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A Second Splendor by Barri Bryan

Buy Link: http://www.classicromancerevival.com/a-second-splendor.html

Blurb:

Julie Anderson is not happy that her ex-husband is coming home to attend their daughter’s wedding. Max has broken her heart in the past – not once, but twice. Thank goodness she’s too wise to fall under his spell again, or is she?

Max Anderson has some reservations about his daughter’s coming marriage to the son of his ex wife’s business partner. He shows up early and walks into a situation that begs him to intervene. When he does all hell breaks loose.

Available now from Desert Breeze Publishing

http://stores.desertbreezepublishing.com/-strse-67/Search-for-Paradise/Detail.bok

When a divorce from her husband of twenty-five years leaves Kate McClure financially destitute and alienated from her two adult children she and her aging mother Belle and return to Paradise Ranch, the homestead they left when Kate was a child. In this quiet spot she can begin to put her shattered life back together, or so she thinks. . .

She has scarcely set foot in the dilapidated old ranch house when her next-door neighbor, handsome bachelor Hank Sinclair arrives to announce that he has a prior claim on Paradise.

Against her better judgment Kate enters into a business deal with Hank and finds she is falling in love with him despite his frank admission that he wants no lasting relationship.

Is she headed for heartbreak again?

The short little month of February is here again. Winter has swept down from the north bringing cold winds and icy rain. In the middle of this coldest, shortest month of the year, we find Valentine’s Day, the time set aside to express to the one you love, how much you care. Some say it with flowers, some with candy or gifts, but always included is that special little Valentine’s card with its message of love and affection.

How well I recall the first special valentine I ever received. When I was in the third grade, I had a crush on a little freckled face boy named Kenneth Oliver. On Valentine’s Day he gave me a valentine with the picture of an Indian chief on it. The poem on the back of the card read:

Heap big Injun not much talk

Swing ‘um wicked tomahawk.

Can’t help love ‘um heap much fine,

Whoopee, be my valentine.

Who knows where this romance would have led had I not outdistanced him in the foot races on our field day the next April first? Kenneth, who came in a distant second, didn’t take defeat gracefully. He dropped me and took up with Nancy Myers who wore ribbons in her hair and hadn’t even bothered to enter the field day competition.

I enjoy writing stories about ordinary people because I believe that each individual is, in his or her own way, fascinating and unique. When caught in unusual circumstances and faced with difficult decisions, ordinary people rise to the occasion in unexpected and astonishing ways. Although my characters may at first glance appear to be average, on closer inspection you will find that their stories are romantic tales that charm and captivate readers. Allow me to introduce you to some of the ‘ordinary’ characters who reside in my three books that DBP will be releasing in 2010.

A Long Shadow

Meet Tyler Carson. She has lived in the small city of Summerville all of her life. The outside world seems alien and far-away to her. Even so, she has never quite fit into a small town’s 1955 society. She’s thirty and unmarried, she’s had more than one love affair and she has a job that is traditionally man’s work. She would like to hold onto the status quo, but forces she can neither alter nor accept are converging to question everything she feels to be solid and sure.

May I introduce Grant Madison? He is a military man and the son of Summerville’s most revered citizen. He is home again after many years of serving in the army in Europe and Korea. So many challenges await him: The care and rearing of his ten-year-old niece, learning a new trade, adjusting once more to a way of life that seems dated and behind the times. His biggest challenge is facing Tyler Carson, the woman he loved and left six years ago.

Grant sees social and political changes looming on the horizon. He sets about to right some of the wrongs he sees all about him, never realizing what the cost of that venture will be.

If you would like to become better acquainted with Tyler and Grant and their 1955 world, read A LONG SHADOW due to be released by DBP in December of 2010

Meet Lucky Livingston. Lucky is a handsome, twenty-four-year-old devil-may-care cowboy with a silver tongue and an over abundance of charm. He’s out to settle an old score — whatever the cost.

May I introduce Bridget McGuire? She is an eighteen-year-old orphan with a dangerous secret and the willingness to do whatever is necessary to keep herself and her brothers out of harm’s way.

Bridget and Lucky meet and sparks fly. Add to this volatile mixture a dangerous outlaw, a marauding band of Ku Klux Clansmen, three inept matchmakers, a bank’s missing loot and one dishonest deputy sheriff. That’s a combustible concoction!

To learn more about the 1922 world of Lucky and Bridget read BRIDGET’S SECRET due to be released by DBP in July of 2010.

Search for Paradise.

Meet forty-six year old Kate McClure whose husband has just divorced her after of twenty-five years of marriage. Kate is financially destitute and alienated from her two adult children. In a desperate attempt to hold onto her independence, Kate moves with her aging mother Belle, to Paradise Ranch, the homestead they left when Kate was a child.

Enter Hank Sinclair— a handsome middle-aged Casanova who is a confirmed bachelor with an eye for attractive women and the belief that he has prior claim on Paradise Ranch. He is instantly attracted to Kate.

Against her better judgment Kate enters into a business deal with Hank and finds she is falling in love with him despite his frank admission that he wants no lasting relationship. Should she run or settle for a temporary arrangement?

Hank would love to get Kate into his bed. But how can he even consider committing to a woman again? And especially a woman whom he suspects is still in love with her former husband. He’d be a fool to get too involved. Still—

If you’d like to know more about Hank and Kate be sure to read SEARCH FOR PARADISE to be released by DBP in March of 2010.

The paradox that we refer to as The Holiday Season has come around once more. It heralds the coldest time of the year. Winter is beginning, the weather has turned colder. Icy winds and chilling rains move in to banish the waning days of autumn. It is also the warmest season of the year with its many traditions, family gatherings and general good feeling. It’s a time of endings. The calendar over my desk has one lonely leaf left. All things seem to be drawing to a close. The year is fading fast away. In its wake comes a new beginning. Another year looms on the horizon beckoning, promising, challenging… May your Holiday Season be blessed and filled with cheer.

“How did this tradition get started? I’ll tell you, I don’t know.” From the song Tradition sung by Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.

There is a Thanksgiving tradition that the women in my family have observed for generations. I don’t know when it began, or how it got the name Wednesday Before, but I do know that my mother and her sister observed it as did my grandmother and her sisters before them. On the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving the women in the family congregate to cook a turkey and to share some of the other cooking chores. The afternoon is spent cleaning the kitchen, visiting, speculating about the future, and reminiscing about the past.

When I was a child I loved sitting in the warm kitchen of our old house and listening to my mother, my aunt and my grandmother gossip as they worked. They talked about everything from childbirth to scandal. Sometimes, if I got too inquisitive or too verbal, they chased me out, so through the years I learned not to ask pertinent questions or offer unwanted opinions, not an easy feat for me then—or now.

Through the years, I have kept that tradition alive. It has become one of my family’s most treasured celebrations. This year I will celebrate Wednesday Before with my daughter, my daughter-in-law, my two granddaughters, my grand-daughter-in-law and my two great granddaughters. I look forward to this Wednesday Before with the same joy and enthusiasm that I looked forward to the ones I spent with my mother, aunt and grandmother when I was a child.

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I am an avid reader and enjoy most of the book I read. I read mostly e-books that I buy on-line. I don’t write reviews for any book reviewing organization. If I review a book here it will be one I purchased and read, and that I think is an outstanding story.

Summer Wine by Helen Ravell is just such a book. Below is my review.

Claire Graham lives in Australia where she conducts a tour group that after two weeks’ of touring, ends at Hunter’s Rest Vineyard.

At the end of one of these tours Claire meets Sam Bennett who is the most gorgeous man she’d seen in a long time. He’s an American who has come to Australia to learn more about the wine making business.

Claire is immediately attracted to Sam. The feeling is mutual and when Sam asks Claire for a date, she accepts. He apologizes because he has no car. Claire tells him she doesn’t mind. She prefers poor and honest to rich and deceitful.

Sparks fly between the two and soon they have begun a torrid love affair.

At Sam’s insistence Claire quits her tour guide job and applies for a public relations position at the winery although she feels she’s not qualified for the position. She lands the job and succeeds with little help from some of her co-workers and outright resentment from a few of them.

Sam proposes marriage and Claire accepts. By now she’s hopelessly in love with the man.

They board a plane for America and while in mid-air, Sam tells Claire he’s a very rich man and heir to a vast multinational corporation. Claire is stunned. She can’t run nor can she hide. She’s forced to try to deal with the situation, then and there.

Her husband is rich and powerful. “It should have been a dream come true but it didn’t feel that way.” She forgives him even though she feels he deceived her and married her under what she considers false pretenses.

That’s only the first hurdle. Claire must adjust to living in a strange country, dealing with Sam’s elevated social position of power and prestige, and coping with a mother-in-law who is convinced she married Sam for his money.

I love this story. It’s romantic without being melodramatic. It’s very well written. There are no lulls as the plot unfolds. The characters are believable and, for the most part, likeable. Even the mother-in-law has a few late-blooming, redeeming qualities.

Without benefit of fantasy, mystery, time-travel, or any other ploy, Helen Ravell tells a sweet, sensitive love story that I read in less than two days.

If you’d like to purchase this book you can find it where I found it, here:

http://stores.desertbreezepublishing.com/-strse-18/Summer-Wine/Detail.bok

“Control of loveliness is the wisdom of verse.”

Quote from “Solon’s Prayer to the Muses”

Translated by Richmond Lattimore

These words were written by an Athenian law giver who lived some five hundred years before the birth of Christ. He recognized then, as we do now, that there is loveliness in the wisdom of artfully crafted verse.

Technically speaking, verse is a generic term applied to rhythmical, and most frequently rhymed, compositions. The term comes from the Latin word for furrow meaning a turning. It is properly applied to the method by which one metrical line in a poem turns into a new line. Versification is the art of writing in lines.

On the surface composing verse appears to be a simple and uncomplicated undertaking. In truth is the most disciplined and structured of all poetical activities. The ability to see the magnificent in the commonplace, and to set that magnificence to the rhyme and rhythm of conscious life in the cadence of the ordinary, requires the ability to control and match the rhythm of the listening ear to the vision of the seeing eye and then to express that vision in the rhetorical language of the imagination.

Language in poetry is highly organized, concentrated, and intense. This concentration and intensity coupled with sound devises such as rhyme and meter give poetry its musical quality. A controlled blend of rhythm and meter conveys and reinforces meaning even as it sings to our senses.

How can mere words take on the singing quality of music? In the explanation there lurks ambiguity and a touch of mystery. On the most rudimentary level, they can’t; however, sound patterns in poetry affect us in much the same way music does. Structured rhythm and patterned rhyme combined with the words of a poem can create a song—a serenade—a symphony. They weave a kind of lilting enchantment that impinges on the ear to touch the heart and echo through the soul. Poems can stir thoughts and ideas by the loveliness of their musical charms.

When I was a child growing up in a tiny town in far West Texas, October was the month the carnival came to town. It arrived in mid October, set up on the fair grounds just outside the city limits, and stayed until Halloween had come and gone, before folding its many tents and silently stealing away, not to be seen again until another October arrived.

Mother never approved of the carnival. Daddy was much more broadminded. Once each year, he took my brother and me to see the sights and ride the rides. Leon, my brother, was a daredevil. He rode everything from the loop-o-plane to the tilt-a-whirl. I liked the bumper cars and the Ferris wheel.

The sideshows boasted a collection of freaks and oddities that were both frightening and intriguing, the rubber skinned man, the bearded lady, the three-legged man, the fat woman, the three-foot-tall man, the sword swallower, the fire-eater… such amazing sights. We talked about them for months afterward.

And then there was the cotton candy. We watched it spin around and become a sticky mess on a cardboard cone before paying our nickel and eating every sweet bite.

I don’t think there are anymore traveling carnivals with scary rides, freaky side shows and cotton candy. Still carnival time remains, after all these years, a vivid October memory.

I suppose the best way to begin my brand new blog is to tell you something about me as a writer. I began my writing career relatively late in life. I didn’t start to write seriously until after I had marked the milestone of my sixty-fifth birthday. I was soon to discover that because I was over sixty, a few individuals assumed that I was sliding into illness, impotence and immobility. I confronted those beliefs and disregarded those assumptions. That was almost twenty years ago.

Beginning a new career at such an august age taught me some valuable lessons. I learned to be tenacious. That’s another word for stubborn. I discovered that one grows old, not by living, but by losing interest in living. I have become skilled at coping with occasionally being spoken to as if I were somewhere between three and thirteen or being viewed as an asexual creature. I can bear with those who, for all their knowledge, are bereft of wisdom.

I have learned not to let negative reviews and comments about your work get you down. My first experience with a book review was horrendous! Remember, dear reader, nothing is more subjective than reviewing and judging a work of fiction. Granted, I maybe a little out of step at times. That’s okay. I have found my writing voice. I write what I know and have lived. My greatest discovery is that for me, it is better to fail striving for the magnificent than to succeed in achieving the mediocre.

I would love to hear from others about the lessons they have learned during their writing careers.