Focused on a career in medicine and not on romance, Willa Duvall is thrown slightly off course during the summer of 1859 when she discovers a never-opened love letter in a crack of her old writing desk. Compelled to find the passionate soul who penned it and the person who never received it, she takes a job as a nurse at the seaside estate of Crestwicke Manor.
Everyone at Crestwicke has feelings—mostly negative ones—about the man who wrote the letter, but he seems to have disappeared. With plenty of enticing clues but few answers, Willa’s search becomes even more complicated when she misplaces the letter and it passes from person to person in the house, each finding a thrilling or disheartening message in its words.
Laced with mysteries large and small, this romantic Victorian-era tale of love lost, love deferred, and love found is sure to delight.
Storytelling – for better or for worse
Guest Post by Joanna Davidson Politano
When I was a kid, I wrote stories, and they got me in trouble. Storytelling has always been the way I’ve dealt with life, especially when I was the quiet kid in early grade-school years. I wrote kids in my class into the stories—specifically, the ones picked on by bullies—and made real superheroes out of them. They all had these amazing hidden talents (which often was true in real life too) and the bullies who made fun of them—well, their characters didn’t fare well. I made sure of it. I had a blast writing up these larger-than-life scenarios, and they were incredibly fun.
Until they were found. I’ll never forget the pure torture of knowing they were circulating around the classroom one day. No one had any idea who’d written them (I’d left them behind on the reading rug in the rush to get to lunch), and I was dying inside waiting for them to figure it out.
That’s the tension I brought to The Love Note as I began writing. What is this? Where did it come from? A potent love letter turns up in the midst of a turbulent family, and several people—from maids to newlywed mistresses—encounter the touching words and believe it’s for them. The heroine knows it’s an old letter found in a family desk, and she’s anxious to trace the story of lost lovers and reunite them with the letter that was never delivered—but it happens to be delivered to a few wrong people by accident before it reaches its final destination.
Just like my grade-school classroom, which encountered a subtle shift after the stories leaked, the letter impacts the house as a whole, a catalyst sweeping through all the broken, disastrous relationships and shaking them up. The letter does eventually find its way home, but not before shifting most relationships in the house—for better or worse.
I learned as a second grader that my words, when put together the right way, carried huge weight. Even though I was a quiet kid, my stories could carve their way into places that no lecture or argument could go and actually change someone’s mind. I loved bringing that shift to Crestwicke in my novel, too, and the many broken love stories there. Words have impacts we cannot imagine. Like a knife, they either perform surgery that leads to healing or cut a new wound.
The characters eventually do find out who wrote the letter—and who it was written for—but by then the story had grown so much larger that they almost couldn’t be mad at the trouble it had caused or the person behind it all. The kids in my class didn’t care who wrote the stories in the end, either. I don’t think most of them ever knew. They were mostly interested in how their character came out on the page, and if they were villain or hero. I still can’t believe my silly wide-ruled sheets of paper unsettled that classroom the way they did, but the words meant something, and, even as fiction, they communicated a great deal of truth about how things in that classroom were.
I think I was hooked on writing back then, and even more so when I grew older and found many books that impacted me. So now I still write, still harness words, and sometimes—when I make friends into characters—I still get myself into trouble.
Card + Pack of 50 Love Notes Cards.
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10/27/20 |
Book Trailer |
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10/27/20 |
Review |
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10/28/20 |
Character Interview |
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10/29/20 |
Review |
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10/30/20 |
Top Five |
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10/30/20 |
Review |
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10/31/20 |
Excerpt 1 |
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11/1/20 |
Excerpt 2 |
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11/2/20 |
Author Interview |
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11/2/20 |
Review |
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11/3/20 |
Guest Post |
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11/4/20 |
Top Eight List |
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11/4/20 |
Review |
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11/5/20 |
Review |
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11/5/20 |
Review |
