Brandy Purdy's Book Reviews and News Blog

Black Mahler The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story by Charles Elford

2012-01-22T00:38:00.002-06:00

This fascinating book, which deftly toes the line between historical fiction and biography, vividly recounts the true life story of the almost forgotten composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, best remembered for his "Song of Hiawatha" trilogy, which set the famous Longfellow epic poem to music and gave choral societies all over the world a much needed break from religious themed compositions.

Born in 1875 to a white mother and a young black doctor from West Africa, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was adopted by a white Welsh family, the Evans, and grew up in the South London suburb of Croyden. From an early age he showed promise as a musician, his first music teacher fondly recalled discovering the little black boy on the sidewalk outside his house playing marbles with his scruffy little violin case beside him. Victorian England was a much more hospitable climate to African-Americans, though racial prejudices, often rudely expressed, definitely existed there, it was not so bad as America where tolerance didn't equal acceptance or kindness in the decades after the abolution of slavery, and young Samuel was able to receive an excellent education, thanks to encouraging benefactors, and eventually received a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. There he met the woman who would become his wife, the indomitable Jess, and his lifelong best friend William Hurlstone.

While he was still a student, he became entranced by Longfellow's vivid and evocative images of the Native Americans in "the land of the Dakotahs" and decided to set the poem to music for his own pleasure, never realizing it would become a worldwide sensation and the masterpiece he could never surpass. Nor did he realize that selling the piece outright, as he always did with his compositions, would be a catastrophic mistake; while his publishers got rich, all Samuel Coleridge-Taylor earned from his masterpiece was a mere 15 shillings.

For the rest of his life, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor would work himself to death to support his wife and two children, barely managing to keep his head above the water. Despite the mistake with "Hiawatha" he always found it to his best advantage to sell his work outright, but it didn't always pay the bills or stave off debt for very long.

In the more racially tolerant England, he didn't realize how important he was to African-Americans, who hailed him as a hero and inspiration and loved his music, creating a choral society in his name. He visited America three times, always to great acclaim, and even met President Roosevelt.

Ironically, one might consider Samuel Coleridge-Taylor another victim of the Titanic. Though he was not on board the ship, the only copy of his Violin Concerto was. Already worn to a shadow, this stressed and exhausted man worked feverishly around the clock to rewrite this composition and get it to America on time. He met his deadline, but a few months later he collapsed waiting to catch a train and died shortly after. He was only thirty-seven years old.

This is a very readable and engrossing book about a thoroughly likeable man-some might even go so far as to say he was "too nice"-a sensitive, funny, generous, thoughtful, and self-effacing and doubting man who couldn't bear to let anyone down. It is a vivid portrait of a man and artist who should never be forgotten.

For those curious about the title, as I was, it comes from a great compliment paid to the composer during one of his American visits. Gustav Mahler, a conductor from Vienna, was then considered the greatest conductor to have ever visitied America. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was favorably compared to him, deemed by many to be Mahler's only equal, and thus he was dubbed "The Black Mahler."

For more information about the book and its author please visit www.blackmahler.com

The Favored Queen A Novel of Henry VIII's Third Wife by Carolly Erickson

2012-01-15T00:00:00.001-06:00

The latest volume in Carolly Erickson’s frothy and improbable line of “historical entertainments” is set in Tudor England and tells the story of Jane Seymour, third of the six wives of Henry VIII, and mother to his only legitimate son, Edward VI.

The novel begins with Jane, a devoted to the serene and gracious Queen Catherine of Aragon, who has tried many times, and failed, to give the King the son he covets, enduring her own sorrows over a man. Her engagement to Will Dormer is jeopardized by her father’s seduction of her fiancé’s fourteen-year-old sister. The couple plan to runaway to the Spice Islands to start a new life together, but, for various reasons, this is not to be, so Jane is on hand to be an eyewitness to the rise of the haughty and ambitious Anne Boleyn and the fall of her beloved Queen Catherine, and to surrender her virginity in a midnight rendezvous with a married French glazier she meets when he is hired to make improvements in Anne’s bedchamber.

When the Nun of Kent’s dire predictions of doom drive Anne Boleyn into a paranoid frenzy and her desperation to give Henry a son costs Jane’s lover his life, Jane becomes a quiet enemy waiting in the wings to destroy Anne and the gentle confidante who captures King Henry’s fickle heart.

I have read all Ms. Erickson’s “historical entertainments” to date (I just haven’t reviewed them all yet) and, while I enjoy some more than others, I always find them fun and a breath of fresh air amongst the more ponderous and serious tomes of historical fiction. If you’re not a historical fiction purist and can take them for what they are, and are open to the idea of Jane Seymour as a woman with all too human feelings and longings, neither sinner nor saint, then you just might enjoy this.

Oblivion The Mystery of West Point Cadet Richard Cox by Harry J. Maihafer

2012-01-14T00:00:00.002-06:00

On Saturday, January 14, 1950, shortly after 6:00 p.m., popular, accomplished, and handsome 21 year-old cadet Richard Colvin Cox left West Point Military Academy to dine with an unidentified friend after telling his roommates that he would return early, most likely between 9:00 and 9:30, and was never seen again.

Cadet Cox seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth. The newspapers and magazines gave the story of his disappearance extensive coverage, rivers were dredged, all 15,000 acres of West Point were exhaustively searched, leaving no stone unturned, all ponds, lakes, and the reservoir were either dragged or drained, a helicopter was even brought in for an aerial search. J. Edgar Hoover even took a personal interest in the case and assigned some of the FBI's best agents to investigate, but not a trace of Richard Colvin Cox was ever found though sightings of him continued to be reported for several years, some with an intriguing ring of truth about them. Every tip--and there were hundreds--was followed up, no matter how unlikely or ludicrous, by either civilian or military investigators. Details of every aspect of the young man's life were gone over with a fine-toothed comb, searching for a clue, either in his past or present, and thousands of people were interviewed, all to no avail. No one who knew Cox could shed any light on his disappearance, and he never contacted his family, fiancee, or best friend.

Richard Cox gave every appearance of being a devoted son to his widowed mother, strong-willed Christian Scientist Minnie Cox, and his letters showed that he was very much in love with his fiancee, Betty Timmons, whom he planned to marry after graduating from West Point. His grades were excellent, he was one of the top men in his class, and there was every indication that he had a bright future ahead of him; there was nothing to suggest he had any reason to just walk away from his life and disappear. His occasional expressions of discontent with West Point life in letters to his mother and girlfriend were typical cadet complaints and, though taken into account by investigators, were not deemed serious enough for him to pull a vanishing act and cause his family and others who cared about him so much distress.

Many felt the key to unlocking the mystery lay in the identity of his mysterious visitor, who had also visited Cadet Cox the weekend before his disappearance, a man who came to be known only as "George" based on a possible phone call he may have made to Cox prior to his visit. Cox himself, in the week before his disappearance, was reluctant to discuss this man and never divulged his name, referring to him only as "he," or "him," or "my friend," though his roommates felt the last was rather odd as he gave the distinct impression of disliking the man and even being uncomfortable with or even afraid of him. Everything Cox said seemed to indicate that his visit was an unwelcome one, and he reportedly described the mystery man as a braggart and a bad apple who boasted about killing a girl in Germany, where the two had served together in an army intelligence unit. Cox claimed this man was "capable of anything."

Despite intensive searching, "George" was never identified, and rumors swirled about murder, suicide, amnesia, revenge, abduction, homosexuality, cover-ups, the CIA, and Russian spies. One persistent rumor claimed that while serving in Germany Cox had testified at a court-martial against a fellow soldier, possibly the man known only as "George," who, upon release from prison, had come to West Point in pursuit of Cox to exact vengeance, but no records to substantiate this were ever discovered. The mystery was never solved and in 1957 Richard Colvin Cox was declared legally dead and the case was officially closed, though it continued to intrigue armchair detectives and readers of books about unsolved mysteries and mysterious disappearances in which it often shared space alongside chapters about Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and Judge Crater.

Thirty-five years later Marshall Jacobs, a retired history teacher, decided to take on the mystery as a research project to help while-away his retirement. What followed was an eight year odyssey to find the truth and rescue Richard Cox from the oblivion of those lost without a trace. Jacobs obtained all available documents via the Freedom of Information Act and even tracked down and interviewed all the living witnesses he could find. And, despite a rather--to my mind at least--unsatisfying conclusion, where Mr. Jacobs seems content to take the word of one informant without any proof or facts to back up his assertions, "Oblivion" is a riveting tale from start to finish.

The Condition by Jennifer Haigh

2012-01-08T00:00:00.004-06:00

I discovered this novel right after watching an episode of Law & Order SVU about a young woman afflicted with Turner’s Syndrome, a disease that basically traps an adult woman in a little girl’s body.

I was really intrigued by the plot of this novel, about how a family copes with their daughter’s illness and what happens when she falls in love. But this is one of those times when I think the author tried to do too much. By making it about the whole dysfunctional family and all their problems—scientist father’s obsession with work and his libido; frigid perfectionist mother and her secret attraction to the handyman; secretly gay but successful cardiologist eldest son; ne’er-do-well discontented, pot-smoking youngest son; and Turner’s afflicted only daughter—the book got bogged down and the most interesting part overshadowed and often pushed to the back burner with several chapters often going by while all the rest of this unfurls like a dropped roll of paper towels. For me, this book just plodded along, and I was able to put it down for long stretches of time, which I usually can’t bear to do; that’s why I have trouble reading while I am writing my own books. I am in no way implying that Ms. Haigh’s portrait of the fictional McKotch family is unrealistic, the problems and secrets are often many, complex, and multi-layered, and I thought she did a fine job depicting this particular dysfunctional family. I just think it would have made a much better and stronger book if the spotlight had been kept aimed on Gwen, who at thirty-four falls in love with Rico, a dive manager during her Caribbean vacation, leading her family to wonder and worry if he is sincere. Is this charming man, the kind who makes a living preying on female tourists, does he see dollar signs when he looks at short, flat-chested Gwen, or could it be that he truly does love Gwen? And when the family puts him to the test will he pass or fail it? I won’t spoil it for anyone who is tempted to find out. And, despite my quibbles with this one, I would gladly give another book by Ms. Haigh a chance; in fact, I have her other two in one or more of my "To Read" stacks, one is about life in a coal mining town in the 1940s and 50s and the other about the women a human chameleon loves and leaves behind him, so I’m definitely intrigued.

Tabby's Christmas Pictures

2012-01-04T20:30:00.005-06:00

The Debutante by Kathleen Tessaro

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-06:00

This is another one of those intriguing mementos of the past affects the present stories. In this one Cate Albion, is an artist who hasn’t quite managed to find her niche, she has only succeeded at, much to her shame, becoming the now discarded mistress of a powerful man. She leaves New York behind and travels to London to work at her aunt’s auction house.

While helping inventory the contents of a once grand estate, Endsleigh House, home of the late Lady Avondale, better known by her maiden name Irene Blythe, one of the beautiful Blythe sisters, Cate finds an old shoebox. The contents include a pair of 1930s vintage silver high-heels with rhinestone clasps, a Tiffany emerald, pearl, and diamond bracelet, and the photo of a handsome, young, dark-haired sailor. Fascinated, Cate becomes determined to unravel the story behind these artifacts of days gone by.

She soon discovers that they are all connected with Diana “Baby” Blythe, Lady Avondale’s bright, beautiful sister, as bubbly and effervescent as champagne, and a true wild child, a madcap blonde who seemed to burst right out of a 1930s screwball comedy a la Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey straight into real life. Baby vanished without a trace during World War II.

As Cate’s detective work continues, she finds herself becoming attracted to her aunt’s business partner, Jack Coates, an attraction that may be mutual, but each perpetually puts the wrong foot forward and, haunted by their past failures and disappointments, shies away from intimacy.

The story is interspersed with Baby Blythe’s vivacious, gossipy letters until the mystery is ultimately unraveled in time for the implied happy ending.

This is a fun, breezy little book with some dark shadows hanging over it. I read this book after a relationship ended and Cate’s feelings--“She would never truly matter to anyone. She was disposable and always had been.”--really struck a chord with me. But for anyone who loves the old movies full of glamorous fashions and comfortingly predictable plots where everything always works out all right by the time “The End” appears upon the screen and the lovers always live happily ever after, this may be just the book for you.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-23T00:00:00.001-06:00

New Review of The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy

2011-12-20T15:36:00.000-06:00

Steve Donoghue posted a wonderful review of The Tudor Throne at http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/book-review-the-tudor-throne/#.TvDSzDNuo0A.facebook

Book Review: The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy

Keeping Up with the Tudors

Brandy Purdy’s earlier Tudor novel, The Boleyn Wife was a spiky, memorable fictional meditation on that most distasteful of Tudor-era hangers-on, the vile Lady Rochford. It was part of the contemporary glut of Tudoriana (sparked by Phlippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, sustained by Jonathan Rhys-Meyer’s oddly spellbinding performance in Showtime’s The Tudors, and given an enormous tenth-round revival by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall), and that’s both a good thing, in that it floats boats that might otherwise have stayed grounded, and a bad thing, in that it floats every last punt and dingy in sight, regardless of how seaworthy they are. Good entries run a significant risk of getting lost in the crowd, as I worry The Boleyn Wife might have been.
That same worry is intensified a bit when it comes to Purdy’s follow-up Tudor fiction, The Tudor Throne, because this book deserves to stand out (it helps that the cover of the US version, done by Kristine Mills-Noble and Trish Cramblet, is so simple and eye-catching, although the more sentimental cover of the UK edition – titled Mary & Elizabeth – is equally inviting)(Hell, even the author’s name is made just a touch more inviting). In the interval since reading The Boleyn Wife, I duly hunted down and read Purdy’s The Confession of Piers Gaveston, about the meddling little schemer who helped bring King Edward II to ruin, and although it’s one of the best fictionalizations of Edward II I’ve ever read (it’s tough to beat Marlowe, but I remain surprised no stops-out Wolf Hall-style epic has yet been written about Edward in English), it’s clear that Purdy is in her element when writing about the Tudors.
Two specific Tudors, in this case: Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and his rightful queen, Catherine of Aragon, and Elizabeth, Henry’s daughter with his turbulent second wife Anne Boleyn. The Tudor Throne‘s narrative is divided between the two half-sisters just as the country’s throne seemed to be once both their dread father than their half-brother Edward VI were dead. It’s a neat device, and Purdy handles it perfectly, shifting tones between her two main characters in order to show both how like and how unlike they are. Mary’s world is the more stately, the more florid, the more prone to what we’d now consider gothic fantasies – which Purdy wonderfully evokes, following Mary from the reality of her midnight ride from Hunsdon to London when she hears that Edward is dying. She encounters a silent, cloaked figure blocking the road, and he hands her a note taken straight from Sir Walter Scott:
The king is dead.
Turn back NOW!
Your are riding into a trap.
Northumberland lies in wait for you.
His son Robert is leading an army to arrest you.
Prepare to fight for your throne.
Do NOT let them take you!
God save Queen Mary!
And we see her in the dark transports of bitter jealousy over the Continental carousing of her husband Philip of Spain, by turns aroused in her dreams at the memory of him, obsessive in gossip-collecting about him (“They said he was busy dancing in Antwerp … they said he had developed a passion for masked balls …” until you want to tell her to just stop), and vengeful:
I wept and howled and screamed like a madwoman and took a knife to his portrait. “God often sends bad husbands to good women!” I raged as I slashed it to ribbons. Then I sat on the floor for hours, weeping with remorse, as I tried to piece it back together again.
And if Mary’s segments are good, those narrated by Elizabeth are downright captivating, giving us a psychological portrait expertly filtered through the sensibilities of a pre-psychological era. This is an Elizabeth just as tormented as her sister, but far more blunt (and every bit as obsessed with pictures, as I suspect Purdy herself is, given how richly visual her books are):
But I wasn’t just Great Harry’s red-haired brat; I was Anne Boleyn’s daughter too. I have seen her portrait hidden away in musty palace attics, and when I look at myself in the mirror, only my flame-red hair, and the milk-pale skin that goes with it, are Tudor. All the rest of me is Anne Boleyn – the shape of my face, my dark eyes and their shape, my nose, my lips, my long-fingered musician’s hands, even my long, slender neck.
This is an Elizabeth who’s both ardent and deeply suspicious of ardor, for what she views as good reasons: Lust kills, as does the loss of it! After his passion for my mother burned out, it was easy for my father to condemn her, a woman he had no further use for, to make way for another. Desire is the antechamber of Death.
By far the most creepy, effective element Purdy works into The Boleyn Throne is how haunted this version of Elizabeth is – literally. She’s no virgin, nor does her fear of lust keep her from experiencing it, but much like Henry, she pays a price every time. After the death of Katherine Parr, for instance, Elizabeth is visited at the most awkward of moments: Over his shoulder, in the steam rising from my abandoned bath, I thought I saw Kate’s ghost take shape, mournfully mouthing these words of wisdom and warning: “Never give your heart lest it be betrayed!”
And the book’s eeriest moment – just begging to be filmed, although it would take a braver director than Hollywood currently has – comes when Elizabeth is making love to Robert Dudley and suddenly sees the ghost of Thomas Seymour leering over Dudley’s shoulder as he presses down on top of her. It vividly conveys the mental world the Tudors occupied, a place of guilt and sorcery, where the dead were never very far removed from the living and the supernatural was right next door to the visible. That world is far too often scrubbed clean by modern outlooks in most Tudor fiction, but it stalks the pages of Purdy’s books in all its horrifying immediacy.

Faith by Jennifer Haigh

2011-12-18T00:00:00.002-06:00

This novel takes on the big ugly issue of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and gives in a personal spin from a viewpoint rarely seen—that of the family of one of the accused priests.

The McGanns are a devout Catholic family, but when eldest son, Arthur, a popular priest in Boston, is accused of sexually molesting a seven-year-old boy, his parents and siblings are divided regarding his innocence or guilt. Art’s mother, a proper Irish Catholic woman raised to revere priests, never wavers in her belief in her son’s innocence. But Mike, his younger brother, an ex-cop, who believes there is no smoke without fire, instantly jumps to the conclusion that his brother is guilty and won’t even talk to him to hear his side of the story, instead he worms his way into the life of the mother of the victim in an attempt to get the boy’s side of the story. And Sheila, the narrator the story, rushes back to Boston, determined to stand by her brother, whose innocence she never doubts, but is troubled by his refusal to defend himself against the allegations although he swears he is innocent.

Unlike Ms. Haigh’s previous novel, The Condition, which I found extremely slow-paced and hard to get through, this interesting family drama moves along at a good pace and held my interest throughout.

Interview About The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy / A Court Affair by Emily Purdy

2011-12-12T20:53:00.006-06:00

Alison has posted a brief interview about my upcoming novel The Queen's Pleasure (A Court Affair) on her blog The Musings Of A Book Junkie at http://themusingsofabookjunkie.blogspot.com/2011/12/exclusive-on-upcoming-release-of-queens.html

Exclusive on the Upcoming Release of The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy

Amy Robsart and Elizabeth I loved the same man. But one died early, and her death is shrowded in mystery. Brandy Purdy stopped by to give us an exclusive look into her upcoming release The Queen's Pleasure, which is Amy's story.

Q: How did others view Amy?

A: There isn't much evidence from the time to suggest that Amy had an friends. Gossip about Robert's relationship with Elizabeth often mentioned that he had a "beautiful wife." But she was without doubt seen as the one great obstacle in the path of her husband's ambition to be King. One of the reasons I was drawn to Amy's story is that so little is actually know abouther. When I first discovered her story in a book of unsolved mysteries I read as a child and then went on to read more about the Tudor era it always frustrated me that Amy often seemed little more than a name on the page, a person who only mattered because of the mysterious and--to her husband and the Queen--inconvenient way she died.

Q: Explain her reluctance to go to court. Was she really a recluse?

A: I think she didn't go because Robert didn't want her to, and she lacked the kind of forceful personality to make it happen anyway. Perhaps she felt out of her depth or intimidated? Perhaps Robert played on this using her own natural nervousness at a lifestyle she was unaccustomed to as a weapon against her, to keep her away because he didn't want her there. But I don't think she was a recluse in the sense of hiding in the house, afraid to go out as the use of the word "agoraphobic" on the back cover of the British edition of my book might suggest. The Amy of my novel grows up on a large country estate, that is her world, and unlike many girls of the period she never harbors dreams of goingto London and serving at court, she is content in her world, while it lasts, and mourns its loss after the life she knew is gone.

Q: Did Amy regret her marriage?

A: Well I can't speak for the real historical Amy becuase enough simply isn't known about her, she didn't leave anything behind that offers us a window into her soul. But in my novel Amy is a very conflicted woman, she loves Robert even when she knows she shouldn't, her head and her heart are constantly at war upon this subject.

Q: Did Amy fear Robert?

A: I think she did. With all the rumors swirling around that Robert wanted to get rid of her to be free to marry Elizabeth, and there was even talk of Amy taking precautions against being poisoned. And, in my novel, this only adds to her anguish, loving a man she also fears.

Q: Who did Robert really love?

A: Himself for certain. I think not knowing is part of what makes Robert Dudley fascinating to this day. Would he have still loved Elizabeth even if she had been a milkmaid or a squire's daughter like Amy was instead of a princess then Queen of England? I'm sure that was a question that ocasionally crossed Elizabeth's mind in her day and it still remains without a definite answer.

The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy will be released in the USA on June 26, 2012 and on August 2, 2012 in the UK as A Court Affair by Emily Purdy.

Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult

2011-12-11T00:00:00.005-06:00

Ms. Picoult has a definite knack for penning un-put-down-able novels about ordinary people caught up in the most extraordinary circumstances, and this one is no exception.

Zoe Baxter, a music therapist who believes “every life has a soundtrack” and “music is the language of memory” is desperate to have a baby. After four failed rounds of In Vitro Fertilization that have depleted their savings and maxed out their credit cards and two miscarriages she is now forty and pregnant for the fifth time. But during her twenty-eighth week, ironically at her baby shower, she has to be rushed to the hospital where she gives birth to a stillborn boy.

Zoe wants to try again, as soon as possible, but her husband Max puts his foot down. He will not be a party to Zoe endangering her life through another pregnancy and for some time he has been feeling that their marriage is no longer about them—Max and Zoe—only about having a baby.

They divorce and Max goes on a downward spiral, relapsing into alcoholism until the snowy night when he crashes his truck, finds Jesus, and joins the Eternal Glory Church. Meanwhile, a friendship blossoms between Zoe and one of her clients, Vanessa Shaw, a school counselor who hired Zoe to work with an autistic boy. Vanessa is there for Zoe when she is diagnosed with cancer and has to undergo a hysterectomy, forever ending he chances, she thinks, of ever being a mother.

Then the unexpected happens, Vanessa and Zoe’s friendship blossoms into love and when Max discovers that his former wife is now involved in a lesbian relationship he becomes convinced that it is his divinely appointed duty to save his ex-wife’s soul and deliver her from the evil of a same-sex relationship.

Zoe is blissfully happy with Vanessa, more complete and fulfilled than she has ever been, only one thing is lacking—the one thing that would make her happiness complete—a baby. But Vanessa can still have children, she is younger than Zoe and does not have her problematic gynecological history, and after the couple are married during a blizzard and at their honeymoon hotel see a lesbian couple with their son, observes “that could be us someday.” Zoe remembers that there are three frozen embryos left over from her last attempt at In Vitro, and it seems meant to be, the pieces falling magically into place, But there’s a catch, Zoe soon discovers, she has to get Max’s permission to use the embryos. And Max, in thrall to his ultra conservative Christian church is not about to give his consent for his unborn children to be born and brought up in a same-sex marriage, instead he wants to give the embryos to his childless brother and sister-in-law, an infertile couple who have also suffered through a string of miscarriages and long desperately for a child of their own.

And of course, the whole thing ends up in court and becomes a media circus and all kinds of personal and legal complications abound. I won’t spoil it for anyone by saying how it all ends.

Like all the other books I have read by Ms. Picoult, I could hardly bear to put it down. I made the mistake of starting this one at 3:00 a.m. and ended up waking up early just to dive back in.

Barnes & Noble Now Accepting Pre-Orders for The Queen's Pleasure

2011-12-05T00:20:00.001-06:00

Barnes & Noble now accepting online preorders for THE QUEEN'S PLEASURE by Brandy Purdy

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-queens-pleasure-brandy-purdy/1036008822?ean=9780758265982&itm=1&usri=queen%27s+pleasure+brandy+purdy

THE QUEEN'S PLEASURE by Brandy Purdy

When young Robert Dudley, an earl’s son, meets squire’s daughter Amy Robsart, it is love at first sight. They marry despite parental misgivings, but their passion quickly fades, and the ambitious Dudley returns to court.

Swept up in the turmoil of Tudor politics, Dudley is imprisoned in the Tower. Also a prisoner is Dudley’s childhood playmate, the princess Elizabeth. In the shadow of the axe, their passion ignites. When Elizabeth becomes queen, rumors rage that Dudley means to free himself of Amy in order to wed her. And when Amy is found dead in unlikely circumstances, suspicion falls on Dudley—and the Queen…

Still hotly debated amongst scholars—was Amy’s death an accident, suicide, or murder?—the fascinating subject matter makes for an enthralling read for fans of historical fiction.

Please note this book is published in the UK as A COURT AFFAIR by Emily Purdy.

A Court Affair by Emily Purdy Back Cover Copy

2011-12-04T23:21:00.006-06:00

This is the back cover copy for A COURT AFFAIR by Emily Purdy, the UK edition of THE QUEEN'S PLEASURE by Brandy Purdy. It will be published in the UK August 2, 2012. The US edition goes on sale June 26, 2012. I will post cover art as soon as I have it.

A COURT AFFAIR by Emily Purdy

Power, passion and politics…

Uncovering the love triangle between Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, and his wife Amy, and her mysterious death, A COURT AFFAIR is an unforgettable story of ambition, lust and jealousy.

A love triangle, with deadly consequences…

Agoraphobic Amy, the daughter of a country gentleman, is marrying the great Duke of Northumberland’s son, Sir Robert Dudley. While she fears the bustle of court and city life, she faces a far larger challenge as rumours will abound that the newly appointed Queen Elizabeth is having an affair with her husband.

Meanwhile Elizabeth is coping with various threats to her person and her reign but finds herself drawn to the temptation of an adulterous liaison so as to retain her power. Numerous foreign suitors begin paying court to the beautiful young queen, which fuels Dudley’s jealousy and leads him to question his marriage to Amy. Dudley struggles between these two women: caught between that which he desperately wants and what he knows to be right…

A royal affair overlaid with ambition, lust and envy, this is an unforgettable story of the price one must pay for sin.

The Red Thread by Ann Hood

2011-12-04T00:05:00.001-06:00

The title of this novel refers to the Chinese belief that an invisible red thread binds those who are destined to be together—like mothers and daughters.

After the tragic loss of her infant daughter and the resulting disintegration of her marriage, Maya Lange opens The Red Thread Adoption Agency to find unwanted Chinese baby girls homes with loving parents in the United States. This absorbing novel weaves together the stories of the Chinese women forced, often against their hearts, to abandon their daughters with the stories of the couples who will eventually adopt them, letting the reader experience all of their heartbreak, fears, desires, conflicts, betrayals, ambitions, and motivations.

This novel makes a fascinating read for anyone interested in the intricacies of foreign adoption and Chinese culture and its sacrifice of baby girls.

Lost In The Forest by Sue Miller

2011-12-04T00:00:00.000-06:00

Set amongst the vineyards of Northern Californian, this novel poignantly captures the struggles of a family trying to cope in the aftermath of the death of a beloved husband and stepfather.

Eva, the mother of two teenage girls and a three-year-old boy, runs a small bookstore in San Francisco. When her second husband, John, is struck by a car, she finds herself, in her grief, drawn back to her first husband, Mark, as he is there to lend a helping hand and be a shoulder to lean on as each in their own way grapples with their loss of “the nice guy” who replaced him. Their eldest daughter, Emily, always a serious girl, adjusts to new responsibilities and increasing independence as she goes first to France as part of a school exchange student program and then off to college shortly after her return. While Daisy, at fourteen, sorely misses the stepfather who made a point of befriending her, the awkward, introverted, middle child, and seeks solace in an affair with a much older man, Duncan, the fifty-three-year-old husband of her mother’s best friend and former movie stuntman who takes it upon himself to awaken Daisy’s sensuality. And three-year-old Theo, who, though he was a witness, cannot comprehend his father’s death, finds himself drawn to Mark, latching onto him as the father figure every boy needs in his life. And Mark, despite an angry divorce that later became amicable for the sake of their children, discovers that he wants another chance with Eva.

The book covers the first year and a half after John’s death then leaps ahead many years, but not to the neat tied up in a pretty bow happy ending, that many might be expecting.

For those who like contemporary novels about families, normal or dysfunctional or somewhere in between, and their problems, ordinary or extraordinary, or the effects of loss and grief, Lost in the Forest makes interesting reading.

First Blooms on my Christmas Cactus

2011-12-03T19:42:00.006-06:00

Here is a picture of the first blooms on my Christmas Cactus, although they look red in the picture they are actually a bright Azalea Pink. This plant is loaded with red and pink buds, but these two are the first to open. These plants are my babies, after Tabby of course, I even talk to them and play them Mario Lanza cds.

Hurricane by Jewell Parker Rhodes

2011-11-29T00:00:00.003-06:00

As promised last year, here is my review of the third and final volume that completes Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Marie Laveau mystery trilogy starring the famous New Orleans’ voodoo queen’s descendant, Dr. Marie Levant.

The book begins with Dr. Marie, who has since changed her last name from Levant to Laveau, driving south, following a disturbing dream. This leads her to a shack deep in the Louisiana bayou where a family of three-father, mother, and child—lie dead; all have been murdered. When she goes to report the crime to the local sheriff, his brother takes her to their home and introduces her to their grandmother, Nana, an old voodoo woman, blind and riddled with cancer, who foretold Marie’s coming.

The town of Delaire has no doctor, everyone has always relied on Nana and her powers whenever they were ailing, and hearing that there is a real medical doctor in their midst, the locals flock to Nana’s house to see Marie. Strangely, many of them suffer from cancer and other diseases and have lived longer than they should have without modern medical care.

Marie does the best she can for them, but when she discovers that the sheriff has covered up the murders, burning the crime scene, she is furious and returns to New Orleans. There the police also show no inclination to investigate and advise her to just let it go. There are other things to worry about. The weather reports are full of a brewing tropical storm called Katrina and everyone is wondering if this will turn out to be “the big one.”

After a colleague is killed, possibly because she was mistaken for Marie, Marie races back to bayou country accompanied by a handsome red-haired Cajun doctor, K-Paul who wants to be more than just a friend to her. Marie is also perplexed by visions of two loas, Voodoo spirits, one half male and half female who freely shifts between the two genders, the other a teal mermaid water goddess.

Marie soon discovers the secret in Delaire that the powers that be hoped to keep buried—the preponderance of cancer and other illnesses in the area is due to environmental factors, oil pollution and damage caused and covered up by Vivco Oil. And Nana helped her people by using her powers as a sin eater to swallow their illnesses until she literally bit off more than she could chew and became sick herself.

And as the great storm of Katrina rages, battering New Orleans, it’s up to Marie Levant-Laveau to save the day.

Though I personally thought it the weakest volume in the trilogy, Hurricane kept my attention from start to end. I confess that, being long familiar with the legends about the real Marie Laveau and the stories told about her being swept up by a hurricane and presumed dead, I hoped the author would tie these into the series finale in some way, but they were never mentioned. But I always liked the heroine she created, and I was a little sorry to see her go, and could not help but wish her well, though at the same time I was also glad that this was not being stretched into an ongoing series. It was time to say goodbye and Ms. Rhodes ended it all upon a positive note.

Note: The first two books, Voodoo Season and Yellow Moon have since been reissued in trade paperback with their titles shortened simply to Season and Moon, you can find my reviews of both, under their original titles by either searching this blog or scrolling through the list of labels on the far right side of the screen.

fathermothergod My Journey Out of Christian Science by Lucia Greenhouse

2011-11-27T00:00:00.000-06:00

Lucia and her siblings had what appeared at first glance to be a privileged childhood, they lived in nice houses, went to private schools, summer camps, country clubs, skiing trips, and accompanied their loving parents on foreign vacations, and even spent some time living aboard in England. But everything is not always what it seems. When it came to illnesses and accidents a darker truth was revealed—Lucia’s family were Christian Sciences, followers of the religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy, which denied the existence of all disease and sickness. When someone got sick, they were described as “working through a problem” and instead of taking aspirin or any other medication or calling the doctor they called their Christian Science practitioner and resorted to prayer instead.

Lucia realized early that she had no faith in her parents religion. When she began to have trouble seeing the blackboard in school and suffering headaches and realized she needed glasses it was seen as a rebellion, a betrayal of their faith, when she went to an ophthalmologist. “You’re just giving in to prevailing erroneous thought,” her father told her. Lucia wisely did not listen and got her glasses.

Most of this memoir deals with what happened when Lucia’s mother became ill with cancer and the siblings long battle to get their mother proper medical care. Dealing with their father’s stubborn insistence that she was getting better and “making good progress” was like slamming up against a brick wall and they also had to cope with the justifiable anger, albeit sometimes misplaced, of their non-Christian Science relatives, especially their doctor uncle and their nurse grandmother, when they became aware of her condition. And you can really feel their frustration, it seeps out of every page. A tumor that began in her rectum gradually eroded the wall between her bowel and vagina leaving her in agonizing pain, suffering from infection and malnutrition, and by the time she taken to a hospital it was too late to save her. She was only fifty years old.

For those who enjoy memoirs about non-celebrities in extraordinary situations or explorations of different religions this is a very interesting and heart-breaking and highly readable book it kept me up until 6:00 a.m. and within minutes of waking up I was reaching for it again.

Happy Thanksgiving! Tabby & A Turkey

2011-11-21T12:00:00.000-06:00

The Fasting Girl A True Victorian Medical Mystery by Michelle Stacey

2011-11-20T00:00:00.005-06:00

This book explores the Victorian phenomena known as “fasting girls” an anomaly slightly above the sordid fringes of the sideshows in which proper, respectable Victorian girls baffled society and the medical and scientific communities by seeming to exist only on air, miraculously taking little or no nourishment for years. Several cases and all the various theories, including fraud, hysteria, eating disorders such as anorexia, are fully explored as are and social conventions about the feminine appetite, the fashionable Victorian complaints of dyspepsia and neurasthenia, and the Cult of the Invalid, as typified by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Alice James, the clash between the titans of religion and science, the heyday of spiritualism and the infancy of psychology and the birth of neurology. But the primary focus of the book is Mollie Fancher, the most famous of all the fasting girls.

In 1865, eighteen-year-old Mollie was injured when her hoop skirt caught upon a hook as she descended from a horse-drawn street car. She was dragged about a block before she was rescued and carried to her home in Brooklyn, New York. She never left her bed again. She began to exhibit a bewildering array of symptoms—paralysis, seizures, blindness, clairvoyance, multiple personalities, trances of varying duration in which she lay like one dead, and an inability to retain nourishment. Apart from a few miniscule sips of milk punch, beef tea, and bits of banana and bites of crackers, not enough to keep a body alive, she ate nothing at all for many years. While the invalid stoically endured her suffering, the newspapers took up the story and her symptoms, rather real or fake, were hotly debated until her death in 1916 shortly after celebrating the 50th anniversary of her becoming an invalid.

Don’t be daunted by the fact that this book covers such a wide spectrum of psychology, sociology, and science; it is not too complex or scholarly for the general reader. I found it fascinating from start to end and learned many new things. For instance, I always thought anorexia was a modern condition and was surprised to learn that even in the Victorian era which considered full hips fashionable, the thinness and pallor of consumptives and invalids was considered an ethereal and virtuous form of beauty, almost saintly. And if you are interested in the Victorian era, this book offers a peek behind the prim and proper lace curtains of the invalid’s bedchamber and the doctor’s office that readers rarely encounter. I highly recommend it to those who enjoy reading historical non-fiction and books about medicine and psychology that are not over the general reader’s head.

O Happy Cat! Tabby Has A New Bunny!

2011-11-18T16:18:00.006-06:00

The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel

2011-11-13T00:00:00.006-06:00

This novel is loosely based on the true story of Charles Byrne, the real-life “Irish Giant” who exhibited himself in London in the late eighteenth century, and whose bones were coveted, and dubiously acquired, by surgeon John Hunter and are today displayed in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons alongside the diminutive skeleton of Caroline Crachami, “The Sicilian Fairy.”

The story begins in 1782 with Charles O’Brien and his band of followers quitting poverty and hunger stricken Ireland to make their fortune in London. The giant has a talent for telling Irish folk and fairy tales, songs, and poems, and this puts him a cut above the average giant working the sideshow circuit. Some of these stories are included and are one of the book’s best features. On the advice of his manager, the Giant changes his name to Charles Byrne, to sound more refined and attract a better class of custom.

Entwined with the Giant’s story is that of John Hunter, a poor Scottish farm lad whose ambition and determination pays off when he becomes London’s most renowned surgeon. He is a dedicated, obsessive man who in his quest for knowledge regularly consorts with bodysnatchers, experiments with artificial insemination, and even accidentally inflicts himself with syphilis while attempting to inject a pauper with the virus, but shrugs it off as this will allow him to chart the course of the disease better. He keeps abreast of any of nature’s oddities on display in London, hoping to dissect them and add their bones to his collection when Death calling, and when he sees Charles Byrne he becomes obsessed with adding his skeleton to his collection.

This is a rather sparse, bleak tale of the pursuit of, and fleeting nature, of fame and fortune. The Giant’s time as a star attraction doesn’t last, and neither does the money. More than once he is forced to reduce his price and change to cheaper lodgings and cater to a lower class of customers to keep in business. Friendships and loyalties fray, disillusionment sets in, though life is better than it was in Ireland the Irish are treated badly, and as his health begins to deteriorate, his band of followers, blinded by the glitter of gold, are tempted by Hunter’s offer to purchase the Giant’s remains.

For those who are interested in the history of medicine, bodysnatching, sideshows and human oddities, Irish folktales, and the not so glamorous life in 18th century London, this is certainly a worthwhile read.

Better Image of The Queen's Pleasure Cover Art

2011-11-12T15:23:00.003-06:00

Now Available For Pre-Order at Amazon: The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy

2011-11-07T14:16:00.006-06:00

The Smallest Of All Persons Mentioned In The Records Of Littleness by Gaby Wood

2011-11-06T00:00:00.003-05:00

This brief little book with the very long title tells the story of the brief and very tragic life of Caroline Crachami, the famous “Sicilian Fairy,” a dainty dwarf only one foot ten and a half inches tall who died in 1824 while being exhibited in London.

Her life began in Palermo, she was born the day after the Battle of Waterloo. A rather unlikely story claimed that Caroline’s diminutive size was the result of the then commonly held belief in “maternal impressions” which meant that any fright or horrific sight experienced by an expectant woman could result in a deformity to her child. In Caroline’s case it was said an escaped monkey had crawled between her mother’s legs as she lay sleeping and when Mrs. Crachami reached down in her sleep to scratch her private parts the monkey bit her. Her child was born shortly after weighing only a pound. The Crachamis later emigrated to Ireland where Caroline’s father found work as a musician at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. But dainty Caroline proved sickly. A Dr. Gilligan diagnosed consumption and persuaded her parents to allow him to take their daughter to London, the climate there would be better for her, he explained, and, in the interests of science, he convinced the concerned parents to allow him to briefly exhibit their remarkable offspring.

If the Crachamis equated brevity with ease, they were sadly mistaken. Caroline’s time as one of the most popular human oddities being exhibited in London was brief only because exhaustion combined with tuberculosis soon sapped her life away. While on display in Mayfair she sometimes received as many as 200 visitors a day who, for the cost of an extra shilling, were allowed to handle this living doll. She was even taken to Carlton House for an audience with King George IV. After an exhausting day on display Caroline expired, supposedly at the age of nine, though modern science estimates her age was more likely closer to three.

Dr. Gilligan sold her body to the Royal College of Surgeons and the devastated Mr. Crachami, who had read about his daughter’s death in a newspaper, arrived just in time to walk in as she was being dissected. Today her skeleton, like an ivory bead and filigree sculpture, is displayed in the Hunterian Museum alongside the seven foot ten inch skeleton of “The Irish Giant” Charles Byrne, along with a glass case containing wax casts of her three inch foot, her arm, and her death mask, as well as a pair of her beribboned ballet slippers, a thimble, silk sock, and ruby ring.

This slim volume presents the meager facts that are known about the life of Caroline Crachami and makes intriguing reading.

Linger Awhile by Russell Hoban

2011-11-05T00:00:00.003-05:00

Irving Goodman readily admits that he is a dirty old man. An eighty-three-year-old widower who was happily, and faithfully, married for twenty-seven years, he has just fallen in love again. But the only problem is that this is 2003 and the object of his affections, Justine Trimble, the perky blonde star of 1950s era Hollywood B-westerns has been dead for forty-seven years.

Luckily, Irving has a friend, a tech wizard named Istavan Fallock, who will find a way to resurrect Justine from the black and white vhs videotape and bring to life a real living and breathing 3-D Justine that Irving can get his lusty hands upon. But, as always happens, problems arise. The first is that after his first glimpse of Justine Istavan decides that he wants her all for himself. The second is that Justine needs blood, and lots of it, to keep her in glorious Technicolor, otherwise she fades back to black and white and soon the sexy vampire cowgirl is on the prowl in London and the police are investigating the bloodless corpses she leaves in her wake.

This is one of those books that sounds much better than it actually is. I saved it for months while I was working on my last novel, looking forward to reading it, anticipating a real treat, only to be let down. It’s not awful, it’s an ok little book, only 132 pages long, good for a quick read, but the magic was lacking, it’s like the literary equivalent of today’s direct to video or dvd horror movie releases.

Tabby's Guess & Win Contest - The Answer & The Winner

2011-10-31T23:22:00.004-05:00

And the answer is...Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House On The Prairie (I told Tabby her colors were too vivid, but she likes things bright). I read her a very amusing book called The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure, which I hope to review here eventually and when we got to the chapter about Laura look-alike contests she decided she wanted to dress up.

And the winner is...Kim Cree, as soon as I have your address I will mail your book out. Thanks so much for entering and I hope you enjoy it.

First Look at The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy

2011-10-31T15:45:00.005-05:00

From the back cover:

When young Robert Dudley, an earl’s son, meets squire’s daughter Amy Robsart, it is love at first sight. They marry despite parental misgivings, but their passion quickly fades, and the ambitious Dudley returns to court.

Swept up in the turmoil of Tudor politics, Dudley is imprisoned in the Tower. Also a prisoner is Dudley’s childhood playmate, the princess Elizabeth. In the shadow of the axe, their passion ignites. When Elizabeth becomes queen, rumors rage that Dudley means to free himself of Amy in order to wed her. And when Amy is found dead in unlikely circumstances, suspicion falls on Dudley—and the Queen…

Still hotly debated amongst scholars—was Amy’s death an accident, suicide, or murder?—the fascinating subject matter makes for an enthralling read for fans of historical fiction.

The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy will be published in the USA by Kensington in July 2012 and in the UK by Harper/Avon as A Court Affair by Emily Purdy in August 2012.

I will post a better quality image of the front cover when I can.

The Man Who Killed Houdini An Investigation by Don Bell

2011-10-31T00:00:00.004-05:00

On October 22, 1926 J. Gordon Whitehead, a thirty-one-year-old McGill University student from Montreal, Canada visited magician and escape artist Harry Houdini in his dressing room at the Princess Theatre and punched him repeatedly in the stomach to test his oft-repeated boast that he could withstand any blow to the abdomen by tensing his muscles. Houdini was caught off guard, before he had a chance to steel himself, some reports say he was lying on a sofa perusing his mail at the time the onslaught of blows began, doing irreparable damage. Nine days later on Halloween the magic died. At age fifty-two the great Houdini was dead of a ruptured appendix and peritonitis. In those days before antibiotics, there was nothing medical science could do to save him.

J. Gordon Whitehead appeared to fall off the face of the earth after the incident and in 1982 journalist Don Bell became intrigued by the man who, whether intentionally or unwittingly, innocently or maliciously, caused the death of the world’s most famous magician. At the time of his death Houdini was on the hit list of many mediums who resented his exposes of their fraudulent activities; the entire third act of his show was devoted to exposing the tricks that went on in darkened seance rooms, and many mediums swore vengeance and prophesied doom would befall Houdini very soon. Mr. Bell wondered if this was in any way related to Houdini’s death—Was J. Gordon Whitehead a believer striking a blow for spiritualism?

Mr. Bell spent twenty years searching for the truth, tracking down surviving eyewitnesses or the descendants of those already departed, elusive documents, and even the only known surviving photograph of J. Gordon Whitehead. Sadly he died in 2003 and did not live to see his book published. The Man Who Killed Houdini is a fascinating real-life detective story that delves into the mind of a disturbed and possibly tormented personality, it’s a must for any Houdini fan and will, I think, also appeal to anyone interested in fully exploring one of the little incidents in history that has often been glossed over in just a paragraph or two in past accounts where the fact that Houdini died overshadowed the circumstances of exactly how and why.

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T00:00:00.003-05:00

Clueless In New England The Unsolved Disappearances of Paula Welden, Connie Smith and Katherine Hull by Michael G. Dooling

2011-10-24T00:00:00.005-05:00

At last, a book about one of the mysterious disappearances that has captivated me most of all—Paula Welden, a pretty sophomore at Vermont’s Bennington College who vanished without a trace in December 1946. With an idea in mind about hiking the Long Trail, after working her shift in the dining hall, Paula put on her red parka, blue jeans, and tennis shoes, and set out, alternately walking and hitchhiking. She never came back. Though featured in numerous collections of unsolved mysteries and articles about missing persons, and that area in Vermont that has been eerily dubbed “The Bennington Triangle” because of the numerous disappearances that have occurred there over the years, all of which are rationally chronicled in this book, with an eye towards truth not New Age mysticism or spinning a good campfire yarn, this is the first time the case has been treated to a full, book-length analysis and viewed through modern eyes and the lenses of forensic, psychological, and geological knowledge about serial killers and their behavior patterns.

As well as the Paula Welden case, Mr. Dooling also examines the 1952 disappearance of Connie Smith (Constance Christine Smith) is also examined. So tall for her age that she might have been mistaken for older, the ten-year-old left her Connecticut summer camp after a brawl with another girl, dismissed as “horseplay” resulted in broken glasses and a bloody nose for Connie. She was last seen hitchhiking, witnesses later came forward to report that she had stopped to ask them for directions to town, but somewhere along the way she vanished.

The last case, although chronologically the first, as it occurred in 1936, tells the story of Katherine Hull, a pretty blonde stenographer who vanished while visiting her grandmother in Lebanon Valley, along the New York/Massachusetts border. Katherine went for a walk and vanished. She may have been hitchhiking or someone stopped to offer her a ride, as some witnesses report seeing a woman matching her description get into a car. Her family liked to believe the religious young woman had run away to join a convent, at least that way she would still be alive. Unlike Paula Welden and Connie Smith, Katherine’s remains were later found, seven years later a hunter happened upon her skeleton. Because of their condition, cause of death could not be determined, and what was left of Katherine Hull was cremated. At that time, authorities assumed she had died of exposure.

The author fully explores the theory that a serial killer was at large, preying on vulnerable young women hitchhiking along the New York border and hiding their remains in the woods. Whether these three women who vanished were truly murder victims or not, Mr. Dooling delivers a meticulously detailed account of their disappearances, the details culled from police files, newspapers, and interviews, and ponders whether if they happened today if they would have remained unsolved. Even if I didn’t stay up all night anyway, this book would have kept me awake.

Immanuel's Veins by Ted Dekker

2011-10-22T00:00:00.003-05:00

With Halloween coming up we’ve got to have a vampire book, so here’s my review of Immanuel’s Veins by Ted Dekker. The year is 1772 and the hero and narrator is Toma Nicolescu, a soldier in the service of Catherine the Great. The Empress sends him to Moldavia, to the country estate of the Cantemir family, seated at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, just west of Transylvania. With his trusty friend Alex Cardei, he sets out on his mission, to protect the family in these times of political unrest, but, the Empress warns, steer clear of the notorious Cantemir sisters—impetuous blonde Natascha and wise brunette Lucine who, unlike the typical 18th century nobly born girl, have been brought up to live their lives for love, in pursuit of pleasure and passion. A marriage between one of them and a member of the Russian royal family may even be in the works, so they are officially off limits.

Of course, Toma and Alek ignore this and they soon pair up with the sisters, Toma with Lucine and Alek with Natascha. But Alek soon finds he has a rival, Natasha just can’t keep away from Castle Castile and the mysterious men and women who live there, living for pleasure sake and imbibing a special wine that bears a strong resemblance to blood; she repeatedly sneaks out at night to join them. But if you can’t beat them join them and Alek soon joins Natascha on her nocturnal visits and soon he is enthralled as she is and it is up to Toma and Lucine to put a stop to these antics and restore them to their senses. But Alek and Natascha don’t want to be rescued and instead try to convert them to the Russian’s free-love, do-as-you-please, live only for pleasure’s sake, lifestyle: “They are the model of love. The pounding of the heart, the touch of lips. They are God’s gift to the world, to love as you would be loved, with intense affection.”

More complications arise when the lord of Castle Castile, Vlad von Valerik, asks permission to court Lucine and her mother urges her to accept him, and, realizing that Vlad may be the marriage prospect the Empress spoke of, Toma finds himself turn between his love for Lucine and duty to the Empress and his country.

After tasting the Russians’ special wine, Toma blacks out in the embrace of Sofia, one of the mysterious Russian coven, and thus Lucine comes upon him. Soon afterwards, though Toma has decided to follow his heart come what may and damn the consequences, he will risk the ire of the Empress, Lucine decides to accept Vlad’s suit and begins to succumb to his charm and desire to please her. But after he bites her lip and she complains of the pain he suddenly becomes violent, and there are no more words of love and tenderness.

And like the hero of any vampire movie, Toma must save his beloved, but more perils and trials await him, and obstacles to overcome. But with the help of a mysterious old blind man who calls himself Thomas and gives Tomas a mysterious volume called The Blood Book that describes the origin of the Nephilim (the word vampire is never used in the book), the evil beings born of unions between fallen angels and human females, and, armed with this treasure trove of knowledge, and a new-found belief in God, Tomas returns to Castle Castile determined to save the woman he loves and slay the evil Vlad.

There’s really nothing new under the sun or moon where vampire fiction is concerned, but it’s still an interesting and entertaining tale. I personally would have liked a better sense of history as window dressing for the story, there were a few modern words that seemed out of place, like “slacks” instead of "trousers" or "breeches", and I’m not sure the term “party people” was used in 18th century Russia, but these are really minor points, little rocks in the road that shouldn’t be allowed to spoil this stirring tale of romance and adventure and good versus evil.

Update: The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy / A Court Affair by Emily Purdy

2011-10-19T03:07:00.005-05:00

My next novel The Queen's Pleasure will be published in July 2012 by Kensington, and in the UK by Harper/Avon as A Court Affair by Emily Purdy in August 2012. I will post more information as I receive it. This novel, told from the viewpoints of Amy Robsart Dudley and Queen Elizabeth I, tells the story of the deadly love triangle that ended with a mysterious death that was the greatest scandal of Elizabeth's reign and to this day remains one of history's great mysteries.

Tabby's Guess & Win Halloween Costume Contest

2011-10-19T00:30:00.001-05:00

This is Tabby's very colorful rendition of the heroine of a popular series of books that later became a much beloved family favorite television show that ran for several years and is still rerun today. Can you guess who she is? Enter to win a prize, your choice of a new, signed copy of The Boleyn Wife, The Tudor Throne, or Mary & Elizabeth (this is the British edition of The Tudor Throne). To enter leave a comment with your guess and specify which book you would like if you win. If your guess is right get a bonus entry. Contest is open to U.S. residents only (sorry, I cannot ship internationally). The answer will be revealed and the winner announced on Halloween.

The White Devil by Justin Evans

2011-10-16T00:00:00.003-05:00

Andrew Taylor thinks his luck has taken a turn for the worse—and quite rightly too it turns out--when his father sends him to London to attend The Harrow School an elite 400 year-old boarding school where the students, all born to wealth and privilege, wear the same style jackets, ties, and straw hats that students wore in the 19th century. It’s a whole new world for American Andrew with the different customs and accents and he finds it very hard to fit in. And when the boy who befriended him on his first day dies under mysterious circumstances Andrew is blamed and shunned as a rumor begins circulating that he gave the boy drugs that caused his death, even though the autopsy soon disproves this.

When another student notices that Andrew bears an uncanny resemblance to Lord Byron, one of Harrow’s most famous past students, he is cast as the lead in the school play. But things keep getting stranger and Andrew wonders if he is losing his mind when he starts having bizarre dreams, visions of, and perhaps ghostly visitations from, a pale effeminate boy with white-blonde hair. Research and clues lead Andrew to identify his nocturnal visitor as John Harness, a poor scholarship or charity student who attended the school during Byron’s time there. Byron took John under his wing, defended him against bullies, and the two eventually became lovers. Is the ghost confused and mistaking Andrew for Byron?

Then the past begins to repeat itself when the ghost mistakes Andrew’s girlfriend for a boy and thinks Byron is betraying him all over again, and Andrew must race against time to solve a 200 year old mystery, to save the lives of his classmates, friends, and teachers as the vengeful spirit unleashes a plague of deadly tuberculosis upon them.

I love ghost stories and this is one of the best I have read in a long time. I thought it breathed new life into the genre and I loved the way it mixed the past and present, the way history and its mysteries and facts long buried, forgotten and obscured by the passage of time, were unearthed or forced their way to the surface to demand confrontation. It blows the dust off the old familiar haunted school stories and gives the reader something novel and new.

Tabby's Getting Ready For Halloween!

2011-10-12T02:07:00.006-05:00

Tabby is so excited. She's already getting ready for her Halloween party. I bought the Funfetti cake mix and icing today before the store sold out so I can make Tabby's favorite cupcakes and we are planning a movie party to watch several classic black and white horror films including the silent vampire classic Nosferatu, Haxan (Witchcraft Through The Ages) one of the most bizarre movies ever made, and all the Universal Monster movies that we can like Creature From The Black Lagoon, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and Dracula (Tabby likes to growl at the monsters). And, though it's not considered a horror film, more a melodrama, A Fool There Was, starring Miss Theda Bara as the vamp who devours men's souls and bank accounts. So lots of scary fun and sweets for Tabby and me, though our tummys and hips could do without the cupcakes, Halloween only comes once a year.

Coming in July 2012! The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy The Story of Amy Robsart

2011-10-11T16:33:00.012-05:00

My novel The Queen's Pleasure will be published in July 2012 by Kensington, and in the UK by Harper/Avon as A Court Affair by Emily Purdy in August 2012. I will post more information as I receive it from the publisher. This novel gives Amy Robsart a voice, and tells the story of the love triangle between Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, and his wife, which ended with Amy's mysterious death at the foot of a staircase, one of history's great mysteries.

Salvation On Sand Mountain Snake Handling and Redemption In Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington

2011-10-09T00:00:00.001-05:00

This was a fascinating book to read. Though I myself am not religious, I have always been amazed and intrigued by those who take their faith, and their lives, into their own hands by handling deadly, poisonous serpents, trusting in God and their faith in Him to protect them. I also happen to like snakes as long as they are on tv, behind glass, or safely confined to the pages of books. My parents, who had me late in life, grew up in rural Georgia in the 1930s and 1940s and, in my father’s case at least, believed in this sort of thing; in his youth he attended a church where members would prove their faith by putting their hands on a hot iron pot-bellied stove without suffering burns and faith healers performed miracles at tent revivals. To this day he refuses to believe that any trickery might have been involved, whereas I, skeptic that I am with my interest in the paranormal, psychology, history, and science, am more inclined to seriously entertain that suspicion; people have been faking miracles and relics since religion began. So, for me, this was a very interesting book.

In 1992 the author of this book, Dennis Covington, went to Alabama to cover the trial of the Reverend Glen Summerford who was accused of attempting to murder his wife, Darlene, with the rattlesnakes they used in their worship services. Covington decided to attend an evening service at The Church of Jesus With Signs Following, a converted gas station/general store with a steeple on top, where Reverend Summerford used to preach before he was arrested. The men in jeans and overalls and the women in ankle-length skirts with long hair and no makeup made him welcome and after the lively hillbilly music, the pulsing thrum of electric guitars and the jingle-jangle of tambourines, and the hymn singing they got down to business—speaking in tongues, drinking strychnine from mason jars, handling fire with their bare hands, and, the snakes—rattlesnakes and copperheads mostly, though cobras were also occasionally seen at services by those “fortunate” to acquire them.

One would think this was the end of the story, that after the trial ended, Dennis would go back to the city and write his story, but he found himself drawn to the snake handlers and, welcomed to their services and hailed as “Brother Dennis” he began regularly attending their churches, even traveling with them to various parts of Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, to attend meetings, and, caught up in the ecstasy, he would eventually, when the spirit moved him, dare to take up serpents.

Despite becoming intimately involved with his story, Mr. Covington manages to deliver a sane and straightforward account of the history of snake handling and the misadventures of those who practice it, the bites, fatalities, beliefs, bickering, and controversy. It is not a preachy book that the author, who has left snake handling behind, uses to try to convert disbelievers, merely an account of his own investigation and experiences. Whether you are seriously interested in bizarre religions and strange beliefs or just vaguely curious, I highly recommend this book.

Mad Madame Lalaurie New Orleans' Most Famous Murderess Revealed by Victoria Cosner Love and Lorelei Shannon

2011-10-02T00:00:00.002-05:00

If you love historic ghost stories like I do, no doubt you have heard the tale of the infamous Madame Lalaurie. In 1834 when her opulent mansion located in New Orleans’ French Quarter caught fire unspeakable horrors were discovered in the attic. Firemen found naked slaves, starved and mutilated, some the victims of horrific medical experiments performed by Madame’s husband, a doctor interested in deformities, while, cool as a cucumber, Madame implored them to save her fine art and furniture and then fled in her coach to evade mob justice, supposedly living out the rest of her life exiled in Paris until she was killed by a wild boar in a hunting accident. For over 150 years the tale has endured with 1140 Rue Royal being pointed out as New Orleans’ most haunted house.

But is the story true? Incredibly, until now, there has been no in depth investigation of the truth behind this tale of terror. The authors offer us a concise, straightforward account of the few facts known about Madame Lalaurie’s genteel Creole upbringing, her life as a high society belle presiding over balls and parties at plantations and mansions, her three marriages, and the births of her children. It contains numerous quotations from various historical sources not readily available to the average reader, which some readers might find distracting and disruptive to the narrative whilst others will appreciate the air of authenticity it lends. The authors do a thorough, meticulous job of exploring every facet of the legend, from genealogy to hauntings and alleged paranormal activity at the house on Royal Street, they even include a chapter on depictions of Madame Lalaurie in popular culture and show how the legend grew and evolved with each telling.

This is one of those books I call “don’t shoot the messenger books” in which it is revealed that the scant facts don’t really support the oft-told sensational story once the embroidered layers are stripped away like a southern belle’s petticoats, but that is not the authors’ fault, they have done an admirable job of exposing the naked truth.

To read more about their research please visit http://www.mad-madame-lalaurie.com/

The King of America by Samantha Gillison

2011-09-25T00:00:00.002-05:00

This novel is inspired by the life of Michael Rockefeller, the millionaire’s son who vanished in 1960 while studying the customs and rituals of the Asmat tribe and collecting native art in Dutch New Guinea.

Stephen Hesse, is the firstborn son of one of the world’s richest men, Nicholas Hesse, and his working-class wife, Marguerite, the daughter of the charwoman who cleaned his rooms at university, born before she was replaced by a more suitably pedigreed blonde wife and a litter of fair-haired children more in keeping with Nicholas’s social standing and political ambitions which later win him the governorship of New York. Stephen grows up a shy, serious, bookish boy who in his loneliness and isolation immerses himself in history and art and spends his summer visits trying to win his father’s love and approval. As a senior at an elite boys’ school he experiences an attraction to the new Latin master that proves mutual when the two share a kiss during a walk on a rainy day. Whether the affair goes any further physically isn’t disclosed as this novel rarely ventures behind bedroom doors. A few years later, as a young man in college, we witness Stephen's first real romance with an older, rather unconventional woman, Sheila, he meets on Fire Island who has a passionate on again/off again affair with an artist boyfriend who lives in Paris six months of every year. But the relationship is doomed to failure when Sheila chooses the bohemian life she has over what Stephen and his father’s money can offer.

Bored and disenchanted, Stephen briefly considers dropping out of college to join the army, until he attends an anthropology lecture on ritual male violence and, using his father’s influence, worms his way onto an expedition to the lush tropical paradise of Dutch New Guinea where naked, painted and befeathered tribes still practice headhunting, cannibalism, and magical rites. His mission is to collect art for his father’s museum, The Hesse Museum For Primitive Art, and to also keep a written record of the expedition. When Stephen becomes captivated by the Asmat bisj poles, elaborately carved and painted totem poles made to honor their dead ancestors, he refuses to listen to common sense and wait until the monsoon season has passed, and thus the stage is set for tragedy with headlines blaring THE KING OF AMERICA SEARCHES FOR HIS CROWN PRINCE as helicopters fly overhead and dugout canoes and Navy ships patrol the water and volunteers beat through the bushes searching for Stephen or his body.

Those who know me or regularly read this blog know I have a fascination with missing persons cases, and the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller is one of what I call “the cases that haunt me,” so I really enjoyed this novel. Though I must stress it is a work of fiction loosely based on the real story and the author has taken numerous creative liberties in creating her cast of characters, I felt it gave me a better understanding of the young man at the center of that tragedy and the events surrounding his loss . There were times when I felt the novel was a tad cold, or dispassionate, when I thought a little more depth or detail would have served it better, but nonetheless I didn’t put it down until I reached the final page, and if I didn’t have so many books piled up waiting for me I would gladly read it again.

Smouldering Fires by Anya Seton

2011-09-18T00:00:00.004-05:00

Set in the 1970s, this novel revolves around Amy Delatour, a nearly friendless high school misfit, the type of girl who doesn’t know how to make the most of her looks and wears the wrong clothes, glasses, and her pretty reddish-brown hair scraped back, up and out of the way in a granny knot. She is fascinated by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, particularly his poem “Evangeline” which harkens back to her own French Acadian heritage. She is also troubled by an unexplainable fear of fire and haunted by strange dreams. Her hardworking, pain-wracked widowed mother, Sarah, is brusque, critical, and resentful, and the only real affection in Amy’s life comes from her French-Canadian grandfather, “Grandpere” Pierre Delatour ,who has filled her receptive mind with tales of their ancestors' exile from Nova Scotia in 1755 and the horrors and cruelty they endured.

The new English teacher, Martin Stone, takes an interest in Amy when they discuss her independent study project—she wants to write a paper about the real Evangeline, whom she believes was her ancestor, Ange-Marie. Intrigued by the hidden depths and brightness Amy hides under her glasses, granny knot, unattractive clothes, and quiet demeanor, her reference to “dreaming true,” and her inexplicable phobia of fire, Mr. Stone, who has an interest in psychology and the paranormal, decides to try hypnosis to unlock Amy’s subconscious and uncover the root of her problems and the source of her fear. But when Amy begins to speak in the voice of Ange-Marie, her 18th century French Acadian ancestress, her desperate longing for her lost love Paul, and fire, Martin enlists the aid of his old girlfriend and college classmate, Claire Colbert, and the two attempt to unravel the mystery of Amy/Ange-Marie and discover if this is evidence of a deeply disturbed personality, a schizophrenic perhaps, or genuine proof of reincarnation, the echoes of a past life intruding upon the present.

This is the final book by one of my favorite authors so it saddens me to say that this is a lackluster finale to her writing career. I wonder if perhaps she was trying to recapture the glory of Green Darkness, one of my all-time favorite books which also deals with a case of reincarnation, though at much greater length and depth than in Smouldering Fires, which appears skimpy and rushed in comparison. In Green Darkness the modern-day characters’ Tudor England past life personalities and surroundings were fully developed so readers could become immersed in their lives and emotions, and the turmoil of the times they lived in, but that is definitely not the case with Ange-Marie and her beloved Paul, they are wispy, pallid dream figures in comparison. I do not know the details of Mrs. Seton’s life, perhaps she had grown disenchanted with writing by this point or there were other problems in her life during the writing of this book that kept her from rising to the challenge that every book is and giving it her best. Maybe she was tired and just wanted to be done with it? I only know that Smouldering Fires, much to my regret, in this readers’ opinion, does not smoulder at all, the fire has gone completely out.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TABBY! She's Four Years Old!

2011-09-14T12:30:00.001-05:00

Tabby will be four years old on September 17th, but we're celebrating a few days early.

The tiger stripe cake:

Modeling her new dress.

Naptime! She's all tired out from eating cake and watching her two favorite movies--Creature From The Black Lagoon and The Wizard of Oz.

Lost by Jacqueline Davies

2011-09-11T00:00:00.003-05:00

This novel interweaves the story of the missing persons case that fascinates me most of all, the 1910 disappearance of heiress Dorothy Arnold from New York’s Fifth Avenue, with the tragic fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory the following year.

Lost is the story of two young women, both, in their own way, lost though they may not know it. First, there is the mysterious Harriet Abbott, a woman clearly too refined and educated for the menial sweatshop labor of finishing sleeves at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory for $6 a week. What is a woman who clearly springs from wealth and means and is unaccustomed to this kind of work and taking care of herself doing in a place like this? Then there is Essie Rosenfeld, a poor Jewish girl from the city’s teeming tenements who dreams of owning her own hat shop someday, but in the meantime is torn between her love for her neighbor Jimmy, a young law student who encourages her love of books, and her preoccupation with providing the best for her little sister Zelda, and her resentment of the mother she believes does all she can to crush her every fragile chance at happiness.

Essie and Harriet strike up an unlikely friendship, but after seeing some old newspapers Essie begins to suspect that Harriet is not the widow disowned by her family and fallen on hard times after the death of her husband that she claims to be. And when her brother Saulie is arrested and Essie goes to the police station to bail him out she sees the Missing poster with a face she knows all too well blazoned on it and realizes that Harriet is really the high society girl Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold who mysterious disappeared, vanishing in broad daylight, while shopping on Fifth Avenue.

But truths will be obliterated, burned away or laid bare, agonizingly scarred and blistering by the tragic fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that soon follows on March 25, 1911. And I won’t spoil the story for anyone by saying what those truths are.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I thought it was such a clever idea, and though it is marketed as a young adult book, I highly recommend it to adults as well. It wonderfully captures the atmosphere of life in New York in 1911 and the deplorable and unsafe working conditions the girls who plied the sewing machines in the sweatshops and factories endured.

Tabby Says: Time To Get Back To Work!

2011-09-10T18:16:00.006-05:00

As I start writing my next novel, Tabby, my little helper, gets her schoolgirl dress on and strikes a pose with my notebooks and her favorite rattle balls.

Tabby: A Ducky And A New Dress

2011-09-06T21:55:00.002-05:00

Review & Giveaway of The Tudor Throne at Historically Obsessed

2011-09-04T22:27:00.003-05:00

Review and Giveaway of The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy) at http://historicallyobsessed.blogspot.com/2011/09/book-review-tudor-throne-by-brandy.html

Thanks Lizzy!

The Accident by Linwood Barclay

2011-09-04T00:00:00.002-05:00

I always eagerly anticipate the date when the latest thriller from Linwood Barclay hits bookstore shelves, he has a wonderful knack for creating gripping tales of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And his latest is no exception.

The Everyday Joe hero, Glen Garber is a contractor feeling the bite in his bank account as building and remodeling jobs become scarce due to the housing and mortgage crisis. His wife, Sheila, hopes the night school business course she is taking will serve her family in good stead by helping her land a better job now, and, later, when Glen’s business picks up again, she plans to take over managing the company’s books and accounting. But everything changes one night when Sheila doesn’t come home. Glen and their eight-year-old daughter, Kelly, set out in his truck to retrace Sheila’s route and discover the devastating truth—Sheila and two others have been killed in a car accident that she apparently caused.

Glen knows his wife better than anyone--though moments of confusion and doubt occasionally crop up to cloud his judgment--and he is convinced she could never have done this. When he sets out to discover the truth, like the layers on an onion, they slowly peel away to reveal the sordid and surprising secrets of his neighbors—blackmail, adultery, massive debt, and, even closer to home, some suburban housewives, friends of, and including, Sheila herself, have become involved in selling fake designer handbags. It all started as a lark, a way to earn some extra cash in these tough times, fun girls’ nights hosting “purse parties” in each others’ homes, but the ladies soon got in over their heads, trafficking in counterfeit prescription drugs besides purses and owing thousands of dollars to organized crime types who aren’t afraid to put a bullet in somebody’s brain for even the most trifling thing. And Glen soon finds himself fighting to keep Kelly safe and to hold all the pieces of his life together as everything threatens to shatter like the glass in his daughter’s bedroom window the night a bullet came through it.

I have read several of Mr. Barclay’s books, which I have reviewed on this blog, and this, I think, is his best to date. As the story progresses like the twists and turns of a maze complications abound, and the solution to Sheila’s death comes as an unexpected surprise.

Linwood Barclay’s The Accident is a fast roller coaster of a book that I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys a good mystery or thriller.

Sappho's Leap by Erica Jong

2011-08-28T00:00:00.003-05:00

Told in the first person, this book begins with Sappho, the celebrated songstress, acclaimed as “The Tenth Muse” standing on the brink of eternity, on the edge of the cliff she is contemplating jumping from, a precipice renowned for curing those who leap from it of hopeless love. Some survive the leap, others perish, it is all in the hands of the gods.

For those who enjoy intelligent novels containing elements of adventure, romance, fantasy, and philosophy, this may well be just the book for you, though I recommend brushing up on your Greek mythology first if your school days are far behind you.

A devotee of the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite, Sappho, a rather plain young woman with blue-black hair and a slightly twisted spine, falls passionately in love with the golden-haired poet Alcaeus, though he professes that he prefers boys. She joins his plot to overthrow the cruel dictator and as a result is parted from her lover and exiled from her native Isle of Lesbos on pain of death should she return and married to a drunken fool in the hope that the life of a traditional Greek housewife busy with the loom and larder, supervising the slaves and childrearing will keep her out of trouble. But Sappho finds fame as a singer, which gets her out of the house, and a new love when her daughter, Cleis, her “golden flower” is born from a seed already planted by Alcaeus before Sappho's marriage.

Anxious for her daughter’s future, she consults various oracles and, though her passion for the absent Alcaeus still runs strong, she becomes infatuated with the beautiful Egyptian priestess Isis. The two often make love in the priestess’s sarcophagus to “experience a foretaste of immortality.” Horrified by her behavior, Sappho’s visiting mother kidnaps baby Cleis and takes her back to Lesbos where Sappho cannot go without risking her life.

The rest of the book unfurls like a richly embroidered tapestry illustrating a grand, perilous, and passionate odyssey that takes Sappho to Delphi to consult the famed oracle, then on to Egypt where she is befriended by the famed writer of fables Aesop who helps her liberate her foolish brothers who have become literally enslaved by the wiles of a notorious courtesan, and then to the Land of the Amazons where she is commanded to be a female Homer and write an epic of their history. She loses several years wandering in Hades, the Land of the Dead, seeing the pale ghosts of her father, baby brother, and others she has known, and emerges to become a reluctant priestess of a failed Utopian paradise comprised of Amazon maidens and Egyptian sailors and their offspring.

After encounters with various gods, goddesses, and legendary beings, including the centaurs, the lovers are eventually reunited, but the course of true love never did run smooth. And when at last Sappho returns to Lesbos and meets her daughter, now grown to womanhood and a mother herself, ashamed of the song that has made her famous as her mother’s “golden flower” she finds the great love she has to give her only child rejected. Sappho tries but cannot give up her songs as her daughter wants and settle down into the quietly respectable life of a gray-haired grandmother, and live down her wild days and put them far behind her, and events, including slander, suicide, and an affair with a beautiful eternally young ferryman named Phaon with an “indefatigable phallus” eventually lead her to climb the Leucadian cliffs. Will she leap? And more importantly, will she live, or is Sappho fated to survive only in her songs?

A note for those concerned about sexual content in their reading: Although Sappho's name is today synonymous with lesbianism, in this novel Sappho is unabashedly what we would today call bisexual, which was common in the ancient world. There are some sex scenes, but they are brief and not explicit catalogs of every touch, kiss, and caress, so anyone sensitive to such things should not shy away from giving this book a chance. There are also some orgies with rather brutal and disgusting behavior that are briefly mentioned to illustrate the depravity of visitors to the courtesan Rhodopis's palace. In other words, this is a novel with some erotic elements but not a work of erotica.

Interview and Review: Beloved Pilgrim by Nan Hawthorne

2011-08-26T14:30:00.000-05:00

Elisabeth von Winterkirche, a tomboy in petticoats, would rather wield a sword than an embroidery needle, and cares more for war than the traditional life of a Bavarian noblewoman and wife. After her beloved twin brother Elias dies, and she is forced into a most unhappy
marriage with a brute who repeatedly rapes her, Elisabeth dons her brother's armor, crops her hair, and with his squire and secret lover, Albrecht, sets out to join the doomed Crusade of 1101.

Along the way to Constantinople and then the Holy Land, she cleverly deals with all the tricks necessary to conceal her femininity and gains in confidence as she discovers that people "see what they expect. They see the armor and the cross and need look no harder," and readily accept her as what she seems to be--an innocent young nobleman embarking on a quest, his sword yet unbloodied.

The journey also proves enlightening in another fashion--Elisabeth, now calling herself Elias, discovers her attraction to her own sex, first in a chaste infatuation with the beautiful Ida, Margravina of Austria, and then in the arms of the beautiful whore Guiliana when her comrades in arms good-naturedly treat their young companion to a night of pleasure, to lose his suspected virginity. Guiliana keeps Elisabeth's secret and initiates her into the arts of love between women, which will stand her in good stead when, soon after, she finds the love of her life in the honey-eyed half Turkish, half Greek servant woman Maliha. But all too soon Elisabeth must leave her love behind and go on to face the blood, roar, and thunder of battle, and the heat, filth, and buzzing flies of an army of unwashed armor-clad bodies on the march and the deprivation and want they endure when supplies run low and the enemy burns the fields rather than have their crops fall into enemy hands.

Nan Hawthorne paints a vivid, living, breathing, and, when it comes to the travails of war, broiling hot and reeking portrait of what life was like for a pilgrim knight on crusade. Beloved Pilgrim is a grand tale of love and adventure, heartache and self-discovery that both male and
female readers can enjoy.

For those concerned about sexual content in their reading matter: the lesbian sex scenes are vividly rendered, but they are not, in my opinion, gratuitous, as each expresses something about the characters involved--In this story, sexuality is also part of the journey.

Beloved Pilgrim breathes new life into the oft-told centuries old tale of "girl disguises herself as boy to go off to war" and is one of the best novels of this kind that I have ever read.

An Interview with author Nan Hawthorne about her book Beloved Pilgrim

Q: I have always found the stories of women who doffed their petticoats, cropped their hair, and disguised themselves as men to go off to pursue an education, a career, like Dr. James Barry for instance, or to fight in wars, or even lead battles like Joan of Arc. What inspired you to write Beloved Pilgrim? Is your heroine/hero Elisabeth based on a real historical person or a composite of more than one real woman?

A: There are so many reasons a woman might want to live either like a man or actually as one. (I call these books “Grrlz2men” and set up a Facebook page to explore them.) In Joan’s case she felt she had to fight, and though it was not unheard of for women to fight, they were almost always peasant women who followed their men into battle. Joan, like Elisabeth, wanted to fight as a knight. In Barry’s case it was to be able to work in a field where women were not welcome. I have also read books, like Jae’s “Backwards to Oregon”, where the woman dressed as a man to avoid being victimized by men. But to me Elisabeth, who is by the way based on my own inner sense of myself, is simply being herself. In 2011 in the US she could do that more readily whether not adopting the identity of a man, but in 1101 the only way she could, in her class, was to actually put on her brother’s armor and masquerade. This is a time-honored choice, particularly in time of war. I for one am not surprised that many women have made this choice, since I simply do not believe a person is born predestined to behave in some way his or her culture deems characteristic of a man or a woman. Each individual is unique, basically genderless except for the mechanics, and chooses or has enforced those subjective characteristics. Writing Elisabeth allowed me to write a woman who simply was herself, not a “woman” nor a “man”.

Q; As I was reading your novel, I thought that Elisabeth's discovery of her true sexuality was as much a journey as her actual travels by ship and by road to Constantinople and the Holy Land. I personally thought this gave the story added depth and kept it from being just another "girl disguises self as boy and goes off to battle" book. Was this what you intended? One of the things I have discovered since being published is that some readers don't want to go behind the bedroom door or if they do they have their own ideas about what they want to find there. Were you at all worried that some readers might shy away from the book because of the sexuality of its heroine?

A; Of course, it was Elisabeth who told me she was a lesbian. She would not have put up with my making her fall in love with a man. But you are right, her realization of her feelings for women is as much a journey as the actual expedition. So is Elisabeth’s personal growth, her awareness that people may not really be who you think they are, that heroes can actually be villains, that mercenaries can be honorable, and that a crusade is not necessarily holy.

As for reader reactions, it went both ways, actually. On one hand I wondered if women who do not identify as lesbian would hesitate to read about one. I had one tell me that since she wasn’t a lesbian, she would have no reason to read a lesbian novel. I replied, “I don’t know why not. I am not a lesbian, and I wrote it.” I don’t understand why we are not surprised that gay men and lesbians read heterosexual books, but that GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) books are only for GLBT people. I am reading Sarah Waters Tipping the Velvet now and am sorry that very few people who are not lesbian will read it because it is such a deep and beautifully written book (and should be made into a movie as far as I am concerned.) I did not write the novel just for straight women. I am passionate about historical fiction and fascinated by nontraditional lives including GLBT historical fiction (like your marvelous Confession of Piers Gaveston, one of the first I came across). I hope lesbians are glad of my addition to that genre, and I hope straight people will get over themselves and broaden their own reading too.

Q: As a writer myself, I know that sometimes characters take on a life of their own and take us down paths we hadn't even thought of in our original outlines; did your characters surprise you or take you down any unexpected paths during the writing of this book?

A: Some characters? I think they all do! I knew Elisabeth and the others would have their way, so I can’t say they surprised me. Although I will say that Maliha was a lot stronger and sure of herself than I originally envisioned.

Q: Your scenes depicting the life of a pilgrim knight on the march and in the heat of battle were so vivid and real I actually had to turn on the air conditioner and put ointment on my mosquito bites and even paused to think how extremely grateful I am that I live in a time when the refrigerator and an ice cold Coke are only three or four feet away as I was reading your book. You put so much into these scenes, bringing them to life, what is the process like, besides a lot of research obviously, how do you do it?

A: That is indeed high praise!

I think this is part of being very much in the character’s head. I don’t know how you can be in a character’s head without being in her body too. Even a typical life in 1101 Europe would be uncomfortable by our standards. I thought about just how awful it would be to ride through a Turkish summer in armor, not bathing, not having enough to eat or drink, and dealing with vermin. I’ve read lots of crusades novels where all the characters think about is the romance of the situation, the glory, the honor, the nobility. That’s nonsense. Some readers believe that putting a woman in the situation allowed me to focus on these discomforts, but I don’t think that's true at all. I think writers assume the men would gloss over or ignore it. I don’t agree.

Q: What was the most interesting part of writing this book for you? What was the most difficult? The most surprising?

A: The most interesting was learning about the Crusade of 1101. Like most people, I had no knowledge of it, though it was the one crusade that changed Europe’s economy and society the most.

Most difficult was working to overcome what I k now are my own writing faults, wordiness, convoluted sentence structure.

Most surprising was adding these characters who were not, like those in my first novel, “An Involuntary King”, friends from my childhood, familiar and comfortable but all brand-new and finding I could do this.

Q: As a writer, do you have a particular routine or ritual for writing? Are you a disciplined writer who follows a set schedule like someone with a nine to five job or the "just when the moment's right or the mood strikes" type?

A: I wish I was more disciplined, but I suspect that routine would not work for me. I write when I am inspired, but fortunately it usually takes just getting started to become inspired. I have learned or developed numerous ways to spark that inspiration. On the other hand, I have just had to come to grips with needing quiet. My neighborhood kids are horribly noisy, so I simply will not be able to write when school is not in session. That makes me sad and more than a little resentful.

Q: You are very active in promoting Independent Publishing, which is in my opinion like a diamond mine, there are some genuine treasures buried beneath the various prejudices and stigmas attached to self-publishing, some talented authors with clever, creative, and unique ideas that profit-motivated mainstream publishing is unwilling to take a chance on and that readers won't usually find unless they go looking for them as many bookstores decline to stock these books unless the author can persuade them or buyers special order them. Why do you think Independent music and films are often celebrated but when it comes to books these are looked down upon and disdained, all of them lumped together as "vanity" projects.

A: I think that’s how the prejudice started, but I think practical issues are more at fault now. Bookstores for instance want to be able to return books if they don’t sell, and it is a rare self-published author who either wants to or can afford to buy back books. On the other hand, direct book buying is the coming thing. You know that some well-loved authors are starting to cut out the middleman and sell their own books on their own web sites, especially ebooks. I believe the reader should choose what s/he reads, but that perforce means lots of small market books, while publishers simply cannot afford to serve those small markets.

You ask why indie recording and films are accepted and not books. I really don’t know. Perhaps the markets are different people, and book buyers as a whole are stodgier. Beats me.

Q: Any plans for a sequel or spin-off? What's next from Nan Hawthorne? Where can readers learn more about you and your work?

A: Now that I have written a lesbian historical novel, I plan to write a gay one in a new era for me, the mid 1800s America. I may write a sequel to Beloved Pilgrim but I have not decided. I want to get back to my first love, medieval England, and have a paranormal mystery series planned. In the meantime I am playing with writing a book as a blog. People can follow my activities on my web site at www.nanhawthorne.com and also follow me on Facebook. I am there as Nan Hawthorne.

I really appreciate this chance to talk about my book with someone like you with whom I share a passion for looking at history and historical fiction with a fresh, more open vision. If people find our books uncomfortable, so much the better. They will learn and new writers will be braver and more willing to take chances because of writers like you and me.

New Interview + Giveaway of The Tudor Throne

2011-08-25T20:40:00.004-05:00

You can read a new review of The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy) at http://siobianthebookowl.blogspot.com/2011/08/review-tudor-throne-by-brandy-purdy.html

plus a new author interview and also enter to win a signed copy of the book at http://siobianthebookowl.blogspot.com/2011/08/interview-with-brandy-purdy-and.html

Beloved Pilgrim by Nan Hawthorne

2011-08-15T12:30:00.004-05:00

Second Edition of Tabby's Calendar Now Available

2011-08-11T20:45:00.004-05:00

A new edition of Tabby's calendar A Year With Tabby is now available at a new lower price, some of the best of the older photos are still there, including Tabby in her pjamas and French Maid costume, but some new have been added too. You can order a copy for $12.99 at http://www.lulu.com/product/calendar/a-year-with-tabby-the-cat-of-historical-novelist-brandy-purdy/16529056 I'm not a professional photographer (obviously!) this is just a fun project for both of us. I make about 30 cents off each calendar, all of which goes into Tabby's piggy bank for treats and toys.

Rennes Le Chateau The Road To Sion by D. A. Chadwick

2011-07-30T00:20:00.005-05:00

This book has been sitting on my bedside table beckoning to me for months while I struggled to meet the deadline on my next novel. Reading it has been a pleasure long delayed. If you are, like me, fascinated by the story of Rennes-le-Chateau and the secret that made a poor village priest wealthy beyond his dreams in 1887 and still remains shrouded in mystery and hotly debated to this day and enabled him to embark upon a series of bizarre, cryptic, symbolism-laden renovations and building projects at his church, including the figure of a devil supporting a font of holy water, this novel brings something new to the bookshelf. It deftly weaves in a new theory involving some tantalizing mysteries, contradictions, and discrepancies in the life and legend of France's beloved national heroine and saint Joan of Arc. Secret societies like the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, and the Freemasons, conspiracy theories, royal bloodlines leading back to Jesus and Mary Magdalene, ancient aliens, cloning, and alien technology also fill the pages of this fast-paced, fact-packed, history and science laden thriller set in modern-day France.

The history and the mysteries are the jewels in the crown of a plot concerning the woman who would be queen, Sarah Rolande Cabot, as France stands poised to restore the monarchy it overthrew in the blood-drenched days of the French Revolution. And who the rightful claimant of that crown should be is a hotly debated topic snared in a tangled web of history and genealogy that science, with the help of DNA technology, seeks to unravel.

Despite its length, nearly 500 pages, this was a book I hated to put down, it kept calling to me even when I forced myself to lay it aside and do my own work. And Tabby enjoyed it too.

Like many self-published books, it would have benefited by a gloss of editorial polish as well as more careful proofreading as I found several misplaced and missing words and misspellings that posed momentary stumbling blocks throughout the story, but I urge readers not to let a few rocks in the road keep them from embarking on Rennes Le Chateau The Road To Sion.
!!CORRECTION!! I have just learned that I was given an earlier edition of this book, it has since been reformatted and gone through another round of editing, so most likely many of the errors I noticed have already been corrected.

Note: This book was previously published as Rennes Le Chateau The Point of Origin.

Special thanks to author D. A. Chadwick for sending me a copy and waiting patiently and graciously for this review to finally appear.

For more information please visit http://www.dachadwick.com/ There is also a fascinating article about Joan of Arc on her blog at http://dachadwick.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/was-joan-of-arc-a-peasant-girl-the-evidence-says-no/

Great Review of The Tudor Throne

2011-07-29T13:33:00.003-05:00

Heather Domin has written a great review of The Tudor Throne (Mary & Elizabeth) on her blog at http://teacake421.livejournal.com/107884.html Thanks Heather, I am so glad you enjoyed the book.

Winner's Choice Giveaway The Tudor Throne or Mary & Elizabeth paperback + ebook The Confession of Piers Gaveston

2011-07-28T02:11:00.004-05:00

You can enter to win your choice of a new signed paperback copy of The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy or the British edition Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy (same book just different cover art, title, and pen name) and, as a bonus, a coupon for a free ebook of my first novel The Confession of Piers Gaveston. To enter, leave a comment for Tabby (she's the one who always picks the winner) specify the book you want if you win, and include your email address. US residents only (I'm sorry but I cannot ship outside the USA). Contest ends August 10th.

The Cat In The Shoe

2011-07-27T22:44:00.002-05:00

Tabby in her new red shoe playhouse.

Tabby's Dilemma: Help Me, I'm Stuck In A Box And Can't Get Out!

2011-07-21T22:37:00.006-05:00

Tabby: I used to be able to do this when I was a kitten!

Today while I was busy working on the outline for my next novel, I heard Tabby crying and ran to see what was wrong. Tabby insists on inspecting every empty box, large and small, before it is thrown out, and I discovered she had gotten stuck while trying to crawl through an empty Rice Krispy Treats box, a feat she used to be able to accomplish with no difficulty when she was a kitten, and I had to come to the rescue and help her out. Poor Tabby!

Romcon Giveaway -- The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy

2011-07-19T23:23:00.003-05:00

There is still time to enter the giveaway at Romcon for two copies of The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy for details visit Still time to enter Romcon's giveaway for two copies of The Tudor Throne http://www.romconinc.com/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=entry&id=1437

And The Winners Are...

2011-07-14T16:11:00.005-05:00

Congratulations to Kim and Cheryl the winners of Tabby's latest giveaway, your books are on the way, we hope you will enjoy them. Thanks to everyone who entered.

Houdini Cat Cartoon

2011-07-14T16:07:00.004-05:00

Tabby and I thought this was so funny we had to share it, it's from the Wild About Harry blog dedicated to magician and escape artist Harry Houdiniat http://www.wildabouthoudini.com/

50% Off Coupon for The Confession of Piers Gaveston ebook edition

2011-07-11T22:08:00.004-05:00

Here is a 50% off coupon for the Smashwords ebook edition of my first novel The Confession of Piers Gaveston, the regular price of $7.99 is discounted to $4.oo when you enter this coupon code SSW50 during checkout. To order visit http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/4011

It is also available as a trade paperback at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and also for their ebook readers Kindle and Nook.

Romcon Special Sneak Peek Inside The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy)

2011-07-11T21:39:00.004-05:00

Romcon is featuring a special sneak peek excerpt from The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (published in the UK as Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy) and hosting a giveaway for two copies of the book at http://romconinc.com/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=entry&id=1437

Tabby's New Box

2011-06-30T00:51:00.003-05:00

The moment this great big box came in the mail was opened and unpacked of Amazon Subscribe and Save groceries Tabby rushed right inside and made it her own private playhouse. My elderly father wants to throw it away, it is already taking up space alongside Tabby's cat wagon, pirate ship, and two toy boxes, but every time he tries she runs back inside and lays down. It's a battle of wills!

Book Reviews Returning Soon!

2011-06-30T00:38:00.003-05:00

Tabby and I have been busy catching up on our reading and I plan to resume posting book reviews next month. Sorry it took longer than I expected. But the good news is we've read some great books on a variety of subjects that we are looking forward to sharing with you.

Giveaway: Win a Signed Copy of Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy

2011-06-16T20:54:00.004-05:00

Two sisters: united by blood, divided by the crown…

They shared childhood memories and grown-up dreams… Mary was England's precious jewel, the surviving child of the tumultuous relationship between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. However, when Henry fell passionately in love with the dark-eyed Anne Boleyn, he cast his wife and daughter aside.

Henry and Anne's union sees the birth of Elizabeth. Mary is soon declared a bastard, stripped of all royal privileges, performing the lowliest tasks. But, there is something about Elizabeth. And Mary soon grows to love her like a sister. After the passage of three years, and Anne Boleyn's execution, Henry can no longer bear the sight of his female heir. With the birth of a son, Edward, both Mary and Elizabeth seem destined for oblivion.

But as history will show, fate had something far more elaborate in store…

Mary and Elizabeth is an unforgettable story of a powerful love affair that changed the course of history, perfect for fans of The Tudors and Philippa Gregory.

Enter to win a signed copy of the British edition of my novel Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy (The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy in the USA) by leaving a comment, U.S. residents only, please include your contact info. Tabby will pick a winner on June 23rd.

And The Winner Is...

2011-06-10T03:55:00.002-05:00

Congratulations to Deb Root-White who won a signed copy of my upcoming novel The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy by guessing Tabby has 105 toys in the photo, she actually has 104 (believe me I know, I'm the one who has to pick them up). Thanks to everyone who entered. Check back later for another chance to win soon.

RT Book Reviews Gives The Tudor Throne Four Stars

2011-06-08T15:49:00.005-05:00

RT Book Reviews has given my latest novel, The Tudor Throne (Mary & Elizabeth in the UK) four stars, you can read their review at http://www.rtbookreviews.com/book-review/tudor-throne

Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy In Stores Tomorrow

2011-06-08T15:45:00.002-05:00

The UK edition of my latest novel, Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy (published in the USA as The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy) goes on sale tomorrow--June 9th.

New Review of The Confession of Piers Gaveston

2011-06-08T15:37:00.003-05:00

A new review of my first novel The Confession of Piers Gaveston has been posted at http://themusingsofabookjunkie.blogspot.com/2011/06/confessions-of-piers-gaveston-by-brandy.html

Tabby's Busy Week

2011-05-31T21:49:00.006-05:00

While I have been putting finishing touches on my manuscript, getting it ready to go off to the publisher on time, Tabby has also had a busy week.

Tabby Says Hooray! The Book Is Finished; Now I Can Sleep!

2011-05-23T20:57:00.004-05:00

I finished my latest novel, about Amy Robsart Dudley, in the wee hours of Monday morning, though I will be spending the rest of the month editing and polishing the manuscript, Tabby is delighted, now she can catch up on her sleep.

I just received my copies of The Tudor Throne (Mary & Elizabeth) which is due out in June, so don't forget to enter Tabby's Guess & Win Contest while there is still time. Scroll down for details.

Tabby's Guess & Win Contest The Prize is a Signed Copy of The Tudor Throne

2011-05-18T22:43:00.005-05:00

Naughty Tabby isn't going to make it easy this time, to enter this contest you must guess how many toys she has in this picture, whoever guesses the closest will win a signed copy of my upcoming novel The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy. Contest ends June 10th, the winner's book will be shipped just as soon as I receive my copies from the publisher. Just post your guess in the comments and be sure to include contact info. Contest open to U.S. residents only, sorry but I can't ship outside the USA.

Tabby In The Bathtub

2011-05-11T17:27:00.000-05:00

Tabby couldn't wait for me to give her a coconut shampoo so here she is laying in the bathtub bathing herself in the traditional cat way.

With A Little Help From Tabby

2011-04-30T19:14:00.004-05:00

Only one month to go to finish my novel about the love triangle between Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, and his wife Amy Robsart Dudley, luckily Tabby is eager to lend a helping paw.

50% Off Coupon For The Confession of Piers Gaveston

2011-04-30T15:32:00.004-05:00

Here's a 50% off coupon for the ebook edition of my first novel The Confession of Piers Gaveston offered at Smashwords, it expires May 30, 2011, to redeem go to http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/4011 and enter code LC69J

It is also available as a trade paperback at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and also for their ebook readers Kindle and Nook.

In Honor of the Royal Wedding A Sneak Peek from The Tudor Throne (Mary & Elizabeth)

2011-04-28T22:23:00.002-05:00

In honor of the Royal Wedding here is a sneak peek of the preparations for another royal wedding from The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy) told from the viewpoint of Queen Mary I (Bloody Mary) as she awaits the arrival of her Spanish bridegroom, Prince Philip.

Sometimes I thought they were all against me. Though I gave them assurances aplenty that they had nothing to fear from my marriage to Prince Philip, only good could come of it, including the blessing of an heir, but still my people continued to protest, as did the members of my Council.

Even my dear old friend, Reginald Pole, now a great learned and esteemed Cardinal serving His Holiness in Rome. The son of my beloved governess, he had fled abroad to avoid Father’s wrath when he spoke out against his infatuation with The Great Whore and callous treatment of my mother, even he put pen to paper and wrote cruel and stinging words to me. “You will fall into the power and become the slave of your husband,” he warned, “and at your advanced age,” he said with cruel bluntness, “you cannot hope to bear children without peril to your life.” How could he be so mean and hateful? I wept over his letter until my tears broke through the paper.

Even the children were against me! When the weather warmed and the grass was green, dozens of them turned out to play a game they called “Queen and Wyatt.” When I found out that the most popular part of the game was when the Prince of Spain was captured and hanged it made my blood boil. I ordered the little offenders whipped and, despite their youth, sent briefly to prison to teach them a lesson lest they, as they gained in years, turn rebels for real and become an even greater threat to my beloved. I could not bear that the children of my kingdom might grow up harboring thoughts of harming my beloved. Indeed the reports said that so enthusiastically did they play at hanging the Spanish Prince that some of the boys enacting his role had been strangled almost to the point of death. I could not have it! I simply could not have it! They must never play “Queen and Wyatt” again! For weeks I lived in terror that Philip would learn of it and the antics of those beastly children would prevent his coming even after on my knees I assured the Spanish Ambassador that I would lay down my life if need be to keep Philip safe. “I would rather not have been born at all than that any harm should befall His Highness!” I threw myself down and sobbed at Renard’s feet.

But it was even worse, ragged gangs of dirty barefoot street boys gathered outside the Spanish Embassy to pelt any who entered or exited, including dear Ambassador Renard, with rocks and offal, chanting “we’ll have no Spaniard for our King!” and “Spaniards go home!”

And when I heard that even the ladies of the court were protesting my bridegroom’s arrival with the very garments on their backs, favoring gowns the color of sun-bronzed skin and calling the shade “Dead Spaniard,” my heart broke and I could not stop the torrent of weeping it unloosed. I took to my bed, unable to sleep or eat, and the flesh began to melt away from my bones, while the doctors stood over me and shook their heads, at a loss of what to do.

“Only Prince Philip can cure me!” I told them repeatedly, waving aside their leeches and lancets. “He must come to me if I am to live, otherwise I shall most assuredly perish!”

And still Ambassador Renard continued to shake his head, and express his, and the Emperor’s fears for Philip’s safety on English soil and concerns about Elizabeth. She must go the way of Jane to pave the way for my beloved’s safe arrival, but my Council held fast, they would not allow me to condemn her without absolute, indisputable proof of her guilt, she was too popular with the people and they feared they would rise en masse to save her, and the traitor Wyatt had gone to his death swearing from the scaffold that she had played no part in his rebellion. Furthermore, it was unjust to keep an innocent person imprisoned, my Council claimed, and the people claimored night and day for the release of “Our Princess.” That was what they called her “Our Princess,” even from her prison cell Elizabeth was still able to exert the witchlike wiles she had inherited from The Great Whore and turn my people against me.

I wept and felt torn apart inside, I loved Philip so much, and longed for him more than I had ever imagined possible, yet a part of me still remembered the baby sister I had loved and cared for, the little red-haired girl I had held on my lap, dressed, bathed, sung lullabies to, and rocked to sleep, and pretended was my very own child. I had horrible nightmares in which I would see myself guiding that tiny tot by her leading strings up the thirteen steps of the black-draped scaffold and I would start awake with a scream upon my lips, my face bathed in tears, and my heart pounding as if it were about to shoot like cannonball out of my heaving breast. I just could not do it; I could not sign her death warrant. Finally, after one such dream, in which I stood calmly by as that dainty red-haired tot knelt in the straw staring defiantly, despite the fearful quiver of her chin, at the scarred wooden block while the tall menacing figure of the headsman in his black hood towered over her with his axe held high, I bolted from my bed, ran to my desk, and ripped the death warrant into shreds.
At last, fearing for my life, the Emperor gave in, and Ambassador Renard came to my bedside to deliver the happy news that Philip was preparing to depart. But, as a precaution against poison, he stipulated, he would be bringing his own cooks, apothecaries, and physicians.

It was as if God Himself had laid hands on me to effect my cure. The moment I heard those words I was cured. Heedless of the immodesty of appearing before the Imperial Ambassador in my nightgown and bare feet, with my graying and faded hair hanging down my back in a long, limp and bedraggled braid, I sprang from my bed. I laughed from sheer joy and leapt and clapped my bare heels together in the air. I grabbed my startled doctors and Susan and Jane by their hands and danced round in circles with them, ignoring the physicians’ warnings about my pulse and heart, then, laughing, I broke free, leaving them staggering dizzy and startled, amazed at my behavior and sudden, miraculous recovery, and began to rush about, hither and yon, summoning servants and palace officials, issuing orders to prepare for my bridegroom’s arrival. Everything must be perfect! There was so much to do and so little time!

I ordered that beneath every canopy of estate in every palace a second throne must be erected beside mine. And I began to name courtiers to serve in his household, there must be 350, and not one less, and they must all be made to swear an oath of loyalty and allegiance to My Prince; the Earl of Arundel should have the honor of presiding over them all as Lord High Steward. And I must send a deputation of noblemen to Spain to escort him, and a fleet of ships to patrol the coast to alert us when his ship was in sight and to shepherd it safety into the harbor. A hundred-gun salute must be fired the moment his ship was sighted. I wanted it to feel as if the very earth shook the way my knees did at the thought of him. The Earl of Arundel himself must row out on a golden barge to greet him and kneel at My Prince’s feet and fasten a specially made Order of the Garter, encrusted with diamonds, rubies, and pearls, about his calf, then invite him to partake of a fine banquet on the barge and, standing proxy for me, drink a loving cup with him. Welcoming speeches, songs, and poems in his honor must be composed, and a children’s choir assembled to greet him with their angelic voices on the docks of Southampton. And he must have guards to keep him safe; with this in mind, I began to select the best men from my personal guard, skilled archers who were also adept in foreign tongues so language would pose no barrier, men who could be counted on to keep my beloved safe. And a splendid horse must be procured as a gift for him, a mount fit for a prince, it should be white as snow and caparisoned in crimson velvet embroidered with golden thistles, with rubies sparkling on its reins, and Philip should have a pair of golden spurs set with rubies; the goldsmith should see to it without delay. Sir Anthony Browne should lead the horse to Philip when he disembarked, so that he would not have to suffer the indignity of walking through the crowd of slack-jawed, craning-necked people who would no doubt gather to catch a glimpse of him. I would not have my beloved being stared at like a freak in a country fair! So Sir Anthony would gently boost my beloved into the saddle then kneel and humbly, reverently, as if it were a holy relic, kiss his stirrup and inform him that he did so in proxy for me. Then he must kiss Philip’s hand and place upon his finger a magnificent diamond ring set in a golden nest of acanthus leaves and pin a brooch crafted like a great golden lovers’ knot upon his shoulder, explaining that both were love-tokens from me. Only then he would take the ruby-studded bridle in his hand and lead my beloved in stately progress through the streets of Southampton to the Church of the Holy Rood for a mass of thanksgiving for his safe arrival then on to the Lord Mayor’s palace where he was to lodge. His rooms there should be hung with tapestries depicting the might and majesty of the Tudor dynasty and my Spanish forebears, the great Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella. And he must be presented with the keys to the city of course, the Lord Mayor, decked out in his ceremonial robes should meet him before he formally entered the city.

I gave orders for the best tailors in London to craft splendid garments to adorn my beloved, and for the decoration of his rooms, fine tapestries and beautifully carved and gilded furnishings, and for the adornment of his private chapel, there must be jeweled crucifixes, statutes and stained glass, golden chalices and candlesticks, and the altar cloth that I had been embroidering ever since I had agreed to take him as my husband. He must have fresh flowers every hour, and a deep crimson velvet canopy, curtains, and coverlet, and silken sheets, all embroidered in gold with lovers’ knots and our lovingly entwined initials, for his bed. And there was the wedding to plan, the ceremony, there must be incense and thousands of tall white candles of perfumed wax, and the walls lined with shimmering sheets of cloth-of-gold in which the dancing candle flames would be reflected. And the wedding banquet! There must be wondrous subtleties sculpted out of sugar and marzipan so elaborate they would make the guests gasp in awe.

And my gown! What had I been thinking all these months, the dawning horror of it nearly felled me. I stood there in the center of the room swaying with both my hands raised to clasp my head. All these months I had lavished so much thought upon my bridegroom but not given a single thought to my wedding gown! I must have the dressmakers in immediately! I must look my best for him! I must, even if it was for only one day in my life, be beautiful! I must have creams and lotions for my skin, to ease the lines of worry from my brow and about my mouth and eyes, and to soften my hands and make my nails shine. And my hair! Surely there were special washes that would make it shine with a newfound luster to match the glow of happiness within me, and perhaps even give the illusion of thickness? I would entrust this to my faithful Susan; I knew she would not fail me; she would want me to look as beautiful as I was happy on my wedding day.

And amidst all this planning every few moments I ran back to Ambassador Renard to embrace him and clasp and kiss his hands in humble gratitude, thanking him again and again for making my dreams come true. “My friend, I shall forever bless you!” I promised, hugging him again. “You shall be the godfather of our first child!”

Weeping with joy, I took him by the hand and led him into my private chapel adjoining my bedchamber, where the Holy Scriptures lay upon the candlelit altar, and lay my hand upon it and promised him that something would indeed be done about Elizabeth. I would send her away, under strict and stringent guard; she would be kept under house arrest, deep in the country, somewhere remote where she could work no mischief and well beyond the reach of those who would work it on her behalf. Every move she made, every breath she took would be observed, every word she spoke would be written down, she would see no one alone and be allowed to neither write nor receive letters, and if even the barest hint of suspicion brushed against her again she would be brought to trial for treason and I would not hesitate to condemn her to ensure the happiness and well-being of my beloved. I would bury Elizabeth alive in the country, I vowed, and do my best to forget about her and pray that everyone else would as well.

I ran out into the gallery, heedless of the shock my appearance would cause, running through the corridors in my flapping white nightgown and bare feet. I stopped short, panting, before my sister’s portrait. Leveling an accusing finger at her likeness I said in a loud and commanding voice, “That comes down!” And I stood and watched until my orders were obeyed and Elizabeth, in her bare-shouldered harlot-scarlet gown and pease-porridge and gold kirtle, was carted away to the attic.

And then, I seemed to awake from a beautiful dream and find myself kneeling at the candlelit altar in the royal chapel at Whitehall in a golden gown with my hair, like a bride’s, unbound, crowned with a wreath of gilded rosemary.

With my hand upon the Holy Scriptures, I swore a solemn oath before my assembled court.

“I call upon God and all of you to witness that I am marrying Prince Philip not out of any carnal affection or desire…” I stiffened my back and ignored the titters and whispers these words provoked. “…nor for any motive whatsoever but the honor and prosperity of the realm. I call upon all those present to pray that God will give me the grace to accomplish this marriage, and that He will look upon this union with favor.”

With a smile of pure delight, Ambassador Renard, stepped forward, to stand proxy for Philip, and placed upon that most special finger of my left hand, the one with the vein leading directly to my heart, a rose diamond set in a nest of golden petals from Philip that was especially dear as it had belonged to my beloved’s own mother and had in fact been her own betrothal ring. The moment it slid onto my finger our marriage was considered binding.

Smiling jubilantly, I looked out into the sea of faces and vowed, “I will wholly love and obey His Highness, my husband”—oh how I savored those two words upon my tongue!—“Prince Philip, to whom I have given my heart, and myself, following the divine commandments, and I will do nothing against his will.”

I pointedly ignored the stir of unrest these last words caused, for I knew that many needlessly feared that Philip would interfere with the governing of the realm. I wish I could have gone to each and every one of my subjects who felt this fear and taken their hands in mine, looked into their eyes, and assured them that they had nothing to fear, and urge them to smile and be happy for me. But I doubted that even such warm reassurances would dissuade them, they were all determined to believe the worst of my beloved, the prince of my dreams. So I ignored them and held my head up high, walking boldly and confidently towards the fulfillment of all my desires and dreams.

As I left the chapel, a double row of two dozen little girls in angelic white dresses, with shimmering silver lace angel wings on their backs and halos on their innocent fair heads, showered me with red and white rose petals, while a choir of little boys sang. As I walked through that rain of fragrant petals I felt like a young girl again. I felt like dancing. I wanted to swirl and spin and show the whole world my betrothal ring and shout out so everyone could hear me “I am a married woman! Praise God, I am a spinster no longer!” I felt like doing it, so I did; that is one of the advantages of being a queen and that day I felt like I was Queen of the World! The only thing lacking was my bridegroom, had he been there to run through that fragrant shower of rose petals and dance with me my happiness would have been complete.

A Highly Unusual Royal Wedding from The Confession of Piers Gaveston

2011-04-28T21:58:00.006-05:00

In honor of the Royal Wedding, here is a rather unconventional royal wedding from my first novel, The Confession of Piers Gaveston. I hope you will enjoy it.

Compact of Brotherhood

Shortly after we became lovers, Edward decided that we should be wed.

I greeted this solemn pronouncement with raised eyebrows. “Surely it cannot have escaped Your Grace’s attention that we are both men?”

Ever impractical, Edward decided we would not let this stop us.

And soon we were standing before the tapestry of a unicorn being captured by a virgin, in the room adjoining Edward’s bedchamber, being joined in holy wedlock, or “a compact of brotherhood” as Edward would ever afterwards describe it. Edward was solemn and joyful in celestial blue and rose silk, babbling on about the sacredness of the occasion, while I, in spring green and scarlet satin, was trying very hard not to laugh.

The ceremony was performed by a fat monk with greedy fingers, eager for the bulging purse of gold Edward offered him. I believe Edward found the fellow in a tavern, the redness of his nose, slurred speech, and weaving walk seemed to indicate a fondness for strong drink, indeed I smelled it upon his breath as he hiccoughed his way through the service.

As he slipped the ring—set with the biggest ruby I had ever seen—upon my finger, where it remains to this day, Edward said: “Before the eyes of the world, let it be known that I adopt you, Piers Gaveston, my beloved Perrot, as my brother. But in truth, before the eyes of God, we are as surely and truly bound as husband and wife. I hereby take and acknowledge you as my own, tonight, tomorrow, always and forever, and beyond life itself.”

As I told Edward at the time, letting it be known will not make it be believed.

Afterwards, when we were alone together in Edward’s enormous bed, I lay idly twisting my hand, watching my ruby sparkle and flash in the candlelight.

“Verily, it looks just like a candied cherry!” I exclaimed. And Edward explained that it was indeed known as “La Cerise” or “The Cherry” because of this resemblance.

And then he raised his head from my chest and, with a besotted smile, asked: “Do you love me?”

“Yes,” I, in all sincerity, answered, and then I turned the question back on him. “Do you love me?”

“How could anyone not love you?” he demanded, sitting up and shaking back his love-tousled hair. “You are the living God of Beauty, you are perfection personified, your every gesture gives new meaning to the word grace…”

He said much more, but at that point I stopped listening. There was that sinking feeling in my stomach again!

“Edward,” I interrupted his rapturous recitation of my charms, “how much did you say this ruby is worth?”

“£1,000 my love!” he answered proudly.

I nodded and forced a smile. We must all learn to live with our disappointments.

Also available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook

New Facebook Page for Brandy Purdy - Emily Purdy

2011-04-28T18:20:00.002-05:00

I have a new Facebook page combining both my names it's called Brandy Purdy - Emily Purdy at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brandy-Purdy-Emily-Purdy/168439023213695

Release Date Moved Up For Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy + Some More News from the UK

2011-04-27T23:55:00.009-05:00

I've just learned that the British edition of my novel Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy (The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy in the USA) will be released a little earlier than originally announced, on June 9th instead of the previously stated June 16th. The release date for the US edition remains the same--June 28th.

My UK publisher Harper/Avon has also just acquired the rights to my next two historical novels.

Happy Easter! Tabby's Easter Dress

2011-04-21T18:43:00.005-05:00

Interview about The Tudor Throne (Mary & Elizabeth)

2011-04-15T20:42:00.002-05:00

I recently did an interview with Allison for her blog Musings of a Book Junkie, you can read it at: http://themusingsofabookjunkie.blogspot.com/2011/04/interview-with-brandy-purdy-author-of.html

Tabby and My Birthday Cake

2011-04-05T14:58:00.005-05:00

Tabby helped me celebrate my 36th birthday today.

Early Review of The Tudor Throne (Mary & Elizabeth)

2011-03-30T19:17:00.004-05:00

Special thanks to Allison for posting a review of The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy in the UK) on her blog, The Musings of a Book Junkie. You can read it at http://themusingsofabookjunkie.blogspot.com/2011/03/tudor-throne.html

Announcement: Temporary Hiatus

2011-03-28T15:24:00.008-05:00

Dear Readers,

I am sorry to announce that I have found it necessary to take a temporary hiatus from reviewing books on this blog. I have a deadline looming ahead, I have an obligation to deliver my next novel to the publisher in June, and due to a combination of personal and health reasons I have fallen behind, so I simply do not have the time to read for my personal pleasure right now, which provides most of the content for this blog, or to write reviews. But Tabby and I will be back in a couple of months, in time for the release of The Tudor Throne (Mary & Elizabeth in the UK), so please don't forget about us.

To any authors who have sent me a book to review: I do apologize for the delay, but don't worry, I have not forgotten about you, all books submitted for review are at the top of my "To Read" stack, they will be the first ones I read when I am able to curl up with a good book again.

Thank you for understanding.

Sincerely,

Brandy/Emily Purdy

The Director's Cut A Theda Bara Mystery by Christopher DiGrazia

2011-03-13T00:37:00.000-06:00

Toby Swanson, a pioneer in the newborn field of movie makeup, just wants a job when he is hired by the Fox Film Corporation to emphasize the allure of their latest star, Theda Bara, instead he ends up joining forces with her to solve a murder.

The year is 1914, and though it hasn't even started filming yet, "A Fool There Was" is already the hot topic, predicted to be the movie sensation of the year. Leading the cast is the movies' first true sex symbol, Theda Bara, the dark eyed and haired, pale skinned, femme-fatale, known as "The Vamp" who devours men's souls and drains their virility and bank accounts. But after a series of deaths and other calamities, Fox decides to call the whole thing off, and Theda's big chance at stardom and immortality is dashed, unless...

"The Vamp" who is actually a nice, down to earth (except for her belief in Tarot Cards and Reincarnation) Jewish girl from Cincinnati named Theodosia Goodman, "Theo" to her friends, asks her smitten makeup artist to help her save her movie. And together, aided by fellow cast members, May Allison and Edward Jose, the quest for the truth takes them everywhere from movie sets to fashionable New York nightspots, a bank in Baltimore, and down into an underground church crypt where the scions of a once illustrious family are buried, and into abandoned subway tunnels. With cameos from Harry Houdini, Rudolph Valentino before Hollywood beckoned, and songstress Sophie Tucker,

The Director's Cut is a fast-paced and fun tale of murder, mayhem, and the early days of moviemaking. Mr. DiGrazia perfectly captures the sights and sounds of the era, with authentic slang and cultural references, and a bow to the morality of the day when it comes to the risque. He deserves a big round of applause for his first Theda Bara mystery and I can't wait for him to roll out the red carpet and present the next one.

To learn more please visit his website www.kissmemyfool.com

You can order the book at Amazon and also the dvd of the movie that plays a prominent part in its pages, "A Fool There Was" in which Theda Bara "uttered" (it's a silent film so actually the title card said it for her) the immortal line "Kiss Me, My Fool!"

And The Winner Is...

2011-03-08T14:26:00.007-06:00

Tabby decided to be generous and picked two paper balls out of the cup, so we have two winners--Carol and Grams! I have emailed both to get their addresses and will be shipping their books out asap. Thanks so much to everyone who entered.
THE TUDOR THRONE Bound by blood, torn by devotion... In the wake of King Henry VIII's death, England's throne is left in a precarious state-as is the peculiar relationship between his two daughters. Mary, the elder, once treasured, had been declared a bastard in favor of her flame-haired half-sister, Elizabeth, born of the doomed Anne Boleyn. Yet the bond between the sisters was palpable from the start. Now reinstated, Mary eventually assumes her place as queen. But as Mary's religious zeal evolves into a reign of terror, young Elizabeth gains the people's favor. Gripped by a tormenting paranoia, Mary is soon convinced that her beloved Elizabeth is in fact her worst enemy. And the virginal Elizabeth, whose true love is her country, must defy her tyrannical sister to make way for a new era... A brilliant portrait of the rule of "Bloody Mary" and her intricate relationship with Elizabeth I, the adored "Virgin Queen," here is a riveting tale of one family's sordid and extraordinary chapter in the pages of history. Please note this book is published in the UK as MARY & ELIZABETH under my British pen name Emily Purdy.

Still Time To Enter To Win An Advance Copy of The Tudor Throne

2011-03-06T16:45:00.000-06:00

There's still time to enter! Tabby will be picking a winner late Monday night, March 7th.

To enter to win a signed ARC of The Tudor Throne please leave a comment and include your contact info. You must be located in the USA as I cannot ship internationally. Winner will be chosen randomly on March 7th by my cat Tabby.

THE TUDOR THRONE

Bound by blood, torn by devotion...

In the wake of King Henry VIII's death, England's throne is left in a precarious state-as is the peculiar relationship between his two daughters. Mary, the elder, once treasured, had been declared a bastard in favor of her flame-haired half-sister, Elizabeth, born of the doomed Anne Boleyn. Yet the bond between the sisters was palpable from the start. Now reinstated, Mary eventually assumes her place as queen. But as Mary's religious zeal evolves into a reign of terror, young Elizabeth gains the people's favor. Gripped by a tormenting paranoia, Mary is soon convinced that her beloved Elizabeth is in fact her worst enemy. And the virginal Elizabeth, whose true love is her country, must defy her tyrannical sister to make way for a new era...

A brilliant portrait of the rule of "Bloody Mary" and her intricate relationship with Elizabeth I, the adored "Virgin Queen," here is a riveting tale of one family's sordid and extraordinary chapter in the pages of history.

Please note this book is published in the UK as MARY & ELIZABETH under my British pen name Emily Purdy.

Brandy Purdy's Book Reviews and News Blog

Black Mahler The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story by Charles Elford

The Favored Queen A Novel of Henry VIII's Third Wife by Carolly Erickson

Oblivion The Mystery of West Point Cadet Richard Cox by Harry J. Maihafer

The Condition by Jennifer Haigh

Tabby's Christmas Pictures

The Debutante by Kathleen Tessaro

Merry Christmas!

New Review of The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy

Faith by Jennifer Haigh

Interview About The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy / A Court Affair by Emily Purdy

Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult

Barnes & Noble Now Accepting Pre-Orders for The Queen's Pleasure

A Court Affair by Emily Purdy Back Cover Copy

The Red Thread by Ann Hood

Lost In The Forest by Sue Miller

First Blooms on my Christmas Cactus

Hurricane by Jewell Parker Rhodes

fathermothergod My Journey Out of Christian Science by Lucia Greenhouse

Happy Thanksgiving! Tabby & A Turkey

The Fasting Girl A True Victorian Medical Mystery by Michelle Stacey

O Happy Cat! Tabby Has A New Bunny!

The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel

Better Image of The Queen's Pleasure Cover Art

Now Available For Pre-Order at Amazon: The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy

The Smallest Of All Persons Mentioned In The Records Of Littleness by Gaby Wood

Linger Awhile by Russell Hoban

Tabby's Guess & Win Contest - The Answer & The Winner

First Look at The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy

The Man Who Killed Houdini An Investigation by Don Bell

Happy Halloween!

Clueless In New England The Unsolved Disappearances of Paula Welden, Connie Smith and Katherine Hull by Michael G. Dooling

Immanuel's Veins by Ted Dekker

Update: The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy / A Court Affair by Emily Purdy

Tabby's Guess & Win Halloween Costume Contest

The White Devil by Justin Evans

Tabby's Getting Ready For Halloween!

Coming in July 2012! The Queen's Pleasure by Brandy Purdy The Story of Amy Robsart

Salvation On Sand Mountain Snake Handling and Redemption In Southern Appalachia by Dennis Covington

Mad Madame Lalaurie New Orleans' Most Famous Murderess Revealed by Victoria Cosner Love and Lorelei Shannon

The King of America by Samantha Gillison

Smouldering Fires by Anya Seton

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TABBY! She's Four Years Old!

Lost by Jacqueline Davies

Tabby Says: Time To Get Back To Work!

Tabby: A Ducky And A New Dress

Review & Giveaway of The Tudor Throne at Historically Obsessed

The Accident by Linwood Barclay

Sappho's Leap by Erica Jong

Interview and Review: Beloved Pilgrim by Nan Hawthorne

New Interview + Giveaway of The Tudor Throne

Beloved Pilgrim by Nan Hawthorne

Second Edition of Tabby's Calendar Now Available

Rennes Le Chateau The Road To Sion by D. A. Chadwick

Great Review of The Tudor Throne

Winner's Choice Giveaway The Tudor Throne or Mary & Elizabeth paperback + ebook The Confession of Piers Gaveston

The Cat In The Shoe

Tabby's Dilemma: Help Me, I'm Stuck In A Box And Can't Get Out!

Romcon Giveaway -- The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy

And The Winners Are...

Houdini Cat Cartoon

50% Off Coupon for The Confession of Piers Gaveston ebook edition

Romcon Special Sneak Peek Inside The Tudor Throne by Brandy Purdy (Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy)

Tabby's New Box

Book Reviews Returning Soon!

Leave A Comment For Tabby To Win The Tudor Throne or Mary & Elizabeth

Giveaway: Win a Signed Copy of Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy

And The Winner Is...

RT Book Reviews Gives The Tudor Throne Four Stars

Mary & Elizabeth by Emily Purdy In Stores Tomorrow

New Review of The Confession of Piers Gaveston

Tabby's Busy Week

Tabby Says Hooray! The Book Is Finished; Now I Can Sleep!

Tabby's Guess & Win Contest The Prize is a Signed Copy of The Tudor Throne

Tabby In The Bathtub

With A Little Help From Tabby

50% Off Coupon For The Confession of Piers Gaveston

In Honor of the Royal Wedding A Sneak Peek from The Tudor Throne (Mary & Elizabeth)

A Highly Unusual Royal Wedding from The Confession of Piers Gaveston

New Facebook Page for Brandy Purdy - Emily Purdy