A great month is in store!

On Tuesday, my first book with Penguin NAL, A FALL OF MARIGOLDS, will be released out into the world — always a wonderful, terrifying day. I love the characters in this book and I almost feel badly for what I put them through. Almost. I am anxious about its debut, of course, and since I aim to please, I really want you all to like it. It’s a dual time-periods story, like my last five have been, with the majority of the tale centering around a grieving nurse named Clara living at Ellis Island’s hospital in 1911. Her story is paired with that of a 9/11 widow named Taryn one hundred years later. The two never meet, but a scarf patterned in marigolds will bring them together in a way that I hope you find compelling.

To celebrate the release of A FALL OF MARIGOLDS, on Monday a blog tour will begin and which will continue throughout the month of February. The book and me will be featured on more than 50 blogs, more than half of which will participate in a drawing for some really cool stuff!

One winner from among all those who post a comment on the blogs will win the grand prize, which includes a beautiful up-cycled infinity scarf (made from a real vintage Indian sari), a signed copy of A FALL OF MARIGOLDS, a DVD copy of the PBS documentary Forgotten Ellis Island, and a $100 Visa gift card. In addition, one winner from each individual blogger’s commenters will win a signed copy of the book. The grand prize winner from among all the participating blogs as well as the individual book winners will be chosen by random drawing. Comments must be posted by midnight Eastern on Feb 28. (The contest is limited to those residing in the United States.)

On Monday I will post the complete list of participating blogs so that you can begin the tour. Just hop over to the blogs each day and drop a comment in the comment section (just one comment per blog) and you’re in the running. The content of the blog tour (the question and and answer part) will likely be the same from blog to blog, but the blogs themselves are all different, and hosted by gifted people whom I hope you will get to know and want to revisit in the future. Plus you will want to check back with them to see if you are the individual winner of a signed copy of A FALL OF MARIGOLDS — there will be a winner of a book on every blog!

I am so looking forward to hearing from you in the weeks and months ahead. I love hearing back from you, even if you DON’T like a book I’ve written. It actually helps to hear why, for I very much want to make your reading time memorable. Hope to see you along for the ride this month!

The overlapping of lives…

I’ve had Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress on the bedside table for more than a year, waiting for life to slow down so that I could read it. It kept getting pushed to the wayside by the famed tyranny of the urgent until I finally realized my reasons for needing to read it were of the urgent type. This book is set during World War 2, some of it in London during the Blitz, and as I am needing to finish the book I am writing next (it’s due on Feb 1!) and it’s also set during World War 2 during the Blitz, I knew I needed to cast aside all other books and read it. I am so glad I did. Not just because the story answered some lingering research questions, but because the prose was so delicious.

The Postmistress is about three women, really, in a time of war. There is Iris, the postmistress; Emma, the young doctor’s new wife; and Frankie, the radio correspondent on assignment in London during the Blitz of 1940. The book is less about letters and the post office and more about what we might do to withhold truth from someone we think is better off not knowing it. I love how Sarah Blake begins an interview with The Help’s Kathryn Stockett. Stockett asked her to describe where the idea for the book came from and here is Blake’s answer:

“The Postmistress began with a picture that sprang into my head one day, of a woman sorting the mail in the back of a post office, quietly slipping a letter into her pocket instead of delivering it. Immediately, questions flooded forward: Whose letter was it? Why on earth would she choose to pocket it? What havoc would be wreaked by not delivering a letter? As I answered those questions, Emma and Will and their love story, and the workings of the small town in which Iris was the center, came to life. One hundred pages into that draft, Frankie Bard arrived on the bus, out of the blue. I had no idea who she was or why she was there, except that one character referred to her as a war correspondent without a war. That was interesting, I thought. By this time I had decided to set the novel in the late thirties, early forties. It was 2001 and I was living in Washington, D.C., after the attacks of 9/11, and I was very preoccupied with trying to make sense of what was happening around me. Were we in danger? Would we go to war? The parallels between that uncertain time and the time before the United States entered World War II resonated with me, and what was a novel about accident and fate and the overlapping of lives deepened into a novel with war as its backdrop, which asked questions about how we understand ourselves to be in a historical moment and what we do when we are called to it.”

I love this answer because this is often how stories come to me, vaporous and barely there, but then I imagine someone and I see them doing what they do everyday, only today is different. And then I just start asking why.

And thus begins the overlapping of lives that is every story I love and every story I try to write.

Here are some great quotes from the book. If you are in a blazing hurry, wait until you have time for it. This is a story to be read when you have time to think and ponder…

“Every story – love or war – is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.”

“Some stories don’t get told. Some stories you hold on to. To stand and watch and hold it in your arms was not cowardice. To look straight at the beast and feel its breath on your flanks and not to turn–one could carry the world that way.”

“They sat together, the four of them, a little longer, before Harry rose slowly to his feet. It was Thursday. It was the end of the afternoon. It was time to pick up and carry on to the other side of the day.”

“She imagined she could pull Time like taffy, stretching it longer and longer between her hands until the finest point had been reached, the point just before breaking, and she could live there. A point at the center of time with no going forward, no going back. Clasped in this way, without speaking, walking into no discernible ending, she could almost believe they tread on time.”

There is so much more like about Sarah Blake’s mastery with words. If you’ve read The Postmistress, I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Light Between Oceans

After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne, a kind but changed veteran of the Western Front, comes home to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on a tiny and remote island, 100 miles from the coast. He brings with him his new bride, Isabel. Some years later, after miscarriages and a stillbirth, a very sad Isabel hears a baby’s cry. A boat has washed up onshore. Inside are a dead man and a crying baby.

Tom, a rule-keeper and an honest man, wants to send word to the mainland but Isabel convinces him that God has brought this poor orphan to them. With milk still in her breasts from the birth of their stillborn baby, Isabel convinces Tom they are perfectly placed to care for this infant girl who would be just be an unloved ward of the state if they were to alert the authorities. They name her Lucy and begin to raise her as their own. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland for a respite and to see their families. That trip will change everything. You can only live on an island where you are the only ones in the world for so long…

M. L. Stedman’s book is called “mesmerizing, beautifully written,” and I would have to agree. In no time at all I was swept away into Isabel’s flawed but understandable desires, Tom’s unflagging love for his wife and yet his devotion to doing the right thing, and the other characters in the book who have a stake in what is to become of an innocent child. Sometimes there are no easy answers, even if love is at the heart of every nagging detail.

This is a book to keep you up at night, turning pages.

Welcome, Robin Lee Hatcher

When my dear friend and fellow novelist Robin Lee Hatcher’s marriage ended in divorce some years ago, she remembers being devastated. In the following years she learned that sometimes God answers prayer in the most unexpected ways. God used the pain of what appeared to be a failed marriage to draw her closer. I am happy to welcome Robin to my blog home today to talk about her new book, A Promise Kept, which was born from that difficult experience.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about A Promise Kept and specifically how your own life inspired this story?
Robin: A Promise Kept opens as Allison Kavanagh arrives at the house her aunt Emma bequeathed to her — a log home in the mountains. Her marriage of more than twenty years has ended in divorce because of her husband’s alcoholism. She was so certain God had promised to save her marriage, but obviously she was wrong. Now she is moving from Boise to Kings Meadow to start life afresh and find a way to heal from her heartbreak.

Like Allison, my marriage ended in divorce because of my husband’s alcoholism. I was devastated because I’d been so convinced God had promised me He would save our marriage. I had believed His promise through many difficult times, but it hadn’t come to pass. I knew God didn’t lie. Therefore, I must have misunderstood.

But God had many things to teach me in the following years, including that He answers prayers in totally unexpected ways and in His own time, not mine. One of those unexpected ways was realized when my husband and I were remarried more than five years later. God used the divorce to save our marriage!

Q: So how does your husband feel this book and your story as a couple kind of being out in the open?
Robin: Thanks so much for asking this question. In order to honor my husband, I made certain from the very beginning that he was on-board for me to write about and talk about our marriage — which would mean talking about him and his battles with addiction. His response was, “If my story can help someone else, use it.”

Q: How much of your main character’s situation is based on your own life?
Robin: While my characters are never me — I allow them to be individuals and allow their lives to unfold in their own way — there are always pieces of me in them. Allison’s life is not the same as mine. I didn’t retreat to a mountain cabin nor have an aunt whose journals helped me discover truths I needed to know, nor did I withdraw from God during the depths of my grief as Allison does. But every lesson God teaches me eventually makes its way into one of my stories. That was certainly true of A Promise Kept.

Q: Because of what you went through, what do you say now to someone who feels like God has abandoned her?
Robin: Hold onto Him no matter what. We only see such a tiny scrap of reality. God sees the whole picture. He knows you intimately, and He loves you extravagantly. He hasn’t abandoned you.

Faith isn’t about feelings. We cannot trust our feelings. The Bible warns us that the heart is deceptive. If you are feeling abandoned, get into God’s word and do a study on His character. When you know His character, you will cease to fear that He might leave you alone in your trials.

Q: What is the most important thing God taught you during this difficult time in your life?
Robin: Not the most important but certainly the most surprising was when I realized I had reached the place where I could thank God for my marriage to an alcoholic and mean it. Because of what happened in my marriage, my faith was deepened and strengthened. I learned to hold onto the foot of the cross so tightly that I could feel the splinters in the palms of my hands. No matter what comes, I’m holding onto the Lord, from where my help comes.

I consider my life lesson to be this: Nothing, absolutely nothing, enters my life that isn’t caused or allowed by God, filtered through His loving hands, for the purpose of making me more like Jesus.

Q: I’ve found that when things don’t work out the way we want them to, it’s pretty easy to blame God. What would you say to someone wrestling with these feelings?
Robin: Blaming God for things not working out the way we want is a fruitless action. And it means we still believe that life is about us. Me and my happiness. You and your happiness. But it isn’t. Not in the way we think, anyway.

About ten or so years ago, I was standing in my office, weeping over my husband and our marriage. Big crocodile tears that splattered loudly when they hit the floor mat. I asked God, “Why?” What I meant was, “Why me?” And after a long period of time, I felt God speak to my heart, “Why not you, beloved?” It quieted me, stopped me cold. Yes, why not me? Did I think I was so special that I could avoid what Christ told me would be true? Jesus said, “In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

Q: In your letter to readers, which appears at the end of A Promise Kept, you talk about how your divorce felt like a failure. How did God turn that failure around in your life?
Robin: When we were first married, my husband and I promised until death do us part. We meant it. So it felt like failure when God told me to “let go” of him after nearly a year of separation, even though I was acting in obedience. What I couldn’t see or understand at first was that God needed to get my husband off by himself so the two of them could work on his life without me being there as a safety net, as the strong one. I believe my husband would have died if we continued on the way we had been, but I didn’t see it that way at the time. I had to stand back and let God be God.

Q: Alcoholism played a large part in your marriage and eventually your divorce. What gave you the strength to continue to pray for your husband even when no answer seemed to come?
Robin: Strength comes from believing deep down in my soul that God is in control and that He wants the best for both me and my husband. I don’t always know what that “best” is, but He does.

Me again! Thanks, Robin, for being here! It’s always nice to have friends over for a chat. If you want to get to know Robin better, visit her at her lovely website. She is one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. If you have a question for Robin, I know she’d be happy to answer it. Ask away…

I wanted to but I couldn’t

I remember reading once that Harper Lee didn’t write another novel after To Kill a Mockingbird because she knew readers would expect too much with a second book and that kind of pressure was wholly unattractive. Perhaps Margaret Mitchell felt the same way after Gone With the Wind. We readers can be heartless in our desire to be wooed and won at a more breath-taking level than the book before.

Some years ago I read, nay, devoured Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale. I told every one I knew who loved fiction to read it, it was such a well-written, captivating tale. I read the book a second time for book club, and then a third time to just study the craft of having a young, idealistic protagonist cross paths with a much older realist; a pairing I wanted for The Shape of Mercy which I wrote in 2007.

I waited and waited for Ms. Setterfield to write a second book, and while I read many other novels in the interim, The Thirteenth Tale remained in my perennial top five. When people would ask me to recommend a book in those in-between years, I would invariably ask, “Have you read The Thirteenth Tale?” and if they hadn’t, I would tell them that was the book they needed to read next.

So when I learned that, after eight years, a new Setterfield book was on the horizon, I gleefully pre-ordered it – months before it was to hit bookstore shelves- and counted the days. Bellman & Black arrived on my doorstep in all its hardback beauty two days after its release. I had to finish another book I was reading and I itched to be done so that I could crack open the Setterfieldian pages and consume them.

I finished the book last night. I can only say that I wanted so very much to be transported to another place with the story, just as I had been before. My expectations were high, perhaps illogically so. Perhaps with The Thirteenth Tale it was the writer’s story, not the story’s writer that so captivated me before. Perhaps it was something unique about me that made The Thirteenth Tale resonate within me, rather than something unique about its author. The prose in Bellman & Black was lovely, Setterfield is still a master, but I never left the room while reading her second book. And I wanted to. Too much so. I wanted to be transported. I was not.

Perhaps I need to book-club this one to appreciate it properly. Sometimes it’s only after I’ve discussed a book with people that I realize what I missed. Some reader reviewers have said Bellman & Black is too dark; but so was The Thirteenth Tale, so I don’t think for me, that it was because there wasn’t enough light. As a novelist myself I know that in every great story, the main character has to be on a quest, a pursuit to have something he doesn’t have, and he has to overcome recognizable and somewhat relatable obstacles to get it. Doesn’t matter if you are reading Green Eggs and Ham or The Silence of the the Lambs. The protagonist, flawed but likeable, must want something and must overcome opposition to get it. What the character wants must be something we readers understand and WANT them to want. Their opposition must also be understood and recognizable. This is how we become emotionally invested. This is what keeps us turning pages. This is what transports us. The clash of the quest and the character and the conflict must captivate us.

Otherwise you just have words on a page. They can be great words, skillfully placed. But unless they transport, they remain words.

Not a ticket.

Will I read Setterfield again? Absolutely. This one just wasn’t the trip for me.

Archive: January 31, 2014

A great month is in store!

The overlapping of lives…

Light Between Oceans

Welcome, Robin Lee Hatcher

I wanted to but I couldn’t