Kelly Irvin has graciously offered to give away a copy of her new release. You can enter by using the Rafflecopter link at the end of the post. (Giveaway ends January 26, 2018. If you are the randomly chosen winner, I'll contact you and pass on your information.)
The story behind the story...
The idea for Beneath
the Summer Sun and the series around which it is built came from reading an
Amish scribe’s blurb in the newspaper The
Budget. The scribe gave annual statistics for her community that included
births, deaths, weddings, number of adults, number of children, number of
baptisms, number of graduates from school, and number of widows/widowers. The
number of widows and widowers was important enough for her to include in her
summary. That made me wonder how widows are integrated into a society that is
centered around husband-wife family units.
From that seed, I developed a proposal for a four-book
series. I wanted to explore the lives of Amish women and how it must be
different to be a widow at twenty and at seventy. Beneath the Summer Sun is the second in a four-part series that
examines those seasons in life. The first book, Upon a Spring Breeze, follows the story of Bess Graber, a young,
pregnant newlywed who finds her life irrevocably changed after a terrible
tragedy.
In Beneath the Summer
Sun, I delve into Jennie Troyer’s life as a thirty-something widow with
seven children. The third book centers around a grandmother and the fourth
book, a great-grandmother.
Jennie is encouraged by her community to remarry, but she
resists. She’s afraid of committing the same mistake twice. How can she trust
her feelings when they led to her first marriage to an abusive husband?
Domestic abuse in Amish marriages is an anomaly, but the
idea that it does sometimes happen made me want to explore the reactions and
repercussions. The Amish don’t believe in divorce. Their vows are sacred and
unbreakable. They believe that there’s nothing that can’t be forgiven.
They also prefer to have as little contact as possible with the English legal
system. Given those three facts, what happens when a woman goes to her bishop
to seek relief from an abusive husband?
In The Amish by
Donald Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt, the authors note
that sexual abuse and domestic abuse likely result in the same challenges for
the Amish, including the reluctance to report them to outside authorities. “Abuse
is typically reported to church leaders, who are always male. Because the church,
family, and community are knit together and the authority structure is
patriarchal, male leaders may not be sensitive to the needs of female victims.
Men may minimize the acts of a male perpetrator or blame female victims for the
violations.”
The authors also touched on an article from Family Life in the mid-1990s when a
group of Amish women calling themselves the Sewing Circle collected stories of
domestic violence and printed them in a booklet to raise awareness of the
problem. This bolstered my belief that there are Amish women who will stand up
for themselves in these situations and reach out to others to help them heal.
We tend to over-simplify the lives of Amish families, and The Amish reminded me that these folks
are human and face some of the same challenges and issues that we do in English
society. Beneath the Summer Sun
delves into one woman’s life and how she overcomes her fears. She learns that
she deserves to be happy. She learns to be brave and grasp her second chance.
It’s a difficult topic and not one we find often in Amish
romances, but I want to explore all facets of love and life, not just the easy,
simple, sweet ones. I believe readers will be touched by Jennie’s story and
there are those women who will see themselves in Jennie’s situation. It’s my
hope that they’ll find some measure of healing and hope in her story.
Back cover blurb...
Jennie Troyer knows
it’s time to remarry. Can she overcome a painful secret and open her heart to
love?
It’s been
four years since Jennie’s husband died in a farming accident. Long enough that
the elders in her Amish community think it’s time to marry again for the sake
of her seven children. What they don’t know is that grief isn’t holding her
back from a new relationship. Fear is. A terrible secret in her past keeps her
from moving forward.
Meanwhile, Leo Graber nurtures a decades-long love for Jennie, but guilt plagues him—guilt for letting Jennie marry someone else and guilt for his father’s death on a hunting trip many years ago. How could anyone love him again—and how could he ever take a chance to love in return?
About Kelly...
Kelly Irvin is the author of Upon a Spring Breeze, the first book in the Every Amish Season series from Zondervan/ HarperCollins. It follows
the Amish of Bee County Series, which
included The Beekeeper’s Son, subject
of a starred review from Publisher’s
Weekly, calling it “an intricately woven masterpiece.” Among her other
works are novellas in three collections. She is also the author of the Bliss Creek Amish series and the New Hope Amish series, both from Harvest
House Publishing. She has also penned two inspirational romantic suspense
novels, A Deadly Wilderness and No Child of Mine.
Kelly’s novels, The Beekeeper’s Son and Love Redeemed, were finalists in the
2015 and 2016 contemporary romance category of the American Christian Fiction
Writers (ACFW) Carol Awards Contest. The
Beekeeper’s Son, An Amish Christmas
Gift, and An Amish Market are Evangelical Christian Publishers Association
(EPCA) bestsellers.
Kelly is currently working on
the third novel in the Every Amish Season
series. Additionally, she is contracted for novellas in two anthologies to be
published by Thomas Nelson in 2018 and 2019. She recently announced that she
has signed a contract with Thomas Nelson for two romantic suspense novels. The first
one, Tell Her No Lies, will debut in
January 2019.
The Kansas native is a
graduate of the University of Kansas School of Journalism. She has been writing
nonfiction professionally for more than thirty years, including ten years as a
newspaper reporter. She recently retired after working twenty-two years in
public relations for the City of San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department.
Kelly is married to photographer Tim Irvin. They have two young adult children,
two grandchildren, and two ornery cats. In her spare time, she reads, blogs,
and writes articles on being a cancer patient for Cure Today Magazine.
Where you can find Kelly online...
Website: http://www.kellyirvin.com/
Twitter: @Kelly_S_Irvin
