Please join me in welcoming J. Arlene Culiner. Today we are spotlighting A Room in Blake’s Folly. After reading the blurb and excerpt, I absolutely love the idea of following this story from 1889 to 2022 and moving on to future installments in the series.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Title: A Room in Blake’s Folly
Series: A Blake’s Folly Romance
Author: J. Arlene Culiner
Genre: Historical to Contemporary Romance
BLURB:
If only the walls could speak…
In one hundred and fifty years, Blake’s Folly, a silver boomtown notorious for its brothels, scarlet ladies, silver barons, speakeasies, and divorce ranches, has become a semi-ghost town. Although the old Mizpah Saloon is still in business, its upper floor is sheathed in dust. But in a room at a long corridor’s end, an adventurer, a beautiful dance girl, and a rejected wife were once caught in a love triangle, and their secret has touched three generations.
A LITTLE MORE ABOUT THE BOOK:
I love writing about people who are different. They are often opinionated, sometimes obnoxiously so, but they are also entertaining, and stimulating, and they do make us question our own values. Some are forced to adapt to new circumstances in order to survive, others are originals, folks who have never really fit into mainstream society.
In A Room in Blake’s Folly, six linked stories take place in a silver boomtown. The first is set in 1889, and the last, in 2022, when the town is no more than a semi-ghost town of crumbling shacks leads and inhabited by 54 eccentric locals. But all have dreams, and their love stories—or the love stories of their grandparents—are anything but humdrum.
A Room in Blake’s Folly is one a trio of stories. Two others, All About Charming Alice and Desert Rose will soon be released.
EXCERPT:
“You a widow?”
“No.” She could hear the tightness in her voice and feel the tension in her shoulders.
His eyes glinted. “A runaway wife.”
“Not that either.” Did she have to say more? She didn’t. But since people were bound to be asking that same question over and over, she might as well get used to it, even though the answer was only partially true. Even though it could never express what her life had been like up until now. “I left of my own accord, but with my husband’s full agreement. He’ll be looking into getting a divorce.”
“And your children?”
Ah, there it was. The big question, the one thing everyone would be curious about. “No children. I’ve never had any.”
He said nothing. Had he heard the note of anger in her voice? She’d done her best to sound neutral, but neutrality wasn’t an easy note to hit.
He stood, walked in her direction—no, walk wasn’t the word she could use. He sauntered, a slow, elegant saunter. A man sure of himself, of his power to seduce. Yes, that was why she’d felt so wary yesterday. He stopped when he was standing beside her. Smiled. No, there was nothing seductive in his smile. She’d been wrong. What had she been imagining? That she was still the young attractive woman she’d been years ago? What a fool she was.
AUTHOR BIO:
Writer, storyteller, photographer, and social critical artist, J. Arlene Culiner, was born in New York and raised in Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, and in a haunted house on the English moors. She now resides in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village of no interest and, much to local dismay, protects all creatures, especially spiders and snakes. She particularly enjoys incorporating into short stories, mysteries, narrative non-fiction, and romances, her experiences in out-of-the-way communities, and her conversations with strange characters.
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Jill Piscitello 