Hallo, Hallo dear hearts!
As you might already be aware of – due to recent global events, my fellow book bloggers and I are adjusting to our new normal too for book blogging. You’ll be seeing a lot of different interviews and guest features populating my blog off/on for the next while as a lot of the tours I wanted to participate on for reviews were shifted over to guest features due to the current crisis and the inability to get print copies out to reviewers and book bloggers.
I don’t mind – as I love hosting wicked good convos on Jorie Loves A Story! Plus, it gives me a chance to come up with some interesting questions to ask the authors and to root out some takeaways from their writings that I might not have otherwise thought to ask if I didn’t have the chance to think about their story’s premise without having a tangible copy in hand. Sometimes these conversations get quite insightful as I intuit out what I want to ask of the author.
In the conversation I was assembling for this author in particular, I was happily distracted by the fact we share so much in common – we have a lot of mutual interests you’ll see throughout the conversation whilst I enjoyed getting a bit hugged closer to how she’s built this world within the framework of the novel! She also disclosed a rather telling truth about ancestral research and the writerly process – how you can hold your ancestors closer to you if you seek to tell a story which they first inspired to be told. It is a crucial part of our human condition isn’t it? To find ways to draw agency out of our heritage and to find a way to augment the past into the present?
Of course it also gives new meaning to ‘living histories’ – as the stories are generally told aloud and passed down. However, if you ficitionalise your ancestral past you have a wicked good way of showcasing your ancestors but in a cleverly spun approach of having their lives inspire new lives in the lifestyles of your own characters! I truly enjoyed reading the responses to this interview and hope the joy of it inspires my readers, too.
Brew yourself a cuppa and hug close to the convo!
Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree
by Lillah Lawson
It’s an unusually warm autumn, 1929, and O.T. Lawrence is about as content as a cotton farmer can be in Five Forks, Georgia. Nothing—not poverty, drought, or even the boll weevi—can spoil the idyllic life he shares with his doting wife and children and his beloved twin brother Walt. Until illness and Black Tuesday take everything O.T. ever held dear in one fell swoop.
Grieving, drinking, and careening toward homelessness, O.T. is on the brink of ending it all when he receives an odd letter from a teenage acquaintance, the enigmatic Sivvy Hargrove, who is locked away in Milledgeville’s asylum for the insane. Traveling through desperate antebellum towns, O.T. and his daughter Ginny are determined to find Sivvy and discover her story.
Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree is a love story to Georgia and the spirit of its people—a story of family, unconditional love, poverty, injustice, and finding the strength inside to keep on going when all is lost.
Places to find the book:
ISBN: 9781947548282
Published by Regal House Publishing
on 20th September, 2019
Published by: Regal House Publishing
Converse via: #SouthernFiction, #HistFic OR #HistoricalFiction
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