does it on the page whereas an actor can win me over much more easily with that shtick. I’ll have to watch Mansfield Park again one of these days–I saw it when it came out and was too busy eying up Mr. Crawford to have any recollection of Jonny Lee Miller’s performance!
Fabulous interview 🙂
And I love some of Austen (Mansfield Park leaves me cold, Emma makes me angry) and some of Heyer (seriously? Two chapters of backstory right at the beginning?) and when I was 11, I adored Jane Eyre, but now I have some reservations. I still hate Wuthering Heights (and not even passionately, just because it’s full of WTF and a$$holes. I mean, how romantic is that?).
And yeah, I’m re-reading Persuasion, which is a personal favorite. I have an annotated edition and the annotator keeps talking about how Anne is so self-sacrificing and how all the people around her are either her snobby or just not as classy as she is. I keep realizing that my ancestors were definitely not up to her standards. And I’m not either – emotions are messy and I’m not very self-sacrificing and I’m not a model of self-control…
Oh no Phyllis:(
Why does Emma leave you angry?! I thought it so real, regular kind-a-story. I loved her and her meddling ways.
Oh, and I forgot to say I never read GH. EVER. I’m not sure why. One day I might, but I’m not counting on it.
I dislike Emma – the character – right from the start and I don’t feel that she improves very much. She is such an annoying snob who knows better than everyone and makes everyone miserable. And then at the end, she marries a stand-in father-figure who’s going to tell her how to think (yeah, she’ll argue back, but we all know Knightley’s going to win). I have tried to read that book more times than I’ve actually succeeded, because I can’t get through the first two chapters or so. We read it for book club because a good friend of mine ADORES it and really, I still can’t see why.
The thing about Anne is that I don’t see her as self-sacrificing so much as just really conservative with her feelings and choices, you know? I mean, I love her and her self-consciousness and restraint and unhappiness–and I LOVE the scene where she talks about women feeling a disappointment in love more–I just always feel so thrown off balance when I get to the scene at the end where she tells Captain Wentworth she was right not to marry him in the first place and he agrees with her, because it seems to go against the whole tenor of the book which seems to be showing me how she’d be better off being more assertive.
There’s a great Sarah Rees Brennan blog post featuring Darcy, Rochester, and Heathcliff on a Bachelor-type show…I can’t find it–it might have been deleted when her blog was hacked–but the best part went something like this:
HOST: What would you describe as your greatest flaw?
ROCHESTER: I entrapped my 18-yr-old employee into a bigamous marriage and keep my first wife locked in the attic.
HEATHCLIFF: I hang puppies and abuse my family. [I can’t actually remember the details of this one bc I read WH so long ago and I have the feeling it was Hareton that hanged puppies but whatever, you get the idea.]
DARCY: …I can be a little judgmental and aloof at parties?
I still love Rochester best though. The heart has its reasons, I guess.
I don’t see Anne as self-sacrificing so much, either. Mostly very private and very rigid – and she has become rigid over the years, Wentworth will help loosen her up.
And Laughing at the bachelor show thing 🙂
Actually, they both did–well, Hareton hanged a puppy and Heathcliff strangled one.
Basically, it sucked to be a puppy in that novel.
::dies:: Wow! I wouldn’t have called that.
Seriously, I want to win and read her first book “In for a Penny”, so I’m making sure I leave a comment!
I also was one of the lucky one’s to read and review ‘Lily…’ and you’re welcome to stop by http://www.bookworm2bookworm.wordpress.com and check it out *she said with no shame*…
Now, for Jane Austen: I’m not a fanatic of her work, but I like her writing and my all time fave’s EMMA (and your guy Jonny Lee Miller played opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in a movie).
‘Wuthering Heights’ is not my fave book and I always thought it a bit too ‘dark’ for my taste.
I’ll give you JLM, and raise you TOBY STEPHENS any time, any day and ANY WHERE!!! No one in the history of adaptations of old classics has EVER come even close to portraying a complex and intriguing character of Rochester as well as he has:
I rest my case;)
melanie DOT friedman AT sbcglobal DOT net
NICE. I need to watch that version. I love all the Rochesters I’ve seen (Orson Welles is a personal favorite) but Michael Fassbender quickly climbed to the top of the list for his portrayal in the new movie. Perfect mix of intense, rude, and incredibly into Jane.
My favorite Austen is probably Northanger Abbey. It’s just so cute and I’d love to talk muslins with Mr. Tilney!
Thanks for the review! I saw it and was very very happy. 🙂
I was captivated with this interview. I have read many regencies and they are unforgettable. Your book In For A Penny looks lovely. The review is great. Jane Eyre is a classic and the ultimate romantic novel.
Thank you! And yes, there really is something so intense and amazing and perfect about Jane and Rochester’s connection–natural sympathies, I guess!
Oh! I’m so excited. I can’t wait to read A Lily Among Thorns! I loved In For A Penny. 🙂
I love Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, and enjoyed Emma but didn’t bond with it and haven’t read Sense and Sensability or Persuasion yet.
P.S. I adore the Keira Knightly P&P!
Isn’t it great? I was so happy when Mr. and Mrs. Bennet turned out to be just affectionate ribbers! And I thought Darcy’s socially awkward vibe came across really well.
S&S is probably my favorite Austen after NA, but as I said I have a lot of issues with it too.
Let me know what you think when you read Lily!
I can’t wait to read A Lily Among Thorns. The excerpts that I’ve read have been great. In For a Penny was one of my favorite Regencies last year. I’m so happy that there are more Regencies with middle and upper middle class characters these days as it’s one of my favorite tropes. I totally did a happy dance when both Loretta Chase’s and Meredith Duran’s newest releases both featured heroines that actually work for a living. That’s got to encourage more authors to write these stories, and more publishers to sell them.
I thought I replied to this but I don’t see it, apologies if it turns up twice!
I loved both those books! Have you read Courtney Milan’s novella “This Wicked Gift”? That’s another working heroine I really loved, her family owns a small circulating library.
And thanks, I’m glad you liked Penny!
I did read The Wicked Gift. It was actually the first story of hers that I had read. I loved it and promptly went out and bought a few others.
Yeah, I like both Austen and Charlotte Bronte, though I always skip the bits of Jane Eyre with drippy St. John and his drippy not-religious-enough love interests. And I always have an attack of contemporary viewpoint when she leaves Rochester: dude, what the hell? Go to Italy and have hot illicit sex! Just…get him to give you a really good settlement beforehand!
I admit to finding Marianne irritating–the belief that if you don’t wear your heart on your sleeve, you don’t have one is something I saw way too much of in college–especially post-Wiloughby, but I would also ogle militamen pretty shamelessly myself.
My favorite Clearly Supposed to Be Unsympathetic Austen character is Mary Crawford: yeah, her naked ambition toward the end is off-putting, but her attitude toward the affair makes a lot of sense from someone who cares more about her brother and the woman involved than about society morals. (Though blaming Fanny is no good.)
I kind of love St. John, especially for not putting his attraction to someone ahead of everything else in his life, but I too have skipped directly to the Rochester bits many a time while rereading. As a kid I wouldn’t reread the childhood bits either, finding them not very interesting and extremely depressing, although I like them better now.
I never got why she had to leave Rochester when I was younger–Italy sounded great to me and still does–but it makes a lot more sense to me now. How I see it is: yes, it’s about her religious beliefs…but it’s also about how he lied to her, and took advantage of the power relationship between them to trick her into doing something he knew she wouldn’t want to do. He just isn’t the person she thought he was. She even says something about how she still loved him, but the stainless truth was gone from the idea of him, or something. And if she gives up her own ideas to go along with what he wants, even if it’s what she wants too, she’ll be losing herself. And she does go back to him before she knows his wife is dead, in the end–what changes is that now she’s making the choice as an independent woman. Although I totally see where you’re coming from! I hope they make it to Italy eventually anyway.
That’s hilarious because almost all my college friends are Elinor fans! Weird. I get that Marianne would be a frustrating person IRL–my issue is more with the way Jane Austen sets her up to BE a frustrating person and to fail and almost die and learn the error of her ways. What makes Marianne a jerk ISN’T her sensibility or her wearing her heart on her sleeve or her talking too much about the poets and books she likes, but in my opinion Jane Austen purposefully pairs those qualities with self-centeredness, rudeness, and self-destructive behavior in order to criticize them (and seems to believe herself that they’re inextricably linked). And then she marries the poor girl off to an old guy who likes her because she reminds him of his dead girlfriend!
Mary Crawford is also great. I love when she doesn’t think organized chapel is the best form of prayer and Edward is like falling all over himself with horror.
Um, that got really long. Sorry!
I loved the childhood bits of Jane Eyre when I was young! They fit in with other books I also loved about Oppressed Children Who Eventually Triumph, like A Little Princess and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Thursday’s Child by Noel Streatfeild.
Oh man, I was so obsessed with A Little Princess as a kid! I loved Secret Garden even better though because it had a bitchy heroine and oversensitive hero. I guess some things never change.
Hee! No worries–I tend to post lengthily myself. Besides, it’s fun to read–and good points!
I’d never thought of Jane Eyre that way before, and it’ll help immensely in my next re-reading. I also like her squalid childhood, although I roll my eyes loads at too-good-for-this-sinful-Earth Helen, because I am mean. (See also: Beth March. Lord.)
Collegewise…well, most of my college friends were gamer geeks, so we didn’t talk Austen that much. I just can’t read some of Marianne’s scenes without thinking of some of the girls in my classes–like the one who insisted that having rules for poetic forms was horrible because poetry should come from the heart. (I suppose I should thank her, though: my rather emphatic response convinced the TA that I’d done the reading and not, oh, stayed up all night drinking and playing video games. For example.)
I totally see what you’re saying, though–it’s not so much that Marianne isn’t irksome, but that the only character who gets enthusiastic about things is also the annoying one? Because: word. I have the same problem with female sexuality–not so much Austen*, but other authors where the sexually active/forthright female character juuuuust so happens to be a selfish harpy. Like, if you don’t want to look like you’re disapproving of Trait A, don’t have the only Trait A character in the book also have horrible traits XYZ.
If that makes any sense. It’s been a day. 😉
And yeah. I love Edward, especially the Hugh Grant version, but it’s really really hard to take him seriously when he clutches his pearls about Mary not appreciating organized religion or the horror that is ZOMG PLAYACTING. Even knowing the history, it’s sort of hilarious: I keep looking up from the latter scene and muttering things like “A POOL TABLE, don’t you understand?”
*Though Fridge Logic does make Lydia Bennett pretty sympathetic: chick is a git, but chick is…fifteen in the days before making out in the backseat of a car was really an option. Yeah, she flirts a lot and marries a problematic guy–I’d have gone *insane*.
Oh man, I have SO MANY things to say! I might not get to it for a couple days but I will def. be replying to this. 🙂 The short version: WORD.
Hee! No worries. (WordPress is doing its “you only get so many replies” thing. I swear, it’s the maiden aunt of blogging software: too much correspondence is Highly Improper!)
Sorry it took me so long to get to this!
Heh, I am not a big Helen fan either, but they totally made her work for me in the new movie–they played her as her own flavor of intense weirdo. She actually reminded me a little of Luna Lovegood in the HP movies. It was awesome. I’m wondering if I’ll see her differently rereading.
“the sexually active/forthright female character juuuuust so happens to be a selfish harpy. Like, if you don’t want to look like you’re disapproving of Trait A, don’t have the only Trait A character in the book also have horrible traits XYZ.”
YES! I see this all the time too! You see it with everything, too. I love Magneto to death but I wish he weren’t the only main-character Holocaust survivor in anything ever unless you count stories that are specifically ABOUT the Holocaust, like Maus. Same for all the bisexual villains, villains in wheelchairs, Arab villains, etc. It would be different if there were a range of bisexual and disabled and Arab characters out there, but there AREN’T. And then it feeds into this narrative about how the Holocaust made the Jews bitter and therefore a threat, or how women who enjoy sex are corrupted and selfish, or whatever.
Are you conflating Edward from S&S with Edmund from MP? Or have I forgotten a scene in S&S? I find Edward much less frustrating than Edmund, but it might be because he’s off-screen so much. Hugh Grant definitely makes him charming, though–a lot of Austen heroes work better for me in movies when there’s an actor to connect to. My least favorite Edmund moment is when he talks about Mary Crawford not being shocked enough by Maria and Henry’s elopement: “So voluntarily, so freely, so coolly to canvass it! No reluctance, no horror, no feminine–shall I say, no modest loathings! This is what the world does. For where, Fanny, shall we find a woman whom nature had so richly endowed?–Spoilt, spoilt!”
Just, for him to describe a woman who doesn’t agree with his views of sexual purity as actually “spoilt,” like bad milk or something…it really upsets me and creeps me out.
And yes, I also have a secret fondness for Lydia, and even more of one for Kitty and Mary! They’re just so young and have had so little guidance, what can you really expect? At least Lydia has fun.
No problem!
And yeah, I was conflating the two (would-be clergymen starting with “E” plus no coffee…yeah) which is doing Edward a serious disservice. Because he’s awesome, and Edmund just needs to shut up. So much. (“Spoilt”. I’d forgotten that scene, and: ew.)
Mary bugs me a little–it’s the Very Very Moral and Uptight thing, which I always have a hard time feeling sympathy for–but Kitty and Lydia…it’s actually pretty amusing. Because I can see both how I would find them really annoying if I was an older sister trying to keep them out of (for the time) big trouble, and yet also how I would absolutely act like them if I was a teenager in the pre- Our Bodies, Ourselves days.
So hearing you on Magneto. I feel like–and my knowledge of non-movie X-Men canon is scarce, so I may be overlooking someone–they missed a great opportunity by not having a Holocaust survivor who’s not, you know, evil–someone who would say “yeah, I see where he’s coming from, but…no”. More interesting shared-origin-different-approach portrayals, less annoying stereotype!
And the same for other groups, ye gods.
I had heard of In For A Penny last year but never got to get a copy, so would love to win a copy.
Hi Rose,
Thanks for a fun interview. I agree with your love/hate of Jane Austen. When I look at my Keeper Shelf, it’s not loaded with the books that had the prettiest, smartest or most courageous characters, happiest ending or famous authors. Rather I choose to “keep” books that caused me to feel real emotions (of whatever kind) throughout the book. I’ve got a couple on there that had me in stitches in the middle and in tears by the end.
Speaking of which…I LOVED “In for a Penny” and would have added it to my Keeper Shelf if my copy had been in better condition when it was given to me. Instead I shared it with a friend who read it and shared it with another friend. Not sure who has it now…!
I have had “Lily” on my Wish List since Sept 4–wow, it’s been a year! I am really looking forward to reading it. But, winning a copy from you would make it even more special. *fingers crossed*
Laura T
Thank you so much! Hearing about my book being leant and passed around makes me SO HAPPY. Sharing books is one of my favorite things and knowing that people are doing that with my story=<333. This book has been a long time coming and I really appreciate everyone who's waiting patiently and still remembers I exist! Good luck in the drawing. 🙂
Oops—lent!
A wonderful interview. I really enjoy historical stories and the best ones are those are richly detailed so that I can experience the time period. I learned about A Lily Among Thorns a few days ago and the blurb caught my interesr right away. It sounds emotional and heartfelt. I feel this way about most reunion stories.
Thanks, I hope you like it!
Thanks for the nice interview. I would love to read In For a Penny.
Kudos on the PHD.
I just read and adored an e-ARC of A Lily Among Thorns, so I would LOVE to win a copy of either book, if the giveaway is open internationally. (No worries if it isn’t, though!)