Best of 2018

It’s started – the best of 2018 list season. I’m always ambivalent about the Best of Lists, until I’m on one – lol. Seriously, it’s amazing to know someone enjoyed my work enough to remember it fondly months later.

This week, Tina at Half Agony, Half Hope blog honored Son of a Preacher Man by including it on her Best Books List for the year, and I’m thrilled about it. My beloved SoaPM is in some excellent company, and Tina called the book “a sweet romance that I didn’t know I needed until I read it.”

I loved that statement because, for me, Son of a Preacher Man was the book I didn’t know I needed to write until I wrote it. The idea started as almost a joke as I discussed Pride & Prejudice “bad” Lizzys and aloof Darcys with my Jane Austen fangirl friends.

But then I started writing it.

Sure, there’s humor in Billy Ray and Lizzy’s story. There’s lust, and passion, and longing, and other things that draw us into their world.

But Son of a Preacher Man is also a story of love—a love that stands the test of time. It’s a story about families and friends, and how they shape us into the people we become. It’s a story about a young man and a young woman learning who they are while society begins to shift around them, and how they learn to stand up for what they think is right for others—and for themselves.

And most of all, to me—its creator—Son of a Preacher Man is a story about the power of forgiveness.

It’s my special book baby, and it makes me happy and proud when other readers see in it what I saw when I was the vessel for that story, making its appearance in the world.

So, this seemed like a good time to say “thanks” to the readers who’ve read Son of a Preacher Man,  to those who have taken the time to review it, to the people who helped make it a reality, and to Tina, who told her friends they would like it.

It just means so much.

See Tina’s list (there are some great books on it)