Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Gingham Mountain by Mary Connealy: Winner of Free Book

The drawing was held on Monday, but I needed to hear back from the winner of Mary Connealy's book, Gingham Mountain before announcing her.

SHERRINDA won the book published by Barbour. If you don't have a copy of this book, they are reasonably priced and worth it!


Thursday, March 5, 2009

Mary Connealy: Kid on the Road to Great Stories

Mary and two of her sisters in their fancy scarves

I'm just going to say it--Mary Connealy writes the funniest and most poignant novels and I love them!Over the years that I've been a book reviewer, I've passed along books or recommended titles to local book clubs. I have a friend who is the president of a local historical society. I loved Mary's historical romances so much, I couldn't wait to give her those. Well, that lady is a harsher critic than I am ("good story, but..." LOL) but she said about Petticoat Ranch, "Mary's voice is authentic. And I really liked this book, do you have any more of her books?"

What's a better recommendation than that?

I explained to my friend that there is a good reason Mary is so good at writing--she grew up in a big family with great parents, she married a guy who grew up with brothers, they live on a farm, Mary's a teacher, and Mary and her husband had girls! Mary is a reader from way back.She just has lived so many things. The first time I met Mary, I liked her immediately. If you haven't met her, then read her books or if you are in Michigan, then be sure to go to her booksignings (see list at the end of this.) Be sure to leave a comment to be entered to win Gingham Mountain.

Let's see what shaped Mary into the author with humor and insight that she is today:


Childhood Ambition:
I wanted to build roads. I had a really huge impression made on me by the first interstate highway interchange I ever saw, overpasses and on-ramps, and I remember thinking that, like the Appian Way in Rome, this would last forever. And I’d love to help build them and then something I did would last forever. You know, writing books lasts. Right???

Fondest Memory (then):
I remember my parents buying a house…a small country farm house…and having it moved and stuck onto the small country farm house where we lived, eight of us in a two bedroom house. Two Bedrooms is an exaggeration. One of those two bedrooms was a fold out couch in what was laughably called a DINING ROOM. No dining went on in there. And the other was a attic, really small with sloping ceilings. So, when we added on the house, we quit using the attic and the DINING ROOM and so, our two bedroom house, added three bedrooms and subtracted two for a total of THREE bedrooms. Although, in honestly, I now got to sleep on that fold out couch for a few years, so I guess you could call it a four bedroom house, for ten people. And I loved the fold out couch. I was the only kid who had her own room.

When they bought that house, I remember watching it come down the road, very impressive.

Proudest Moment (then): Hmmmm….
I was a very shy kid. I remember vividly spending a lot of time clinging to my mother’s skirts and burying my face. I wasn’t about PRIDE back then. I remember being in a wedding when I was about five, picked from among my then…four sisters (ages 7, 6, 5 (me) and 1). I really loved that, being plucked out and given that honor. I may have just been the right age but it made me feel really special.

Biggest Challenge as a Child or Teen:
I’d say shyness. It’s one of the reasons I make a great writer. I can have both sides of a conversation myself and, if I say something stupid, I’ve got a lot of time to think it over and delete it. A perfect world for a shy person.All my instincts are to withdraw. I live a whole world inside my head. I’m never happier than when I’m alone, in front of a computer monitor makin’ stuff up.

Mary as a teen 

My First Job:
Babysitting. I babysat for a neighbor with three little kids, including an infant when I was probably twelve. I was fearless. I had five little brothers and sisters by that age. I feared NOTHING about little kids.

Childhood Indulgence:
Reading, I think. My parents would let us get out of almost any chore if we were reading a book. They just considered it a constructive activity. So, if I was reading, I could duck washing dishes or cleaning, almost anything but helping milk the cows. There was NO ESCAPE from that.

Favorite Outfit as a Child:
A pink flower girl dress from that Proud Moment above, it was beautiful!!!!!!

Favorite Childhood Movie and/or TV Show:
I don’t know about favorite but we watched the Wizard of Oz when I was a kid. And I didn’t know it turned into color once they weren’t in Kansas anymore, until really late in life. We only had black and white TV. We watched Ed Sullivan instead of Bonanza because my mom thought it was too violent. Go watch an episode of Bonanza sometime. Very tame. It makes you see just how far we’ve fallen.

Favorite Childhood Book:
I was a ravenous reader. Dr. Seuss when I was really young. I love the 500 Hats of Bartholmew Cubbins, anyone remember that? I read Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden and just any book I could get my hands on.

Favorite Childhood Activity/Pastime:
I had a friend right across the road, Joani, one year younger than me and we played together constantly. We were always outside. We had horses and barns to climb in. Woods behind our house and beside Joani’s. We ran wild, except we never got too far.

About 1960: Youngest to Oldest: Lois, Don, Mary, Nila, Ruth

I also had all those brothers and sisters so there was never a shortage of playmates.
Mary and all of her siblings


Did you pass notes or have a pen pal as a child?
I went to a One Room Country School when I was a kid and one teacher had twenty-four kids in eight grades and that woman was FORMIDABLE. We didn’t misbehave much, it was just too scary. I look back at her and just love what she was, how she acted. I remember her telling us her husband had died of a heart attack really young because he smoked and we must never, ever smoke. I remember her turning on the radio the day JFK died and letting us listen to that unfold. She cried. Very scary to me to watch such a strong woman cry. Of course, my brothers and sisters were all there, and Joani and her brothers and sisters (seven in all). Plus a lot of other good-sized families. We had a blast, all while behaving pretty well.

Dad and his three big girls: (Mary says) "I'm third of eight, so I'm the baby in
 this one
(Around 1956, right Mary??) Look at all those books beside his chair!

Childhood Hero:
My dad, I suppose. He used to read to us. Now, in this modern era, my dad wouldn’t rate that high. He didn’t do diapers, he didn’t help around the house at all. But he read to us, held us on his lap, he was funny and did wonderful voices with all the characters in the book. Meanwhile, my mom is out cooking supper for ten people, so she’s my hero, too. But she was grateful for him distracting kids. She felt blessed, too.


Childhood Favorite Memory of Church:
We had this really lovely old church. I remember the Jr. High & High School age kids got to go up in this room in the STEEPLE for their Sunday School class. And I wanted to do that so badly. I was nine or ten when we built a new church-I had maybe two years to go before I’d make the cut into the steeple classroom. The new church was beautiful with big, roomy classrooms and I loved it. But I always was a little frustrated I never quite got to the age to go up in that steeple. I did go up there some, between Sunday School and church, sneaked. And it was cool.

What kinds of memories from childhood are used in your book(books?)
I consider a lot of Gingham Mountain to be like my childhood life in a general way. Grant’s tiny house and all those kids. Enough food but not much else, no luxuries at all. I knew I could take that tiny house and shoe-horn all those kids into it because I’d lived it.

Anything else you would like to share with readers about your childhood which affected the writer you have become?

My parents were both college educated. My mom was a teacher, though she worked…maybe one year at it. My dad had a degree in agriculture. Then they got married and he was a farmer and she was a housewife. They used their education later for work but at the time it was just a part of their background.

We were kind of raised with this,almost, mythology about how they’d gone to college and found each other. I don’t know if that ‘love story’ was the roots of it, but education was really respected in my family. We didn’t have fancy stuff. My mom was no Martha Stewart. Too many kids, the house was bitter cold in the winter and blazing hot in the summer. We had a very starkly simple bathroom in the basement and a shower but the basement was cold. We bathed in a tin tub in the winter, one that got dragged in off the porch. Most of our clothes were used and they were crammed into not nearly enough drawers that wouldn’t shut, overflowing closets.


But we had what was important. We had love. My parents adored us. If they were worried about money they didn’t lay that burden on us ever. We had faith in God and a love of books and learning and a sense that we could do anything we wanted to. All eight of us went to college. Two doctors, including among spouses, several masters degrees, two pastors with divinity degrees and one published author.

I remember saying to my mom one time that I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up, I just wanted to be happy.She said, “Find out what God wants you to do and you’ll be happy.” That struck me as being really profound and I always remembered it. Years later, I told her that really impressed me.Mom couldn’t remember saying it. She was just this lovely, gentle-hearted woman of faith who could look at her chaotic, poverty-stricken, child-burdened life with a husband who wouldn’t change diapers and feel lucky. And my dad acted lucky 

to have found her. She knew how to love beautifully and that came out in every word she spoke.

Mary Connealy Today: Child of God,Daughter, Wife, Mother, Grandmother,
Friend, Teacher, Author (Still talking in her head, but not quite as shy)

Mary's Web site
Mary's Blog
Seekerville, where Mary and other authors blog
Petticoats and Pistols (historical) blog

From Barbour Publishing

LASSOED IN TEXAS SERIES

PETTICOAT RANCH

February 2007

International Readers Choice Contest Finalist
Long Historical Fiction Category

Sophie Edwards’ life is one long struggle for survival, and, more importantly, the survival of her four daughters. She wants to avenge her husband’s murder, but she has no idea how to do it. And as if she hasn't got enough to do, now a wounded man is disrupting her family’s lonely life.

Clay McClellen left an idyllic, all-male world in the mountains. But, after plunging headfirst over a cliff, Clay finds himself at the mercy of a widow and her four girls.

A suspenseful romantic comedy about a mountain man trapped in a pretty, sweet smelling, confusing all-girl world.




CALICO CANYON

July 2008

4 1/2 Stars from Romantic Times

Let yourself be swept away by this fast-paced romance, featuring Grace Calhoun, an instructor of reading, writing, and arithmetic, who, in an attempt to escape the clutches of a relentless pursuer, runs smack dab into even more trouble with the 6R's - widower Daniel Reeves, along with his five rowdy sons. When a marriage is forced upon this hapless pair - two people who couldn't dislike each other more - an avalanche isn't the only potential danger lurking amid the shadows of Calico Canyon. Will they make it out alive? Or end up killing each other in the process?


GINGHAM MOUNTAIN  (Just released. See below to be entered in a drawing for a free copy!!!)

February 2009

4 1/2 Stars from Romantic Times

A rancher runs head-on into the new school marm, who believes he's made slave labor out of eight orphaned children.

Grant Cooper crowds too many orphans into his rickety house, just like Hannah Cartwright's cruel father. Grant's family of orphans have been mistreated too many times by judgmental school teachers. Now the new schoolmarm is the same except she's so pretty and she isn't really bad to his children, it's Grant she can't stand.


Other books by Mary Connealy:

From Heartsong Presents
ALASKA BRIDES

August 2008
By Cathy Marie Hake, Mary Connealy
and Kathleen Y'Barbo

Contains Golden Days winner of ACFWs Book of the Year contest as Best Short Historical
The historic Alaskan frontier makes a wonderful setting for romantic adventures. Trek into the wilds alongside three women who have strong faith, determination, and no need for a husband. Can they surrender their independent hearts when love comes to call in the form of a friendly neighbor, a grieving widower, and a secretive gold miner?


3 BOOK COZY MYSTERY SERIES
from Heartsong Presents Mysteries


Coming in June 2009
NOSY IN NEBRASKA


OF MICE...AND MURDER
November 2008
Join the club here:www.heartsongmysteries.com

Being named in Great-grandma’s will was like hitting bankrupt on Wheel of Fortune. The whole family held their breath while the wheel ticked around and around, or rather while the lawyer opened the envelope. Then they all heaved a sigh of relief when the wheel stopped on Carrie’s name. Carrie the heiress. Great. Clean up the house. Clean up the yard. Clean up Great-grandma’s rap sheet.

Carrie hates mice and loves the big city. So why is she living in a huge mouse infested house in her dinky hometown? The dead guy in her pantry closet is the most interesting thing that's happened since she came home. Of course the carpenter who's helping her trap her mice and solve the crime is pretty interesting, too.

PRIDE AND PESTILENCE
Coming 2009

Joe Manning comes to town to finally meet his dead beat dad, only to find his father has been murdered.

Bonnie is attacked while she's at work in the Melnik Historical Society Museum, proud home of Maxie the World's Largest Field Mouse. Only her attacker now claims it was an accident, and he claims he's never seen the guy before who's dead in Bonnie's store room.

Bonnie wants to be suspicious but once he stopped attacking her he turns out to be pretty sweet. And lots of people had a motive to kill Sven Gunderson - including Bonnie herself. Gunderson, the true owner of Maxie, wanted his mouse back.

In Melnik, that means war!

THE MICEMAN COMETH
Coming 2009

Tyler Simpson is opening a new law office and he's home to stay.

The very British Dr. Madeline Stuart is writing an anthropology doctoral thesis about a small town that worships an oversized rodent. Success with her project should lead to her dream job, a full professorship at Oxford... even better, a guest shot on Oprah.

When a body falls out of a cupboard in Tyler's law office, clutching Maddy's necklace in his cold, dead fingers, Maddy gets arrested and Tyler is appointed her attorney.

But once Tyler finds out Maddy's here to betray his beloved Melnik, he isn't giving her his best effort.

And someone out there thinks blaming the murder on Maddy would be a perfect solution to his own problems. And Maddy's more likely to cooperate with being framed - if she's dead.

Maxie the World's Largest Field Mouse must come through one more time to thwart the criminal in his peaceful, if someone mouse-obsessed, hometown.

~ Heartsong Presents~

SOUTH DAKOTA WEDDINGS

BUFFALO GAL
October, 2008

Book #1 in the South Dakota Weddings Series from Heartsong Presents

They'll never see eye-to-eye.

Buffy Lange has spent her life learning about, caring for, and protecting buffalo. She's landed the job of her dreams, managing a huge buffalo ranch in South Dakota. With stars in her eyes, she imagines all of the Midwest given over to free-ranging buffalo. To her, buffalo embody beauty, majesty, and strength. To Wyatt Shaw, however, the buffalo are a constant threat. Wyatt's ranch adjoins the Buffalo Commons and he watches in trepidation as its owner expands and rides roughshod over the local ranchers. Buffalo are wild, untameable, and dangerous. They present a hazard to man and beast.

When disaster strikes, Wyatt's worst fears are realized and Buffy can do nothing but clean up the mess. With one determined to rid the area of buffalo and the other determined to see them flourish, the dust seldom settles around these two. Will they find a common ground or are they destined to forever stand alone?

CLUELESS COWBOY
November, 2008

Book #2 in the South Dakota Weddings Series from Heartsong Presents

Emily Johannson discovers a cranky man living in a derelict house in the woodland behind her ranch. When she orders him off, Jake Hanson tells her he bought this wreck and is planning to live there. He's filthy, starving, and furious that Emily found him. He wants to be left alone. And she would if she didn't keep needing to save his worthless life.



BOSSY BRIDEGROOM
December, 2008

Book #3 in the South Dakota Weddings Series from Heartsong Presents

Michael Davidson was a tyrant for a husband, and Jeanie was born to be a doormat.

They got along great.

Then Michael abandoned his submissive wife, just another way to be a jerk.

Michael returns a Christian and wants to heal their relationship. Jeanie is in possession of the first bit of hard won self esteem of her life, and she doesn't believe for a minute her cranky husband can change his ways.

They commit to building a healthy marriage but his new job as her boss slips them back into old habits.






Barbour Authors Booksigning Tour in Michigan, March 30th-April 4th, 2009

Authors: Christine Lynxwiler, Kaye Dacus, Mary Connealy, and M. L. Tyndall


Monday, March 30 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Family Christian Stores

Minges Brook Mall

5700 Beckley Road, Suite B-2

Battle Creek, MI 49015





Tuesday, March 31 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Family Christian Stores

3155 Westshore Drive

Holland, MI 49424






Tuesday, March 31 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Baker Book House

2768 Paris Ave SE

Grand Rapids, MI 49546





Wednesday, April 1 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Family Christian Stores

Rivertown Center

3819 Rivertown Parkway SW, Suite 100

Grandville, MI 49418





Thursday, April 2 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Leighton Township Library

4451 12th Street

Moline, MI 49335





Thursday, April 2 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Jude 3

2279 North Park Drive, Suite 810

Holland, MI 49424




Friday, April 3 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Family Christian Stores

Jolly Cedar Plaza

5132 S. Cedar Street

Lansing, MI 48911




Friday, April 3 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Family Christian Stores

Westnedge Corners Shopping Center

4413 S. Westnedge Ave

Kalamazoo, MI 49008




Saturday, April 4 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m.

Family Christian Stores

3343A Alpine Road NW

Walker, MI 49544

To be placed in a drawing for Mary Connealy's Gingham Mountain, leave a comment with your contact info: 
(yourname AT Isp dot com) 
and I'll draw one winner on March 9th, 2009 (Sorry, U.S. addresses only.)