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#241 ~ The French Mistress

The French Mistress: A Novel of the Duchess of Portsmouth and King Charles II by Susan Halloway Scott

Published by: Penguin Group

Published on: July 2009

Page Count: 400

Genre: Historical Fiction

Format: eBook read on my Kindle

Availability: paperback, eBook,

• This novel was the February selection of my Historical Fiction Lovers book club.  I was excited to get an eBook copy of it because I’ve wanted to read Susan Holloway Scott for almost as long as I’ve started reading historical fiction.
• I enjoyed the juxtaposition between the monarchs and their respective courts.
• For more than half of the book, Louise holds on tightly to her virginity.  Knowing that she is to become Charles II’s mistress from the very beginning, there was no question as to whether she would remain a virgin throughout the book.  I think I was more impatient for her to give it up than the king was.  This goes hand in hand with my other chief complaint – the novel’s focus.
• I would have preferred a novel about the Duchess D’Orlean or a novel about Louise and Charles II.  This was a novel about Louise and Henrietta and then Louise and Charles.  That is what made this novel seem long and why what would be the most interesting parts of Louise and Charles’ relationship were rushed through.  Had this been a novel about Henrietta and Louise was a minor character, it would have been fantastic.  Had this novel been about Charles and Louise’s relationship alone, it would have also been a great read.  Instead, we got a play by play of Louise’s life with Henrietta and her last days as a virgin, but the political and emotional upheaval at the end of Charles’ life were told in retrospect.  Even Louise’s family’s reaction to her move to England was spoken of as an afterthought.  Those are the things that I would have cared to read about in more depth.

My Final Thoughts

Although The French Mistress was a missed opportunity for me from a historical standpoint, I enjoyed Scott’s writing overall.  I would try another one of her novels.  Have you enjoyed one of Scott’s novels?  If so, which would you recommend?

Other Voices

Reading Adventures

#209 ~ The Brother’s Boswell

The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell are well known literary figures and friends.  James Boswelll’s brother John is less widely known.  It was the combination of a novel about two authors I didn’t know very well combined with an unstable, hidden brother that intrigued me immediately when I was offered a review copy of Philip Baruth’s novel entitled The Brothers Boswell. I selected this novel for the Historical Fiction Lover’s book club in September, coinciding with Johnson’s 200th birthday.  Baruth wrote a wonderful guest post in May in preparation for reading his novel.  I was happy to crack the book open when September rolled around.

While reading the novel, I learned quite a bit about the Johnson and Boswell. I didn’t end up enjoying the read as much as I had anticipated, though.  As I started reading, I found it difficult to get in rhythm with the language.  After the first few chapters I was able to read more comfortably and the story started to pick up when John arrived on the scene.  The potential of what might happen with John as he tracks his brother and Johnson like unsuspecting rats in a London maze kept me reading despite the slow going.  I found the sections directly about James Boswell the most difficult to read.  I did not care for him at all.  I found him nearly repulsive in his own self-importance.  In fact, I was almost hoping he’d find his comeuppance at the hands of his younger brother.  Unfortunately, the conclusion didn’t pay off for me.  While this novel might appeal to those with more intimate knowledge of Johnson and Boswell, I wasn’t the right reader.

*****

I want to thank Soho Press for sending me a review copy of this novel.

#199 ~ Nefertiti

Nefertiti by Michelle Moran

Amunhotep III is the Pharoah of Egypt.  His eldest and most beloved son Tuthmosis is set to be his heir. Uizier Ay is the brother of Amunhotep’s wife and Tuthmosis’ mother, Queen Tiye.  They plan on marrying Tuthmosis to Ay’s eldest daughter Nefertiti.  Their plans are disrupted, however, when Tuthmosis dies duuring an illness.  Many believe that he was murdered by his brother, Amunhotep IV, a selfish prince who believes that the priests of Amun, the great god of Egypt, are doing no more than hoarding the wealth of Egypt for a false god.  It is decided that Nefertiti should now marry the younger Amunhotep in hopes of reigning him in.  Nefertiti does just the opposite when she learns that she has to feed into his vanity and give herself fully to Amunhotep’s sun god Aten in order to keep her position in his harem.  All of this is witnessed and recorded by Nefertiti’s sensible and loyal younger sister, Mutnodjmet.  Mutny loves her sister, but grows uneasy with the  way in which her sister and the Pharoah rule Egypt.  She lives with them in the new city they erect for the glory of Aten, Amarna.  Her disapproval grows and Mutny is forced to choose between her sister and her own destiny.

Nefertiti opened my eyes to an intriguing and exciting world that I really haven’t given much thought. Before October, my only cultural exposure to Ancient Egypt was The Ten Commandments, Steve Martin’s song “King Tut“, The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” and the bust of Nefertiti I saw at the Altes Museum in Berlin back in 1997.  It wasn’t that I didn’t find Egypt interesting.  There were just other louder and more immediate influences pointing me toward England, France, and Civil War.  Nefertiti has changed that.  From the moment I picked the novel up and found mention of Nefertiti’s bust in the Author’s Note, I could not put it down.  There was an immediate connection for me.  Our book club loved this so much that we’ve selected the sequel, The Heretic Queen, as our book club selection for November.  I – we – cannot wait to read more fiction set in Ancient Egypt.  I want to know what happens after Nefertiti’s death.  I want to know more about the Egyptian gods and why Amunhotep might have felt the need to create his own.

Michelle Moran not only brought Nefertiti and Mutny to life, she painted their story like a picture.  I can fully visualize the city that Amunhotep and Nefertiti built.  I can see and feel the stone used to create the temples to Aten and the statues of the Pharoah and his Queen.  Most importantly, I felt as though I knew the characters.  Mutny instantly became a friend to me and I cared deeply about her throughout the book.  Nefertiti was adored and worshipped, but it was Mutny whose character shown through in everything that she did.  She was the one who wanted to help people, not just throw money into the streets to buy support for her husband.  She was intelligent and practical.  People came to her for her herbal remedies.  Perhaps she could have kept the Pharoah in check where her sister couldn’t, but I think she would have been miserable.

As I read Nefertiti, I kept thinking back to The Other Boleyn Girl.  There are so many parallels between the stories.  Both sets of sisters are propelled into royal politics for family gain.  Nefertiti and Anne Boleyn were both instrumental in changing the religious landscape of their day.  In securing their place, both queens ended up creating monsters they could not control, and neither queen bore an heir.  In these fictional settings, the sisters must risk their lives to find happiness and are left to pick up the pieces.  The Other Boleyn Girl sparked my love affair with historical fiction.  Had I read Nefertiti first, I believe it would have done the same.  It’s just that good.  Despite the difficulty I had getting used to reading and sounding out the names of some of the characters, they quickly found a place and my imagination and, in the case of Mutny, a place in my heart.

+++++

Nefertiti was the last book read during the Historical Fiction Lover’s Book Club Queens of Summer series on Facebook.

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To buy this novel, click Nefertiti.

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• Ancient Egypt and Us (allaboutegypt.org)

A Conversation with C.W. Gortner

Today, C.W. Gortner will be visiting the Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club on Facebook to discuss The Last Queen, our selection for July.  The Last Queen was one of my Top 10 novels last year.   To participate, simply head over to the Event I set up and join in.  Leave comments or ask questions using the event Wall.  If you’re not a Facebook member, signing up is quick and easy.  If you are dead set against joining Facebook, leave a comment here and I’d be happy to send that along to C.W.

Have a great weekend!

Writing The Brothers Boswell ~ A Guest Post by Philip Baruth

When I got offered a copy of The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth by Sarah at Soho Press, I knew that this would be a great book for the Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club.  I responded back that I would love a chance to read it and then make that our September selection.  The Brothers Boswell was published this month and its author, Philip Baruth, graciously wrote a guest post for us.  I hope that this makes you as excited as I am to read this novel!  

Writing THE BROTHERS BOSWELL

I first read James Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763 when I was twenty-one.  I was in college, plotting to be a writer and all the while telling my father I would go to law school.  To my astonishment, Boswell was also 21 and a would-be writer, also pretending to be preparing for a career in the law.  So I felt an immediate, electric kinship, across the centuries.  

We didn’t mesh on everything, of course.  Boswell trolled the brothels and associated with Dukes and Countesses, so I never reached as high or as low as he typically did.  Still, I had the immediate and lasting impression that here was a character worth a novel, and two decades later I sat down to write it.

James Boswell

My thought was that I’d sketch the famous friendship between Johnson and Boswell from the inside, from Boswell’s point of view.  In 1763, Johnson is the undisputed literary lion of England; Boswell is little more than a boy from a good Scottish family — not much in the way of a recommendation in London high society.  Yet they become fast friends almost from the moment they meet.  It seemed like a natural.  Except that when I sat down to write, nothing came.  

The problem, I think, was that I knew the Boswell-Johnson story far too well:  I wrote about it for my Honors thesis as an undergraduate, and my Ph.D dissertation, and I’d published several articles on the topic for good measure.  And of course Boswell’s London Journal describes that year in painstaking detail. 

But I knew the key must lie in the London Journal itself, and so I sat down to read it for the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth time, determined to search the background for what I’d previously missed.  And there, in a footnote to January 5 1763, it was:  I’d forgotten that John Boswell, James’s younger brother, visited him in London for several weeks, following a brief bout of insanity at the end of 1762.  I noticed something else as well — John appears almost not at all in Boswell’s journal entries, with the exception of a line like “Had tea with my brother John.”  In most cases, that was the extent of the reference.

The more I thought about it the stranger that reticence seemed to me.  Boswell wrote and thought a great deal about madness.  It was a topic that consumed him, partially because a strain of melancholia ran through his own family, and his uncle had spent the last part of his life in a strait-waistcoat.  Boswell asked everyone about madness, friends, strangers, even Johnson, in their first conversations.  So here was a visitor fresh from the madhouse, and a brother no less — but almost complete silence from Boswell on the topic, silence from a man who happily recorded everything, from prostitutes to venereal disease.  

Samuel Johnson

There was no avoiding the conclusion:  Boswell wanted desperately to hide his brother’s madness, from London society, from the friends reading the manuscript pages of his journal, and mostly from himself.  It was repression of a very high order.

From that point, the rest fell directly into place.  John, in my novel, stumbles on the Journal and discovers how systematically he has been hidden away from the great and powerful by his brother, and that knowledge reactivates his madness.  He is so jealous of James’s budding friendship with Johnson that he either begins or imagines his own deeper relationship with the author of the Dictionary.  And when he cannot reconcile his brother’s London with his own, John acquires two golden pistols, and sets out to trap Boswell and Johnson, to force them to acknowledge the relationships they’ve kept secret from one another.  A tangled web, admittedly, but one that made emotional sense.  

And I could tell immediately that I’d hit on something, because suddenly the writing of the novel became great fun, something I looked forward to, rather than daily misery, which is always a good sign, of course.

**********

Thanks so much for stopping by, Philip!  

If you would like to read more from Philip Baruth, why not check out his blog, Vermont Daily Briefing.

May Selection ~ The Firemaster’s Mistress

May promises to be another great month for the Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club!  This month we’ll be reading The Firemaster’s Mistress by Christie Dickason.

This novel takes place during the reign of James I of England, who is Elizabeth I’s heir.  It’s story revolves around the Gunpowder Plot masterminded by Guy Fawkes. 

While browsing HarperCollins’ website for more information about this book, I found a great interview with the author about The Firemaster’s Mistress.  With HarperCollins’ permission (thanks, Greg!), I am reprinting it here:

Q: What drew you in the first place to a fictional representation of the origins of the Gunpowder Plot?

A: I had already written Francis Quoynt as a very minor character in my previous novel, The Memory Palace, when he was an older man, a retired soldier and friend of the main male character. And for some reason, I couldn’t let go of him. It was a little like falling in love. I daydreamed about him, began to see him in more detail—the height, the pale hair, the wry humor—and his amiable, self-effacing intelligence linked to hidden strength. When I started to mull over a possible story, the Gunpowder Plot jumped out as an obvious historical event for him—an explosives expert – to get tangled up in. Right period, right subject. A done deal! Also, by chance (honestly), my next book was going to coincide, more-or-less, with the anniversary of the plot.

Q: Your account of a small group of religious extremists bent on terrorizing a population has many contemporary resonances. To what extent did your awareness of modern terrorism inform your depiction of it in a historical context?

A: Funnily enough, I think the energy worked the other way round. Studying the historical event made me look more closely at the contemporary situation, to try to get behind the headlines. Obviously, the problems of a mixed society trying to deal with a violent threat were very much in my mind—and I think that issues around identifying and dealing with that threat still resonate between the centuries.

On the other hand, the parallel was an uneasy coincidence that may well have heightened my need to deal with that aspect of a story chosen for other reasons. I am also convinced that Guy Fawkes, who had military experience of gunpowder, knew that he could not possibly escape an explosion, on that scale, in time.

Also, to be totally honest, writers often don’t know exactly why they choose to write what they do. If you analyze too much, you can lose the juice and freeze. You go with an impulse of what feels important and trust the readers to be in active partnership with you. If you do your job right, they feel the hum.

It’s worth remembering that in England, before Henry VIII broke with Rome not that long before my story, almost everyone’s grandparents or great-grandparents had been Catholics, now the ‘enemy’. Many of the ruling class were still Catholics. Many other people were still secret Catholics. It was the extreme violence of the Gunpowder Plotters, more than their religious or political views that set them apart. Other huge complexities—too tangled to go into here – also surrounded this event, including the position of the Church in Rome, and the religious wars on the Continent.

Q: You have written: “[N]ovelists live in the gaps in the landscape where scholars’ maps peter out or disagree.” Can you describe more concretely how you inhabited that fictional gap in your account of the Gunpowder Plot?

A: By being hungry, hungry, hungry for the known details, and somehow getting them inside my head, mainly by research, and then beginning to imagine “what next?” For example, by visiting the houses, looking at details of daily life in museums, wearing the clothes*, reading what my characters would have read. By seeing the real documents, like the confessions of Guy Fawkes—and the awful, speaking difference in his signature before and after he was tortured. I try to build up a vivid, “felt” picture until I have a film that runs in my head. Then I describe it, plausibly. Informed plausibility is the key. Even imagined reality follows its own rules of logic.

In The Firemaster’s Mistress, I invented three main fictional characters to give myself a little freedom to roam into the unknown and to speculate. I can put words into their mouths and give them emotions for us to care about more freely than I feel I can do with known historical characters. Through Francis, Kate, and Boomer, I can build tension and excitement in addition to the known events. After all, the Gunpowder Plot failed—which makes a bad newspaper headline but challenges a writer’s imagination all the more.

But, please do ask me this question again when I’ve finished the book I’m writing now, about a real historical English princess, with a supporting cast of fairly well-documented real people. Reality can sometimes be unhelpful! At the moment, I’m wrestling with a documented order of events that is the wrong way round to the best way to build plot tension. I have my fingers crossed. I might still find a contradictory record, to raise doubt and give me one of my cracks. Otherwise, I’ll have to invent a way around the problem.

P.S. In search of more “felt” detail, I’ve just scheduled a lesson in riding sidesaddle, which was the period norm for women. So far, in my books, I’ve wriggled around finding ways to justify having my women ride astride. In the future, it will be from the horse’s mouth.

Q: Guy Fawkes is the ultimate scapegoat for the Gunpowder Plot, or at least its most infamous culprit. Is much known about his co-conspirators?

A: A few details can be found here and there, particularly about the leader of the conspiracy, Robert Catesby, though information changes depending on the source. But not that much is known about Fawkes either. As Antonia Fraser said in her book, The Gunpowder Plot, we have very few unambiguous facts about the whole event. You see them all by flashes of lightning. Ironically, Fawkes may have been brought in almost as “hired help”, as their demolitions expert. I suspect that he may have been chosen as scapegoat by the government because he was not a gentleman, like most of the others, nor related to prominent aristocrats, like Thomas Percy.

Q: What historical accuracy issues did you experience in narrating a book in seventeenth-century English vernacular? 

A: I always start with the idea that all my characters sound as normal to each other as we do to ourselves. And we should experience them in the same way. They certainly don’t speak a quaint period pastiche. My problem, therefore, is to suggest the period flavour without self-conscious—and irritating—literal imitation. I was lucky enough to work for the Royal Shakespeare Company for almost four years, where I heard Shakespearean language spoken all day, every day, so that both the rhythms and vocabulary became second nature. In fact, the actors and crew even began to order Green Room bacon sandwiches and cups of tea in blank verse.

One of my special language techniques, funnily enough, is to “think American”. Many of the older forms of English (including folk songs) survived in the States long after they died out in England, particularly in mountain regions, or parts of the Midwest where I did some of my growing up. “I ain’t done nothing yet,” is perfectly good 17th century speak. I’m always battling proofreaders to keep my double negatives.

That said, although I try to make my characters speak as naturally as possible, I also work very hard to avoid words that were coined after the period of my books. “Interface” is an obvious one, but “plan” (18th century) often sneaks past my guard. I know that some writers think it doesn’t matter, but I’m convinced that readers feel a cumulative sense of “rightness” or “wrongness” even if they can’t say why.

You can also have fun trying to show subtle differences of class, education, and nationality. Shakespeare leads the way there, particularly in the History Plays, even if a little caution is needed in following his example—the 17th century English made fun of all foreigners with uninhibited relish.

Curious? Here’s a look inside from the publisher:

 

April 29, 2009 | Filed Under Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club | 11 Comments 

#155 ~ A Silent Ocean Away

A Silent Ocean Away: Colette’s Dominion by Deva Gantt

Charmaine Ryan’s loving mother raised her as best she could despite her deadbeat and abusive husband in Richmond, Virginia just before the Civil War.  As a teenager, Charmaine finds work in a wealthy home as a companion to help make ends meet at home.  When her mother dies at the hands of her father, she is lucky that the Harrington family takes her in.  She is safe from her father, but she is leary of men like him.  When an opportunity to live on the Caribbean island of Charmantes as a nanny for the wealthy and powerful Duvoisin family arises, Mrs. Harrington, who has family ties to the island, encourages Charmaine to apply for the position.  She wants Charmaine to have the best opportunities and make a wonderful match for herself.  With her mentor’s encouragement and company, she sets sail for Charmantes.  There, Charmaine encounters a family in crisis.  Both parents are ill and the conflict between the adult children of Mr. Duvoisin threatens to tear the entire family apart.  Although she has the complete support of Collette, Charmaine must fight for her position within the family and protect her dignity from the advances Paul, Duvoisin’s second, bastard son.  Things only get worse when John, the heir to the Duvoisin fortune returns to the island.

A Silent Ocean Away, written by sisters, Deb and Val Gantt, is the first installment in a trilogy about Charmaine and Colette’s legacy to her family.  This entire saga was written as one tome, but it was split into a trilogy when it was published.  Because it was a joint effort, they published the novels under the pen name DeVa Gantt.  It is clear when reading this book that the women put a lot of work into polishing the story and the writing.  The story and the characters are consistent from the beginning to the end.  I want to know what happens to each of the main characters.  I want to know if Paul’s business on his island is succesful and what John’s intentions were when he returned to Charmantes.  I want to watch the children grow up and see how both Colette’s and Charmaine’s care impacts them.  Most of all, I want to know which brother Charmaine will choose or if she will find someone even better suited for her.  

One disadvantage to reading a series is that not all of the clues, foreshadowing, and character development is completed in the first installment.  Agatha and her brother, who is Colette’s doctor, are villainous characters and I wanted to see them get their comeuppance.  At the end of A Silent Ocean Away, however, there was no true resolution to that storyline.  With such a well though out and written story, I’m sure that my waiting will be rewarded.  On the other hand, I will be disappointed if it is not.  With a traditional novel, I would know this by the end of the novel.

A Silent Ocean Away is a wonderful read that will sweep you away with the tide if you let it.  In the bleak weather of late winter/early spring, it was so nice to escape to the warm dry air of Charmantes to experience Charmaine’s trials and joys.  Once she made her way to the island, I had a difficult time putting the book down.  When I finished it, I desperately wanted to pick the second installment up to continue along with Charmaine and the Duvoisin family.  If you enjoy romantic sagas, DeVa Gantt is a must read this summer. I would strongly suggest buying Decision and Destiny: Colette’s Legacy while you’re at it.  Sure, I haven’t read it yet, but I would hate to be stranded on the beach somewhere finishing up A Silent Ocean Away without the sequel nearby.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

++++++++

For a history of the Collette trilogy that I posted for the Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club, click here.

  

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To buy A Silent Ocean Away, click here.  Seriously, you might as well by
Decision and Destiny: Colette’s Legacy.   You’ll want to be ready when the finale is published in November.

April 21, 2009 | Filed Under Historical Fiction, Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club, book review, female author, fiction | 8 Comments 

HFL Book Club April Selection ~ A Silent Ocean Away

In April, the Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club, the club I administer on Facebook, will be reading A Silent Ocean Away, the first part of the Colette Trilogy written by sister Deb and Val Gantt under the psydonym DeVa Gantt. I just finished A Silent Ocean Away: Colette’s Dominion this afternoon and thought it was wonderful. Once I got started, I didn’t want to stop. I hope that the rest of the group feels the same way.  What’s really exciting is that I received a copy of Decision and Destiny: Colette’s Legacy, the second part of this trilogy in the mail this week.  It’s due to be published by HarperCollins on April 7th and I’m finding it difficult to keep from picking it up and continuing along with the story of the Duvoisin family.  The best news of all is that I will have copies of Destiny and Decision to give to club members who read the book and fill out the Discussion Guide.  If you are interested and haven’t already joined the Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club, please do so. If you don’t have a Facebook account, it only takes moments to join and you don’t really have to fill out your profile to participate.

When I received my copy of A Silent Ocean Away, from HarperCollins the press kit contained information about the first installment as well as the story behind the trilogy.  The following is the story.  It’s so interesting to know how a book or a series came into being and I want to share it with you.  I didn’t have an electronic copy, so I copied it from my paper only to find out afterwards that it is on the author’s website. Sometimes I just don’t think things through.  Anyway, here is the story behind the story as written by Deb and Val Gantt (who I’d love to meet and have tea with someday):

“Published author” wasn’t on the career goal line of DeVa Gantt’s resume. The notion of writing a novel took root from an off-handed dare when the women were young adults. ‘We could write our own story.” Deb mused, “I can envision the main character already.” Val, who never shied away from a creative opportunity, jumped on the idea. Within a day, early plot ideas were hatched and scenes were drafted – the first, John Duvoisin’s stormy return from the States in A Silent Ocean Away.

The Colette Trilogy was conceived in late 1979 while the sisters were still living at home with their parents. Deb was a full-time student at Montclair State College in central New Jersey and Val, a third grade teacher in Suffern, New York. At the outset, they were writing just for the fun of it, working feverishly during their free time – in the evenings and on the weekends – writing scenes with pen and paper. To ensure their literary pastime remained a diversion from the daily doldrums, they chose an exotic island in the Caribbean for the primary setting of the story – a  charmed oasis where they, and ultimately their readers, could escape without leaving their armchairs. They chose a time period that fascinated them – the early 19th century – and wrote about a wealthy family with shipping connections to both the North and the South. Their research on commerce pointed to Richmond, Virginia, so this became the Duvoisin homestead, lending plausibility to the family’s financial interests and the roots of their fortune and misfortune. Still, after a full year of writing, the work itself was a hodgepodge of hand-written scenes without a connective story thread or an overarching theme. Publishing the work was not seriously in their plans.

When Deb left home for six months to study abroad  in France, Val, the organized, methodical half of the writing duo, decided it was time to weave the scenes into a sequential, coherent story with a real beginning leading to a real (albeit unknown) ending. She pulled out the family typewriter and spent hours at it, pounding new and existing scenes onto erasable typing paper. (Erasure shavings in the moving parts soon killed the typewriter and a new one had to be purchased.) The ocean that separated the sisters was far from silent. Val “read” the organized story, smattered with new material, to Deb via cassette tape sent by transatlantic mail. In France, Deb wrote more scenes while she ad her roommate waited for Val’s next installment of what they now dubbed “the Book.” When Val visited Deb in Europe over Easter break of 1981, she brought along a tome, which they read in London, railway stations, and trains across the French countryside. Deb’s roommate joked that the budding writers missed Europe with their heads buried in their magnum opus.

In 1983, real life intervened and the book languished. The young women had hit a creative roadblock. The compelling theme of the story that pointed the way to a powerful ending eluded them. The women moved, married, and started families. Deb was now working for a pharmaceutical company, and Val, who had always dabbled in art, opened her own retail craft store thirty miles away. In addition, they both had children: real-life families trumped their fictional one. And so, the Duvoisins were quietly tucked away in a box, silent until Thanksgiving weekend 2002.

The rejuvenating spark was strangely coincidental. Though the women had spent Thanksgiving together – the book never mentioned – a day later, while tidying up, each came across their copy of the unfinished manuscript and begun to read. The following week, Deb e-mailed Val to tell her she’d been reading “the Book.” It was a wonderful work begging to be finished, and she had some fresh ideas.

By January of 2003, the creative energies were flowing again. They discarded a key premise that was impeding logical progression of the novel; something that life experience allowed them to recognize. They mapped out an ending, and their approach to the writing changed. They divvied up the scenes that remained to be written and met at regular intervals to share their drafts.

During the twenty-year hiatus, technology had bridged the gap between the typewriter and the personal computer. The sisters could now share their work electronically, but there were different challenges. Completing the novel had to be worked into real life responsibilities: children, marriages, households, and jobs. The women stole every spare moment, working late at night, into the wee hours of morning, and on the weekends. Often, Deb packed up overnight bags, and headed to Val’s house with her son and daughter. The cousins played while the writers collaborated. Wherever they went, the women brought the Duvoisins along: from sporting events to dance practices, from doctors’ offices to school functions, from business trips to vacations. An opportunity to work on their “masterpiece” was never wasted.

As they closed in on the completion of the first draft, the sisters knew they were ready to take the next step: publish the novel. They had worked too hard; the story was provocative and emotional, the characters complex and credible; the book could not go back into a box. Cognizant of the challenge in convincing a traditional publisher to publish the work, Deb and Val were determined to offer a professional manuscript: historically accurate, with impeccable grammar and spelling.

Thus began a two-year period of extensive research, arduous editing, and painstaking proofreading. During the time, both authors read and revised the manuscript numerous times, an effort that ultimately melded their individual writing styles into a single literary voice. But query letters sent to agents and publishers met dead ends. The Colette Trilogy was a whopping 800+ pages, and no one in the publishing industry was interested in taking a chance on a manuscript of that length, especially by and unknown author.

They refused to be deterred. Self-publishing became the only option – a stepping-stone that would enable them to compile a portfolio of reviews and positive feedback. They published with an independent house in 2005 and learned how to effectively market their book, approaching booksellers and local media. They learned to accept rejection and move on; even so, the favorable reviews began to pour in. Stellar critiques were posted on Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com. Readers loved the story and were begging for more. Val and Deb finally had proof that size didn’t matter.

In 2006, an agent stepped forward and presented the novel to an editor at HarperCollins, and in 2007, HarperCollins agreed to publish the work as a trilogy.

Today, the women look back at their accomplishment, and concur that the experience has been rewarding and unexpectedly broad in scope. The benefits have been immeasurable. Perhaps the dearest is the bond of sisterhood that deepened; they have shared a unique journey. Their greatest satisfaction, however, is seeing their unfinished work come to fruition: the Duvoisin story has finally been told.

Check this out for even more about A Silent Ocean Away:

March 28, 2009 | Filed Under Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club | 8 Comments 

Historical Fiction Lovers March Selection

This month, the Historical Fiction Lovers book club is reading False Colours, one of the Georgette Heyer books that Sourcebooks – love them! – has republished recently.   You can click on the book title to buy it through Amazon.com (it’s available for the Kindle, too), or check the book out at your local library. Once you’ve read the book, you’re welcome to fill out a discussion guide and  participate in our discussion of the characters, themes and other aspects of this novel.  I have only a few more pages to go and am looking forward to our discussion this month.

We are currently at 105 members and would love to add new fans of Historical Fiction.  Why don’t you join us?  If you have a Facebook account, you’re half-way there.  No Facebook account?  It only takes a few moments.  Not to mention, the Historical Fiction Lovers book club is not the only book club on the block.  There are 5 pages of book clubs started by members.  They are as broad as the Book Lovers book club that reads a little bit of everything or as specific as a particular author or genre.  There’s bound to be a dozen groups you’ll be interested in joining.

March 5, 2009 | Filed Under Historical Fiction Lovers Book Club | 1 Comment 

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