Beautiful, intelligent, and bored with predictable beaus in Gilded-Age Chicago, Elsie Klemens entertains her aunt’s offer to explore a mystery in tropical Florida. Like Robinson Crusoe, she embarks on a whirlwind adventure to throw off constraints, and embracing a ruse, she alights upon an unanticipated niece, a whimsical housekeeper, and Frank Seldon, a handsome rail clerk who moonlights as a suspicious writer of all Elsie despises. But when, like Crusoe, she is marooned through misadventure, she discovers the hidden keys that open doors to enlightenment, to promise, and to seeing in Frank how unfathomably vivid and sublime life can be.
Before the Rising Sun
When ghostly wanderings in a colonial manor cause the enkindled romance between Gertrude—an expert seamstress—and Nicholas—an aspiring architect—to be snuffed out, wounded, Gertrude withdraws. Amid the cold winter, old acquaintances, fallacious laws, and superstitions vie for opportunities to bend love’s direction—until the
Christmas spirit shepherds the two lovers toward hope in the marriage of true minds, promise in unions with new friends, and faith in the dawning of novel resolutions.
How to Hear Friends & Be Influenced by People
Those who scoff at the idea of romance writing usually focus on its formulaic obedience, declaring that formula obliterates originality. However, if the ritualistic plot is so easy to identify, why, then, do so many readers keep reading? The answer is, of course, that originality is not obliterated. The answer emerges from beyond the genre itself.
