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Book: Weaving Roots
Author: Heather Wood
Genre: Christian Historical Fiction with Romance
Release date: June 25, 2024
Baltimore, 1828
Spinning. Turning flax to fine linen thread for her family’s weaving business keeps Betha’s hands occupied all day, but it’s the concerns spinning in her heart that never truly rest. How can she give her nephew Henry a secure, loving home when his father remains indifferent? How can she guide the boy who calls her “Ma” to know and follow the Lord for himself? And when past secrets and future changes collide, will she lose Henry altogether?
Colm Gallagher is passionate about teaching boys using innovative educational methods. But is his kind and thorough instruction enough if he is not allowed to give his students the ultimate truth of God’s Word? Confronted by his student Henry Young and the boy’s lovely but determined aunt, Colm considers if he has allowed practical considerations to outweigh his deepest-held beliefs.
Even as Betha and Colm are drawn to each other, family loyalties, financial pressures, and personal uncertainties push them further apart. Will the threads of their lives unravel or become knit together into something stronger?
Weaving linen is her family’s legacy. Weaving roots of truth and grace is her calling.
Click here to get your copy!
Heather Wood grew up in the Chicago suburbs, loving history, classic literature, writing stories, and Civil War reenacting. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree in Bible/Theology from Appalachian Bible College, she settled in Virginia with her husband David. Her early passions fuel her writing today, although she spends most of her days now working to infuse her love for God and good literature into the hearts of her four children.
I’ve gone through a lot of phases in my life. I’ve been involved in different hobbies and activities, only to have them fizzle out after a few years. So when I started writing, I thought it was the same thing—that it was another short-lived hobby and soon I would get back to my regular life.
My third book was about to be released when one day, it felt like God turned a light bulb on in my mind: This is what I’ve been preparing you to do all along. When I look back at my parents, my education, and the experiences of my life, I realized that God had specially equipped me to do exactly what I was doing: write Christian historical fiction about real American church history.
The epiphany was more scary than exciting. I’m a “one idea at a time” kind of author. I don’t have multiple projects going at once. I had no idea, as I went to publish my third book, if I would even be able to come up with a plot and characters for a fourth. Would I announce to my friends that this writing thing was here to stay only to find I never got another story idea? What about the sacrifices it would require of my husband and kids?
That was just in 2022. Releasing this summer is Weaving Roots, my fifth book and the first in a whole new series with entirely new characters. I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the series unfolds from the idea seeds God has planted! I regularly offer my writing up to God, willing to walk away if He were ever to ask me to do so. Until then, I will work diligently and trustingly at the work He has given me to do.
You see, while each book does start with an idea seed, it’s watered by real history. As I take my spark of inspiration to the history books, I delight in finding out what God was doing in the time and place I’m writing about. My plots grow up around the real people He used and the work He was doing (although I usually make people who really lived into minor characters at best. Most often, I merely refer to them off the page while using what I do know about them to inspire my characters). I always try to drop vivid characters into the world as it really existed and watch and see how they respond. I dig into Scriptures and the theologians and Christian thinkers of their era or the one before to round out my themes and take the book’s message deeper. As a result, I am always the first one who is convicted and challenged by the message God brings to my stories.
Weaving Roots introduces us to the father of the siblings in my Finding Home series when he was just ten years old in 1827. He’s a second-generation Irish immigrant in a family of linen weavers in Baltimore, more than a decade before the Irish Great Famine. To the best of my knowledge, no one in either Christian or general market fiction has written about this time, place, and people group. Not everything on the page will be what you expect, as this generation between Colonial and Civil War/ Victorian Americans was very unique in their beliefs, struggles, and priorities. Henry Young is brought to Baltimore by his father, who is looking for a fresh start for his son and himself. Henry soon finds that his new schoolmaster is not what he expects and his father has more major changes coming into his life.
I can’t wait to share Weaving Roots with you and see how God uses His words to bless and encourage you!
To celebrate her tour, Heather is giving away the grand prize package of a paperback of Weaving Roots, a special handstitched bookmark and a sticker designed especially for Weaving Roots, a copy of The Virginia Housewife, an 1820s cookbook referenced in Weaving Roots, and a $15 Amazon gift card!!
Be sure to comment on the blog stops for nine extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.
https://promosimple.com/ps/2ddab/weaving-roots-celebration-tour-giveaway
Wow looks like a powerful and important film! "You forget many things in life, but you never forget kindness." So true. "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only the light can do that." Keeping the truth of the atrocities that happened in WW2, making it visible, may help to prevent it from happening again.
Synopsis:
From the best-selling author of Wonder, the book that sparked a movement to “choose kind,” comes the inspirational next chapter. In WHITE BIRD, we follow Julian (Bryce Gheisar), who has struggled to belong ever since he was expelled from his former school for his treatment of Auggie Pullman. To transform his life, Julian’s grandmother (Helen Mirren) finally reveals to Julian her own story of courage — during her youth in Nazi-occupied France, a boy shelters her from mortal danger. They find first love in a stunning, magical world of their own creation, while the boy’s mother (Gillian Anderson) risks everything to keep her safe. From director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland and Christopher Robin), screenwriter Mark Bomback, and based on R.J. Palacio’s book, WHITE BIRD, like Wonder before it, is an uplifting movie about how one act of kindness can live on forever.
Release Date: 10/4
#WhiteBirdMIN #MomentumInfluencers #BooksYouCanFeelGoodAbout
Movie trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iInOdzyBikw
Website: https://whitebird.movie/
A lovely laughing out loud story to keep you company as well as any friend. Wonderfully endearing characters. Camilla has taken on more than she realized when she agrees to help Owen. After an attempted kidnapping she travels to his home in Virginia and his not-so-formal family. A lady of the Four Hundred meets a family still in touch with its roots, and learns a bit along the way. Fabulous read!!
I received this book free from the author, publisher and NetGalley book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
#MeetingHerMatch #JenTurano #BethanyHousePublishers #BooksYouCanFeelGoodAbout #FiveStarNovel #ChristianHistoricalFiction #ChristianHistoricalRomance
Description: Miss Camilla Pierpont, a renowned matchmaker and influential member of the New York Four Hundred, has vowed never to marry after suffering a devastating heartbreak during her debut years ago. However, when she is nearly abducted along the Hudson River, she finds herself rescued by an annoyingly outspoken, albeit fascinating, gentleman who challenges her in a manner she wasn't expecting.
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Book: The Enchanting of Miss Elliot (Aprons and Veils: Book Three)
Author: Grace Hitchcock
Genre: Historical Romance
Release date: July 29, 2024
She thought he was her forever—he had other plans.
Of all the dares Lorna Elliot had accepted, becoming a Harvey Girl waitress was by far the dumbest—and she’d pulled some pretty foolhardy antics. Her back was sore. Her feet were swollen. And she had done it to herself in a fit of pique over a Texas Ranger who was mooning over another woman. Lorna had longed for distraction at the time, but after weeks of training, she might keel over and die in the middle of the dining room floor with a plate of apple pie in one hand and a pot of coffee in the other. But, she’s an Elliot. And Elliot’s never quit. The only thing she’d ever quit was attempting to win Ranger Reid and now that he’s the new sheriff in her hometown, it’s going to be impossible for her to move on unless she takes control of her heart—for better, or for worse.
Sheriff Reid had never wanted to settle down until he had fallen hard for a runaway mail-order bride turned Harvey Girl who chose another. When news of an outlaw’s escape lands on his desk, he eagerly rides out in pursuit all the way to Topeka and overhears the outlaw’s plans that revolve around the wealthy Elliot family and their daughter, Lorna. It’s up to Reid to see his childhood friend safe . . . despite Lorna insisting that she can protect herself without him.
Click here to get your copy!
Grace Hitchcock is the award-winning author of multiple historical novels and novellas, including the American Royalty, True Colors, and Aprons & Veils series. She holds a Master’s in Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in History. Grace lives on the Northshore of New Orleans, with her husband, Dakota, sons, and daughter in a cottage that is always filled with the sounds of sweet little footsteps running at full speed. When not writing, or chasing babies, she’s baking something delightful and can usually be found with a book clutched in her fist.
Q & A with Grace Hitchcock
Q: What is your favorite trope to read? Which of your books have that trope?
To name a few, I love stories about marriage of convenience, fake dating, mail-order brides, runaway brides, and enemies to lovers. In my books, I do have some of those tropes, but I adjust them to fit my story
My Harvey Girl books by tropes:
Runaway Bride: The Finding of Miss Fairfield
Mail-Order Bride: The Pursuit of Miss Parish
Friends to Lovers/Fake Dating: The Enchanting of Miss Elliot
I’d love to write an enemies-to-lovers trope in the future!
Q: Have you ever been asked to spice up, or down, a kissing scene? How did you do it?
For my May release, To Catch a Coronet, the editor challenged me to make the kissing scene longer and more romantic. Haha it took me my entire writing session that day to make the short scene two paragraphs longer in order to make the kissing more swoon-worthy, while still staying true to the level of affection I have in my books. With that critique in mind, I attempted to add a bit more “swoon” in The Enchanting of Miss Elliot as well.
Q: What historical novel has most impacted you? How?
Grace: I feel like every season, there is a novel that touches me. The one that stuck the longest has to be Tracie Peterson’s Westward Chronicles (a Harvey Girl series). They are moving, unique tales that inspired me to write my own Harvey Girls series! I re-read the Westward Chronicles every few years.
Q: How does your faith integrate into your writing in practical ways?
Grace: No matter how subtle my theme or short the verses, my stories will always point the reader to the Lord. Usually, whatever I am personally learning spiritually while writing impacts my heroine/hero in some way.
For The Enchanting of Miss Elliot, the heroine, a firm believer, is despairing that God will not give her the desires of her heart and sets out to find a new future and a re-directing of her heart. It’s a very realistic struggle, and the reader can see through the story the beauty of trusting God in our daily walk and with our biggest dreams.
Q: What’s your life like outside of writing?
Grace: Besides reading at least one to two books a week, I love to take long walks to the park with my family, exercise on my bike, plan the family’s next travel adventure, and try new baking challenges. As a wife and mama of three, I usually have some happy recipients for the new recipe.
Q: Will there be more Harvey Girl books from you?
Grace: Yes! I am currently working on Book Four in the Aprons & Veils series, The Vanishing of Miss Victoria. It will release mid-2025.
About The Vanishing of Miss Victoria:
Love got her into this mess—never loving again would get her out.
Corinna Victoria Roberts had never been lucky—not in her choice of husband, or her lot in life after the man she’d eloped with had promptly abandoned her, taking her gold and jewels with him. When her husband’s thieving, lawless relatives show up at her door announcing his death and demanding that her late father’s restaurant empire be signed over to them, her life is in danger. She flees to take a position no one expects of her—as a Harvey Girl waitress in New Mexico.
Tanner Sterling has hunted his last bounty. As the new foreman on his friend’s ranch, he wasn’t expecting to rescue a Harvey Girl from a raging river his first day. He is intrigued by the shy beauty and becomes friends with Corinna over many meals at the Harvey House. But, when a picture of her on a wanted poster with a massive bounty arrives in Tanner’s mail, everything he knows about Corinna shifts. If he doesn’t claim the bounty on her head, he knows far less honorable men who would love to ride off with the stunning Harvey Girl. Despite wanting to hang up his past along with his gun belt, Tanner will do anything to protect Corinna from the coming storm.
To celebrate her tour, Grace is giving to two winners an autographed copy of The Pursuit of Miss Parish each!!
Be sure to comment on the blog stops for nine extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.
https://promosimple.com/ps/2ddaa/the-enchanting-of-miss-elliot-celebration-tour-giveaway
TICKETS ON SALE NOW
About Average Joe
High school football coach Joe Kennedy had no other choice but to fight. A childhood in foster care followed by 20 years in the Marine Corps was nothing compared to his biggest battle: his commitment to stand for God publicly by taking a knee in prayer after each game. When he was fired, Joe and his wife Denise knew this battle for religious freedom, freedom of speech, and the rights of all Americans was one they would have to fight—no matter the cost.
From the director and producers of God’s Not Dead and the producers of The Blind comes AVERAGE JOE, in theaters beginning October 11.
Buy Tickets: https://momentuminfluencers.us13.list-manage.com/track/click?u=7fa294e9cfc078eecabbec8f4&id=89595c318f&e=8178308bbe
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