Sarah-Thank you for this lovely offering to read this advanced copy of a book you seem to hold very dear to your heart. Books are treasures and I am looking forward to unwrapping the hidden treasures that wait for us inside. Historical novels are certainly a way for all of us to relive the moments of our ancestors and as you stated to view parallels to our own lives now. Respectfully- Sue
Sarah-Blake wrote:
It's a deep satisfaction to address you-to know that you are out there reading! I am thrilled (and a bit terrified) to think of you bent over my book in the next few weeks, your eyes on these pages, considering. But then I look forward tremendously to the conversation that follows once you have finished. What a privilege, and what a pleasure, for me to have been asked to join the First Look Book Club.
The book you hold in your hands has taken a long while to come through the many thickets of false starts, dead ends, and sudden flashes of insight that demand yet another draft. I have been living with my characters-Iris and Frankie and Emma-for as long as my second child has been alive; in the past eight years I have moved from one state to another, then out of the country and back again, always carrying these women, the London Blitz, the refugees of Europe, in my head. And the crystal summer of 1941, before this country went to war, hovered there at the back of my mind while the present days saw the US invasion of Iraq, the 2006 bombing of Lebanon, and then the election of Barack Obama, a wartime leader whose eloquence seems to reach the old-fashioned, stately heights of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
So it has been with a curious kind of double vision that I have experienced the events of these last several years. And it occurred to me, as I wrote and watched, that though we may be told we are in "historic times," it is nearly impossible to know what that means. What that means on a personal, immediate level, that is. THE POSTMISTRESS, by dint of its long gestation, evolved from a single question-what would happen if a postmistress didn't deliver the mail?-to my fascination with characters caught off guard by war. Caught, that is, in the web of history.
Thank you for being this story's first readers. I so look forward to hearing how it catches you.
Sarah Blake
Sarah-Blake wrote:
It's a deep satisfaction to address you-to know that you are out there reading! I am thrilled (and a bit terrified) to think of you bent over my book in the next few weeks, your eyes on these pages, considering. But then I look forward tremendously to the conversation that follows once you have finished. What a privilege, and what a pleasure, for me to have been asked to join the First Look Book Club.
The book you hold in your hands has taken a long while to come through the many thickets of false starts, dead ends, and sudden flashes of insight that demand yet another draft. I have been living with my characters-Iris and Frankie and Emma-for as long as my second child has been alive; in the past eight years I have moved from one state to another, then out of the country and back again, always carrying these women, the London Blitz, the refugees of Europe, in my head. And the crystal summer of 1941, before this country went to war, hovered there at the back of my mind while the present days saw the US invasion of Iraq, the 2006 bombing of Lebanon, and then the election of Barack Obama, a wartime leader whose eloquence seems to reach the old-fashioned, stately heights of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
So it has been with a curious kind of double vision that I have experienced the events of these last several years. And it occurred to me, as I wrote and watched, that though we may be told we are in "historic times," it is nearly impossible to know what that means. What that means on a personal, immediate level, that is. THE POSTMISTRESS, by dint of its long gestation, evolved from a single question-what would happen if a postmistress didn't deliver the mail?-to my fascination with characters caught off guard by war. Caught, that is, in the web of history.
Thank you for being this story's first readers. I so look forward to hearing how it catches you.
Sarah Blake
Hello, Ms. Sarah,
