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Adriana Kraft

Adriana Kraft

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Golden Years and Silver Linings ~ My Review #LesbianRomance #LaterInLife #Review #FiveStars @IHeartLesFic

December 28, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

For starters – a golf course in Palm Springs? Count me in! Mr. Kraft and I get to Palm Springs at least once a year, and our son and his partner join us from L.A. (where we absolutely refuse to drive any longer). We’ve taken in the marvelous Judy Show at the Purple Room, gone Tiki Bar hopping (the Reef is a favorite), hiked the stunning Andreas Canyon trail with its native palm trees and clear creek waters, explored the Art museum, taken the aerial tram and hiked at the top, toured modernism houses, and sampled more restaurants than are probably good for us.

Palm Springs may have been a reason I picked up this book and kept reading upon first opening it, but there is so much more.

BOOK INFORMATION

Golden Years and Silver Linings: A Lesbian Romance
by Linda M. Ford (Author), Patricia Grayhall (Author)
ASIN: ‎B0CFSG8X9V
Publisher: Rain City Press
Publication date: ‎August 14, 2023
Print length: 283 pages
Genres: Lesbian Fiction, Lesbian Romance, Women’s Divorce Fiction

MY REVIEW:

This book is a breath of fresh air for all of us over sixty. I could not put it down. Having lived through the Women’s Lib of the 60s and Consciousness Raising of the 70s, I was impressed with the realistic portrayal of that era – and chagrined yet again over how long it took for our culture to move from there to inclusiveness and acceptance for the LGBTQ community (a battle we are obviously still fighting).

If I had to identify two main themes that stood out to me, they would be fidelity and authenticity. Now in their late sixties, the two main characters first fell in love with each other in their early twenties, in 1972. By then Christina already identified as lesbian, but Robyn Elizabeth had never considered that there might be any other option than to fall in love with a man. I appreciated the authors’ authentic description of her inner struggle to accept her feelings and finally act on them in that era. In 2023, readers who are younger may write off Robyn Elizabeth as an undeserving wimp when she ultimately turns tail and runs, abandoning Christina. I fully understood her.

The dual timeline novel gives us a window into their 1972 experience, then drops us into a chance meeting 46 years later, in 2018, on a golf course in Palm Springs. As a sidebar, I love Palm Springs and thoroughly enjoyed it vicariously through the characters’ eyes.

Christina’s wife has died of cancer, in 2016, and Robyn Elizabeth is in a stable 40+ year marriage that is relatively comfortable but lacking passion. We are allowed to experience the inner world of both characters as they journey toward what many might think an impossibility – a late-in-life happy ending.

Christina is deeply afraid of being hurt again, as she was by the abrupt break-up in 1972. Robyn Elizabeth must once more examine her feelings and become faithful – not to a marriage that is already broken, but to her authentic self. Even knowing that all romance novels have a happy outcome, I was pulled into their experience and found myself struggling to envision how it all could ever work out. And that is what kept the pages turning.

BUY LINK:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CFSG8X9V/

Available On Kindle Unlimited

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog, LGBT Tagged With: Five Stars, Lesbian Fiction, lesbian romance, review, Women's Divorce Fiction

On Tour: The King’s Command, by Rosemary Hayes @HayesRosemary #BookReview #HistoricalFiction #Huguenots #LouisXIV #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

October 5, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

Book Information 

Book Title: The King’s Command: For God or Country
Author: Rosemary Hayes
Publication Date: July 3rd, 2023
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Page Length: 415
Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb:

Sixteen-year-old Lidie Brunier has everything; looks, wealth, health and a charming suitor, but there are dark clouds on the horizon. Lidie and her family are committed Huguenots, and Louis XIV has sworn to stamp out this ‘false religion’ and make France a wholly Catholic country. Gradually Lidie’s comfortable life starts to disintegrate as Huguenots are stripped of all rights and the King sends his brutal soldiers into their homes to force them to become Catholics. Others around her break under pressure, but Lidie and her family refuse to convert. With spies everywhere and the ever-present threat of violence, they struggle on. Then a shocking betrayal forces Lidie’s hand and her only option is to try and flee the country, a decision that brings unimaginable hardship, terror and tragedy and changes her life forever.

“One of the very best historical novels I have ever read.” Sandra Robinson, Huguenot Ancestry Expert

Buy Links: 

This title is available to read with #KindleUnlimited.
Universal Link: https://books2read.com/u/bW6zGG
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CB4RH68S
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Command-God-Country-ebook/dp/B0CB4RH68S/
Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/Kings-Command-God-Country-ebook/dp/B0CB4RH68S/
Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/Kings-Command-God-Country-ebook/dp/B0CB4RH68S/

Review

Do you have French Huguenot ancestors? If so, have any stories come down to you about their experience – what they endured, why they chose the risk of leaving France, how they decided to come to the country where they eventually settled? My answer to the first question is yes, but the scant information that was passed down through family stories and recorded over a century ago turns out to contain many errors. I blogged about my own Huguenot history yesterday and hope you will take a peek at it: https://wp.me/p9O7pv-3sP

In The King’s Command, author Rosemary Hayes has brought us a thoroughly researched and detailed account of life for one Huguenot family in southwestern France. Her story opens in 1680, some five years before King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and required all protestants to convert to Catholicism: “One king, one country, one religion.” That the family are her direct ancestors and she has been able to visit the French town where they lived has added greatly to the richness and veracity of her fictionalized account.

I especially appreciated the author’s careful parsing of each step of the transition from respected freely worshipping tradesmen and professionals to a persecuted minority with no rights to property, profession, freedom of religion, or even life itself that took place in France over the decade of the 1680s and beyond.

The persecution and exodus were not a single event, although the crisis peaked in 1685. By opening her novel five years earlier, the author has succeeded in conveying  not only the gradual escalation of attacks and curtailment of rights that preceded the revocation, but also how news traveled, how families learned what was happening to others like them, how they first attempted to protect themselves and their assets, and how they began to consider whether to stay or flee. The peril and travails of her family in their escape is a story shared by thousands, many of whom did not make it.

The novel is well written, engaging, and rich with accurate historical detail. I found it easy to imagine my own ancestors, likely in a different region of France, gradually learning and observing those same changes and weighing their options as the depredations and dangers increased and came closer to home. A highly recommended read.  Adriana Kraft

About Rosemary Hayes:

Rosemary Hayes has written over fifty books for children and young adults. She writes  in different genres, from edgy teenage fiction (The Mark), historical fiction (The Blue Eyed Aborigine and Forgotten Footprints), middle grade fantasy (Loose Connections, The Stonekeeper’s Child and Break Out)  to chapter books for early readers and texts for picture books. Many of her books have won or been shortlisted for awards and several have been translated into different languages.

Rosemary has travelled widely but now lives in South Cambridgeshire. She has a background in publishing, having worked for Cambridge University Press before setting up her own company Anglia Young Books which she ran for some years. She has been a reader for a well-known authors’ advisory service and runs creative writing workshops for both children and adults.

Rosemary has recently turned her hand to adult fiction and her historical novel ‘The King’s Command’ is about the terror and tragedy suffered by the French Huguenots during the reign of Louis XIV.

Author Links:

Website: https://www.rosemaryhayes.co.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HayesRosemary

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rosemary-Hayes/e/B00NAPAPZC

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/80106.Rosemary_Hayes

Tour Schedule Page:  https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2023/08/blog-tour-the-kings-command-by-rosemary-hayes.html

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog, Excerpts, Guest Bloggers Tagged With: Book Review, French Huguenots, Historical Fiction, Huguenots, review

Huguenot Ancestry and a New Historical Novel #HistoricalFiction #FrenchHuguenots #MyStory #MFRWAuthors @HayesRosemary

October 4, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

Tomorrow, I will host and review The King’s Command by Rosemary Hayes, a lovely new historical fiction novel. Her story traces the experience of her French Protestant ancestors in the late 1600s, during the period of King Louis XIV’s persecution and his revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Reading that story, which is backed by her careful historical research, filled in a host of details about what my own ancestors must have experienced in that same time period. I wanted to place my review in that context, but once I jumped down the genealogical rabbit hole, I gathered so much material that I decided to share my own story as a separate blog post. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow for the author’s post and my review.

I did not learn of my Huguenot ancestry until early adulthood, when my mother began looking into her genealogy and discovered that the original immigrant in her father’s line had fled persecution in France and arrived in the colony of Pennsylvania in 1752. Her source (in that era, before the internet) was a story that had been handed down through the family and published in a county “genealogical history” in 1898 – some five generations after the ancestor arrived.

The published account stated that her ancestor’s father had “suffered death for conscience’ sake” and the mother had fled to Switzerland with her three sons, who subsequently embarked for the colonies after their mother’s death. The brother who is my ancestor was well educated and quickly found work teaching in an academy.

In the middle 1700s, upon disembarking in Philadelphia, all immigrants on shipboard were required to come ashore, swear allegiance to King George II, and sign a document declaring their allegiance.  My husband and I were privileged to view a facsimile of the brothers’ three signatures on that declaration in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. many years ago, corroborating at least that component of the information that had come to us.

Not having studied history sufficiently by then to know any better, I naively assumed they’d fled France when the Edict of Nantes was revoked. But the dates don’t fit – the revocation was in 1685, and they didn’t arrive in Pennsylvania until nearly seventy years later.

More recent research on the internet shows that in the 1720s, when the three brothers were born, the family in fact lived in Hesse-Kassel, then a Calvinist region of Germany to which many Huguenots fled after the revocation. Genealogical resources have taken me no further back than the birth of their father, also born in that region of Germany.

The records do confirm that their father met an early death: he died in 1735 at age 34. I have the location of his death, but so far I’ve been unable to get behind the mystery of how he died. Was he fighting in a war? The war of Polish Succession (1733-35) involved the Rhineland, about 150 miles south of where he lived. Perhaps he was called up to serve in that war and campaigned in the siege of Phillipsburg. Did he die of natural causes? An accident? Since he lived in protestant Germany, it seems unlikely he himself died from religious persecution.

Where in France the family originated is also still a mystery to me. The protestant communities of France were largely concentrated in southern and western France. Many of those who settled in Hesse-Kassel and nearby regions of Germany were from regions near Lyon, in the eastern part of southern France. They typically came first through Switzerland, which was inundated with new refugees, and thence to the protestant regions of Germany.

What I now suspect is that elements of the story that was published in 1898 are true, but that they became conflated and condensed in time by the five generations that passed the story down. Quite possibly an original ancestor was killed in France at some time during the persecution and turmoil of the 1680s. If the family did in fact live in southeastern France, the survivors probably did flee first to Switzerland, and thence to the Calvinist communities in Hesse-Kassel, where it appears they and their descendants remained until the 1750s.

In summary, the stories that have come to me offer no detail of what my ancestors did for a living in France, what they experienced across the decade of the 1680s, what event precipitated their choice to leave (an act that was forbidden and punishable by imprisonment, enslavement, or death), and how they managed their escape into Germany. The book I will review tomorrow is a welcome window into what they may have gone through.

~ ~ ~ ~

For those of you who have Huguenot ancestors, whether or not they settled in Germany, I highly recommend this virtual museum:

https://museeprotestant.org/

You can select whether to access its resources in English, French, or German. It offers what it calls “tours” – collections of articles following specific topics, most of which also include historical photos and often maps (as below).

Some sample tour titles:

The Rise of Protestantism in France

The Huguenot Refugees

The Huguenot Refuge in England


Photo credit: MuseeProtestant.org

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog, More About Adriana Tagged With: Ancestry, French Huguenots, Historical Fiction

#MustRead for #4thOfJuly – Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, Ron Chernow, Diana Rubino, and Piper Huguley #IndependenceDay #FourthOfJuly #OurHistory #NeverForget #MFRWAuthors

July 4, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

If you’re an American, take a moment today to ponder how we got here. The American Revolution was a complex web of motivations, alliances, happenstance, luck, hard work, and some would say divine providence.

If you only ever read three books to deepen your understanding, here is what I recommend:

The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy

Freedom or death. This is how much it mattered to the colonists who chose to take up this battle and fight the great British Empire. But they were bit players on a far larger stage, where British victory was a foregone conclusion and the gnat annoying England was of little consequence. The Men Who Lost America takes us behind the scenes across the pond, giving us an in depth (and highly readable) exploration of the British leaders, their motivations, their history, and the forces and intrigues that drove them.

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow is perhaps more famous for his spectacular biography of Alexander Hamilton, a major source for the enormously successful musical Hamilton. He brings those same skills to this portrait of our Revolutionary War Commander and our first president. We view the inner man through direct quotations – “My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings,” – examine the context and forces that shaped him, and follow his emergence from the bumbling colonial soldier who made mistakes in the French and Indian War to the competent general and leader who won the revolution and the hearts of the people.

Oney: My Escape From Slavery by Diana Rubino and Piper Huguley

Any effort to comprehend the events of July 4 1776 would be incomplete without addressing the great stain upon our history of liberty and freedom – slavery. Until I ran across this book by historical romance author Diana Rubino and Afro American historical author Piper Huguley, I had never considered how the “Father of our Country” might have treated his slaves. Together this pair of talented authors have created a believable, authentic voice for Oney Judge, the young woman whose position as a household slave to Martha Washington was viewed as one of privilege – privilege, that is, for everything but liberty.

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog Tagged With: American Revolution, Fourth of July, history, Independence Day, July 4th, Must Read

Pride Month is over, but Pride is forever. #QueerRomance #Pride #LoveIsLove

July 1, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

I started the month of June thinking that since I have well over thirty published books with bisexual or lesbian women as heroines, I should feature one of them every day all month. I quickly backed out of that plan and decided to mostly focus on other queer books I thought should be showcased, sprinkling in a few of mine as I went along.

You can find all their blurbs on my Instagram account. I hope you’ll check them out – some famous books, and some truly worthwhile books you may have never heard of. Great reads, all.

Here’s the list:

Rick Reed: The Impossible Childhood of my Desire Contemporary Transgendered Romance

Patrick Field: Servant Contemporary Gay Romance

Carey P.W.: Grayality Contemporary Transgendered Romance

Jess Savage: Good in the Zak Contemporary Bi Romance

T. J. Klune: The House in the Cerulean Sea Contemporary Gay Fiction

J. Scott Coatsworth: Skythane SciFi/Fantasy Gay Romance

H. K. Carlton: In the Flesh Contemporary Lesbian Romance

Charlotte Johnson: Lady Charlotte’s Revenge Regency Transgendered Romance

Robin Lynn: Enchanted Ink Gay Fiction

Jackie Keswick: Hiding Place Contemporary Gay Romance

Gemma Johns: Baby Steps Contemporary Lesbian Romance

David Lawrence: Blue Billy’s Rogue Lexicon Historical Gay Romance

Maggie Blackbird: Back Where You Belong Contemporary First Nation Gay Romance

Lisabet Sarai: Opening Night Historical Gay Romance

V. J. Allison Honestly Contemporary Transgendered Romance

G. A. Hauser Something to Believe In Contemporary Gay Romance

Amity Malcom: Sew Into You Contemporary Lesbian Romance

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog, LGBT Tagged With: gay fiction, LGBTQ, pride, Pride is Forever, Pride Month, queer fiction

Celtic Fervour: Series by Nancy Jardine @nansjar #5Stars #Review #Historical #Fiction #Celtic

May 19, 2023 by Adriana Kraft

I downloaded the first book in this series because I have Scottish/Celtic roots in my ancestry, and I’m always curious to know what my ancestors’ life was like. I was vaguely aware that Rome had attempted conquest of much of what is now Scotland but then had withdrawn to Hadrian’s Wall by the time they began its construction early in the second century AD. I had no idea how far north the conquest actually advanced, and I knew very little about how my ancestors might have lived in Roman Britannia.

Since retiring from teaching elementary students, Scottish author Nancy Jardine has immersed herself in research and publications about the Roman Empire and Roman Britannia. In this five-book Celtic Fervour series, she has expertly woven both historical characters and the few actual events about which some detail is known into her fictional saga. We experience Iron Age tribal life through her fictional Brigante warriors and their families, from 71 to 89 AD – the era when the Roman general and governor Agricola tried unsuccessfully to conquer all of what is now Scotland.

The Brigante tribe itself is real and was quite large. When the Romans began advancing north, the Brigantes covered Eastern Britannia between the firth of Forth in the north and the Humber estuary in the south. Their lives, their culture, their beliefs and their struggles came to life and pulled me in throughout the entire series.

The series has already received high praise from many authors of historical fiction. I highly recommend this read for any who love historical fiction grounded in facts, and especially any who are curious about Roman Britain.

Five Stars.

SERIES BUY LINK

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D313CWC

Free to read on KU

 

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog Tagged With: 5 stars, Brigante, Celtic, Historical Fiction, review, Roman Britain, Scotland

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