March 30, 2021
 March 30, 2021 This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we know people will be talking about this spring. Read more about it, and enter our Spring Preview Contest by Wednesday, March 31st at noon ET for a chance to win one of five copies of SUNFLOWER SISTERS by Martha Hall Kelly, which is now available. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!  Today's Featured Book and Contest:  Martha Hall Kelly’s million-copy bestseller LILAC GIRLS introduced readers to Caroline Ferriday. Now, in SUNFLOWER SISTERS, Kelly tells the story of Ferriday’s ancestor Georgeanna Woolsey, a Union nurse during the Civil War whose calling leads her to cross paths with Jemma, a young enslaved girl who is sold off and conscripted into the army, and Anne-May Wilson, a Southern plantation mistress whose husband enlists. Georgeanna “Georgey” Woolsey isn’t meant for the world of lavish parties and the demure attitudes of women of her stature. So when war ignites the nation, Georgey follows her passion for nursing during a time when doctors considered women on the battlefront a bother. In proving them wrong, she and her sister Eliza venture from New York to Washington, D.C. to Gettysburg, and witness the unparalleled horrors of slavery as they become involved in the war effort. In the South, Jemma is enslaved on the Peeler Plantation in Maryland, where she lives with her mother and father. Her sister, Patience, is enslaved on the plantation next door, and both live in fear of LeBaron, an abusive overseer who tracks their every move. When Jemma is sold by the cruel plantation mistress Anne-May at the same time the Union army comes through, she sees a chance to finally escape --- but only by abandoning the family she loves. Anne-May is left behind to run Peeler Plantation when her husband joins the Union army and her cherished brother enlists with the Confederates. In charge of the household, she uses the opportunity to follow her own ambitions and is drawn into a secret Southern network of spies, finally exposing herself to the fate she deserves. Inspired by true accounts, SUNFLOWER SISTERS provides a vivid, detailed look at the Civil War experience, from the barbaric and inhumane plantations, to a war-torn New York City, to the horrors of the battlefield. It’s a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and unthinkable racial cruelty, a story still so relevant today. Click here to enter the contest by noon ET This is a special newsletter for our Spring Preview contests, which will mail on select days in March and April. This newsletter is separate from our weekly Bookreporter.com newsletter, which mails every Friday. You can subscribe to that newsletter here. Please visit the other websites in TheBookReportNetwork.com: ReadingGroupGuides.com and AuthorsOnTheWeb.com. |
