Children and Animals in Books by Anne Gracie

W.C. Fields said “Never work with children or animals,” and for a lot of people that holds true for romance books, too. Some readers really dislike having children or animals in books, others love them. Me? I say it’s all in the execution. Sweetly lisping precocious bratty-type children? Little saintly critters? Generally no — though I have written several books with children. Animals? Well, I’m a sucker for animals.

The reason W.C. Fields said this was that children and animals generally attract the audience’s attention away from the star — him. And it’s true. There are no children in THE AUTUMN BRIDE, but there are animals — specifically kittens. I started with my heroine’s sister rescuing a cat and a litter of young kittens from a building that was going to be demolished. That was it. It was just meant to be a slight plot complication. But kittens have a way of attracting attention…

When Abby discovers elderly aristocratic invalid, Lady Beatrice Davenham living in squalor and at the mercy of her rapacious neglectful servants,  she’s invited by the old lady to move in with her. Abby and her “sisters”, calling themselves the Misses Chance and pretending to be Lady Beatrice’s nieces, move in, sack the servants and set about improving life for Lady Bea and themselves. It all works beautifully until Lady Beatrice’s nephew Max returns from the Far East and demands to know who these impostors are. So we’re all set for a confrontation — right?

Remember how I said animals upstage the stars?

“My nieces, Max,” said Aunt Beatrice with a smile that had a lot in common with the look the little cockney had given him. Lying through her teeth and daring him to deny it.

But why? “Damn it, Aunt Bea—”

“Later, Max,” she said airily. “Thank you, girls. My nephew and I have much to catch up on. Featherby, perhaps a cup of tea in half an hour.”

Max waited with folded arms as the girls bustled about gathering things—magazines and bits of lace and fur and fabric lay scattered all over the counterpane—and examining him surreptitiously from beneath lowered eyelashes….

(snip)

Why the hell had his aunt claimed them as her nieces? Was it some kind of blackmail? Or threat?

The women were still fussing over the bits of fabric, sorting them in a manner calculated to annoy him.

“That will do,” Max snapped. “Collect it later.” He moved to sit on his aunt’s bed.

As he did so, five women and a butler shrieked.

“What the—”

Lady Beatrice snatched up a tiny white kitten from the spot where Max had been about to sit and cradled it to her bosom. “Max, you could have killed her.”

“Well, how was I to know you’d taken to keeping cats? I thought it was a bit of fur.”

“It is—attached to a kitten. This is Snowflake, and over there is his brother, Marmaduke.” A small tortoiseshell kitten emerged from under a magazine, regarded Max and yawned extravagantly.

See? They upstage. But Max, being a hero, rallies, of course, and takes the kittens in his stride…

He reached out to pat the white ball of fluff, and a small black missile flew out and attached itself to the fabric of his sleeve. It clung determinedly, growling.

“What the—” Max picked his assailant off his sleeve. Black as soot, black as sin, the tiny piece of fluff sat on his palm and stared back at him, undaunted, then clamped needle-sharp teeth down on his thumb.

“Ouch!”

“This is Max,” his aunt said. And then, bewilderingly, “Stop it, Max! That’s a very bad habit.”

Max frowned at her. “I beg your pardon?”

Mischance, repressing—not very successfully—a smile, came forward and removed the kitten from his grasp. “Yes, Max,” she said sternly addressing the kitten, face-to-face. “A very bad habit.” The kitten gave her nose a few exploratory pats.

“You named that kitten Max?” Max said.

“Yes.” His aunt beamed up at him.

“Why?” He looked at the small, scruffy kitten, now resting against the soft bosom of a deceitful woman. The creature was too young to know the dangers of that.

“Because he is bold and dashing and handsome, of course,” said his aunt.

“Because he is always off adventuring and never where he ought to be,” said Miss Abigail Chance at the same time. With a pointed look, damn her cheek. What did she know of his business?

She held the small black kitten against her bosom, caressing it behind the ears. Max the kitten purred blissfully, like a rusty little coffee grinder.

Max the man glowered.

See? The poor man hasn’t a chance. Not only are there five women to deal with — all of them lying in their pearly white teeth — there are kittens. . .

W.C Fields would sympathize.

So what about you? Are animals in books a problem for you? Or are you an animal lover? And if so, what’s your favorite animal? Tell us for a chance to win one copy of my book!

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‘The Autumn Bride’ by Anne Gracie

STORY: Governess Abigail Chantry will do anything to save her sister and two dearest friends from destitution, even if it means breaking into an empty mansion in the hope of finding something to sell. Instead of treasures, though, she finds the owner, Lady Beatrice Davenham, bedridden and neglected. Appalled, Abby rousts Lady Beatrice’s predatory servants and—with Lady Beatrice’s eager cooperation—the four young ladies become her “nieces,” neatly eliminating the threat of disaster for all concerned!

It’s the perfect situation, until Lady Beatrice’s dashing and arrogant nephew, Max, Lord Davenham, returns from the Orient—and discovers an impostor running his household…

A romantic entanglement was never the plan for these stubborn, passionate opponents—but falling in love may be as inevitable as the falling of autumn leaves…

REVIEW: This story opens up in 1805 with our young hero Max finding out that he’s come up in the world and is to inherit a title of Lord Davenham from his uncle. That however wasn’t the worst of it. Along with that title, he is informed that not is he only broke, but he is in so much debt that the only option left to this young man was to get himself off to India and work hard at amassing wealth so that he can pay-off all of those creditors and have enough left over to reestablish and restore his own name.

Before he embarks on this trip and in order to accomplish this personal goal, he now must offer a pound of flesh to only one man who is shrewd and smart enough to accept it as a bargain and for the future benefit to both of them. As he leaves England, he makes sure that his solicitors will be taking care of his elderly Aunt, Lady Bea, who is residing in one of the property’s he refused to sell because it has been her home for many years.

It’s now 1816 and while Max is still in India getting rich, our heroine Abigail Chantry has been putting up with a lot of abuse in a few positions she’s had as a governess and the only reason she did, was that she loved their children.

In her latest position, she gets some disturbing news about her only sibling and her request to be allowed to offer aid to her younger sister falls on deaf ears of her employers and is threatened with eviction if she disobeys them. Abby is left with no choice but to ignore the uppity couple she’s working for, secretly rescuing her sibling and a couple of young girls that were helping her with that task. Not long after her employer kicks her out and now all four girls are dependent on Abby’s skill and wits for their survival and that’s when she meets Lady Bea, alone and woofly neglected in her town house, wishing for death to take her.

Anne Gracie does it yet again! She created a wonderful story of a unique, strong willed and very witty heroine. She then sets out to play a matchmaker for her with a man who is duty bound to marry another and tries to ignore his desire for Abby. Add to the story a motley crew of supporting characters that are given smart, witty and frankly brilliant dialogue, and what you have is a heartwarming and funny, romantic and sexy, memorable love story.

I promise you, the pacing is such that by the time you come to that last sentence at the end of the book, you’ll be surprised and sad it’s over. This promises to be another of her wonderful series and I for one can’t wait for the second book to come out!

*Book provided by publisher through NetGalley.

Fan2Author Interview with…Anne Gracie

Kristal:  Hello Anne!  I’d like to welcome you to b2b and thank you very much for taking time out of your busy day to visit with us!  Feel free to chatter as little or as much as you would like with our readers throughout the day!

Anne Gracie:  Thanks so much for inviting me, Kristal. I’m so pleased to be here. Hi Everyone!

K:  So, I’ve been digging around a little on your website being nosey and I am truly in awe of your childhood!  All the places you traveled, all the experiences you must have had, all the ANIMALS!  What was that like for you, having such a full childhood?  Did you have a favorite place?  How about a favorite animal?

AG:  Well, it was great for me — I don’t know how it was for my parents with all those animals. <g> But I kept adding to the menagerie. I used to bring them home just on dusk, knowing my parents wouldn’t make me go out in the dark to return them. And my mother would carry on, “You’re taking that creature back first thing in the morning, missie. I’m not having another animal in the house. It’s always me who has to feed them and clean up after them and — oh, look at that poor little creature, it’s starving, poor little mite.” And she’d be feeding the kitten or whatever it was, and all the time raving on about how it was going back and she wasn’t having another animal in the house… and by evening, she’d be sitting down after dinner, trying to knit with a kitten purring on her lap or fighting with her wool, and muttering about too many animals… And they always stayed. I even brought home a white cockatoo once that I found down the swamp —  a tamed bird who wouldn’t have survived in the wild. He was a beautiful, cunning bird with an evil sense of humor.

As for a favorite place — we lived in so many places, I have favorite places everywhere. In one town I used to love going down with my dog to what we called the swamp — a big lake, surrounded by grass and reeds taller than me. I’d spend all day there sometimes. And when we lived in Scotland I used to wander along the ‘burn’ — a little stream that ran through the woods.

Also in Scotland we had an attic, which I thought was very romantic. I’d read about them in books all the time, but we generally don’t have attics in Australia. I loved looking out of the sloping window set into the roof of the attic, gazing out over the rooftops of the village where we lived. From that window I could see the ancient Pictish tower, one of only three remaining in Scotland. I’ve been thinking about that attic a lot lately, as the heroine in my current story was looking out of an attic window when she got a bold idea that changed her life. She’s in London, though, not Scotland.

K:  I love the premise for ‘Bride by Mistake’.  I am all about a war-torn hero and I certainly worship at the altar of Isabella’s pluckiness.  Was it difficult to write such intense characters with the amount of depth they both brought to the story?  Did they kind of lead you along and write their own story or was it one that you had decided upon without their help?

AG:  Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it. My characters always lead me along, though normally it’s a bit of a wrestling match and involved a lot of rewriting.  It might sound a bit weird, but for me, as if my characters actually exist and discovering them is a kind of archaeology — I have to dig around to find out what makes them tick, and they’ll often surprise me. To mix my metaphors, it’s a bit like tuning a musical instrument — you know when you’ve hit a wrong note, and have to rewrite and rewrite until it rings true to the character.

K:  I truly felt the emotions, the love, the transformation of these characters over the length of the book.  Along similar lines to my last questions, what was that writing experience like for you?  I know how it felt as a reader but I can’t even imagine as an author what it is like writing these characters as they change and evolve into the characters that they are meant to be.

AG:  Thank you. For me, digging deep into a character’s past and psyche is what stories are all about. I take a while to get started on a book, fiddling and writing and rewriting, trying to get the right angle to start the book. Once I do, I’m off and running, but all the way through I’m asking myself, why did he do that, why did she think that? What does she really want? etc. And that involved going deep.

By about half way in, I’m obsessed by the story and it’s quite hard to pull my head out of that time and place and those characters. I’ll even wake up with a scene rolling in my head like a movie, and I have to write it down by hand before I get up, otherwise I’ll forget it.

My friends know now that when I’m in the zone  I’m no fun and won’t come out to play until the book is done.

K:  Your history, education and professional endeavors certainly lend themselves nicely to your career choice as an author.  Was it always that way?  Did you always want to be an author?

AG:  No, it always amazes me that with parents who were teachers, nobody ever suggested to me I should write stories – not even when I was a kid and made up stories to tell the pets. Not even when I drove people crazy whining about having nothing to read. I was a huge bookworm and read constantly, and my best presents were always books, but I don’t remember ever thinking of being a writer. I think I imagined that writers were special people, far beyond my reach.

I remember saying once to a friend in high school that I  could write a book, but it wasn’t a serious thing.  You know how you say stuff at that age? Writing fiction wasn’t even an option at high school or university, though we did do creative writing sometimes, but I never understood what that was. We did all these weird writing exercises. If someone had ever said, “write a story” I would have loved it.

Writing a book only became a real possibility in my mind when a couple of people I knew got published, and I thought, “I want to do that.” And then, when I was overseas, traveling on my own, I had the time to think and to write — I wrote a whole novel by hand in exercise books. And that’s when the possibility became a plan.

K:  Is there any one heroine or hero who is reminiscent of your own character?  Is there one that you found to have traits similar to your own as you write?  Or maybe one that you relate to more than the others?

AG:  No, not really. I suppose the admirable things in my heroes and heroines are things I value in people — kindness, honor, loyalty, sense of humor, etc. but if I even suspected I was writing someone like me, or even like a friend of mine, I think I’d freeze.  My characters have to be free to be themselves.

I’m fond of all my characters, maybe some more than others. For instance, Harry,  in HIS CAPTIVE LADY is a hero I’m very fond of — he’s not a man for speeches, Harry. He’s the quiet, deep kind of hero, and when he committed himself to the heroine, he gave himself wholly. Bella in BRIDE BY MISTAKE was a heroine I was fond of, too — she was gutsy and loving and led with her heart. Ayisha in TO CATCH A BRIDE was also a heroine I loved — a little spitfire, but she was justified. But I pretty much love them all — I couldn’t write them if I didn’t love them.

K:  So, you’ve written many books and received many wonderful awards for your talent!  What wonderful accomplishments you have made in your career this far!  What are your plans?  What happens next? What can ours readers expect from you in the coming year or two?

AG:  Thanks, Kristal, I feel pretty fortunate to be able to continue writing. It’s a magic job, to be allowed to spin stories and to have other people read them — it’s the kind of thing I used to get into trouble for in school — daydreaming. <g>

I’ve just signed a contract for a new series, about four “sisters” in London — a Bride series — though only one of the four girls expects to be a bride. I’m working on the first of them now and I have to say, I’m enjoying the sparks that fly between the hero and the heroine. And I’ve just written a scene where some of the characters from my first Berkley book, THE PERFECT RAKE, appear, which was fun.

K:  Anne, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing a little of yourself with b2b and our readers.  We are simply tickled to have you here with us!

AG:  And I’m delighted to be here, too, Kristal and the other b2bers. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Kristal here- Anne has graciously agreed to give away a copy of one of her books to one very lucky commenter!!!