‘Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Match’ by Marilyn Brant

STORY: Would an Elizabeth Bennet by any other name be as appealing to a Darcy?

A single mother and an ER doctor meet on an Internet dating site—each for reasons that have little to do with finding their perfect match—in this modern, Austen-inspired story. It’s a tribute to the power of both “pride” and “prejudice” in bringing two people romantically together, despite their mutual insistence that they should stay apart…

Beth Ann Bennet isn’t looking for love. She’s an aspiring social worker using an online alias to study sex-role stereotypes. Dr. William Darcy isn’t looking for love either. He’s just trying to fund his new clinic by winning a major bet. Both think Lady Catherine’s Love Match Website will help them get what they want—fast, easy and without endangering their hearts. Both are in for a big surprise.

Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Match…where true love is just a fib and a click away.

REVIEW: If you’re expecting your typical ‘Pride and Prejudice’ contemporary re-telling of Jane Austen book, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by finding out that while some names have stayed the same and brought into the 21st Century, the roles might be a bit reversed.

As blurbs go, this one’s perfect and gives you just enough of a peek and a hook into the story saving me the trouble of summarizing it for you, thus letting me tell you the reasons why I liked it.

Ms. Brant cleverly takes some of the bones of the original, shakes them up, guiding them to their perfect landing and giving us a story that is all her own.

The characters, main and secondary, were three-dimensional to a point that they might have been your neighbors or your friends, that’s how real they felt. The plot was intriguing and kept you in anticipation of the final reveal, which kept the story moving and entertaining.

And just when you thought you got it all figured out, Ms. Brant gives you a surprise or two!

You know what else I liked about this story? It made me remember what my husband once told me and at the time, I don’t think I appreciated his wisdom. He said I was everything he never wanted…but go tell that to his heart!

Sometimes, what we find when not even looking is not what we want, but rather what our heart knows we need. That’s what happens to our hero and heroine, and getting there, Ms. Brant made them work for it! I found the individual life stories of both characters touching and way too real, that by the time they got their happily ever after, I was emotionally fulfilled.

‘Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Match’ is a great tribute to Jane Austen by Marilyn Brant and it will have you sigh as much as the original, if not more so. Highly, highly recommend you get it! Promise you’ll love it!

*Book provided by the author.

‘Holiday Man’ by Marilyn Brant

STORY: A Year of Holidays…

Shannon Quinn is the small-town girl who runs “Holiday Quinn” — a holiday-themed inn and resort based in scenic Door County, Wisconsin.

One winter evening, wealthy Minneapolis businessman, Bram Hartwick, blows into town along with the fast-falling snow. The sparks Bram and Shannon create succeed in heating up the chilly Midwestern night, not to mention plenty of holiday weekends in the year that follows…

But is their relationship only for special occasions, or might it be the elusive everyday love that neither of them thought could be found?

REVIEW: As I finished this story [3 am Thursday morning!] the one word that bubbled in my mind as I tried to encompass everything within it was ‘honest’.

Make no mistake, there are many more like, hot; sensual; funny; entertaining; warm…romantic. But somehow the word HONEST was the first to pop into my head. Ms. Brant had created these two characters with honesty of who they are within their vastly different upbringings.

Everything in Shannon’s life involved and revolved around the legacy that was left in her keeping. She accepted it with love and dedicated herself to making sure she didn’t disappoint anyone, her new patrons and her regular guests; her friends and employees. In pleasing everyone and making sure that the Inn thrived she neglects her love life and all other dreams are left on the back-burner to be dealt with sometime down the road. Except that ‘down the road’ line keeps moving further and further. I really, really liked her. She was such a sweetheart and totally relatable character.

Bram, our hero, was one of those men that finally starts to see the fruits of his labor. As the CEO of his company, he was very much a ‘hands on’ man and never left anything to chance. He belonged to the family of overachievers and workaholics, so the good and bad habits were in his genes. His love life suffered greatly because of them and his globetrotting.

As these two lonely people meet and consequently embark on an affair, the author is clever in throwing them a curve ball of reality, and that’s where I felt the honesty of a real life and real problems and insecurities intrude into their life and bringing this story closer to the reader.

The chemistry that the author created between the two was raw and sizzled throughout the story. For that alone, this is one worthy read!

For me, a very surprising moment came almost at the end of the book, and it will stay in my memory for ever. I hate giving spoilers, but I’ll give you a hint…I am Serbian.

‘Friday Mornings At Nine’ by Marilyn Brant

STORY: Every woman remembers her firsts: Her first kiss. Her first lover. And her first time contemplating an affair…

Each Friday morning at the Indigo Moon Café, Jennifer, Bridget and Tamara meet to swap stories about marriage, kids and work. But one day, spurred by recent e-mails from her college ex, Jennifer poses questions they’ve never faced before. What if they all married the wrong man? What if they’re living the wrong life? And what would happen if, just once, they gave in to temptation…

Soon each woman is second-guessing the choices she’s made–and the ones she can unmake–as she becomes aware of new opportunities around every corner, from attentive colleagues and sexy neighbors to flirtatious past lovers. And as fantasies blur with real life, Jennifer, Bridget and Tamara begin to realize how little they know about each other, their marriages and themselves, and how much there is to gain–and lose–when you step outside the rules.

REVIEW: Jennifer is married to Michael, mother to twin girls, and works as freelance web designer.

Bridget is married to Graham, mother of three and had just recently started work again.

Tamara, married to Jon, has one son and is stay-at-home mom.

These three middle-aged women meet each Friday at the Indigo Moon Cafe, to share their lives with each other.

Tamara’s husband is a lawyer who’s never home. Keeping company with her neighbor, a very handsome writer seems a thing to do. As their only son is off to college, she’s left all alone. Lonely and bored she makes her home and especially her garden a sanctuary of sorts.

When Jennifer receives an unexpected message from her ex-boyfriend arrives, she has a choice to make. See him with telling her hubby, or not see him and not tell her hubby?!

Bridget gets a job at Dr. Luke’s dental office, and both are happy to discover that they share their love for cooking…

The suspense of this tale is in trying to figure out which one of these women will succumb to infidelity. To be honest, I didn’t see it coming, and hope you won’t either.

Marilyn Brant went out on a limb with this story, calling it romance, and while some will no doubt not see it as such, once you get into the story, vest yourself in these complicated, sometimes frivolous yet very human characters, you’ll see the romance of it. What drew me to this story at first was the subject matter, but what grabbed me and held me captive was the humanity of the story.

You’ll appreciate this author’s serious thought and consideration to this topic which I’m sure wasn’t an easy thing to do when writing romance. She went all out in making sure we, the readers, would have the full story and in the end we were left to accept the decisions of these women without any prejudices and judgments. Now, that I call some crafty writing!

This was one book I wasn’t looking forward to reading and after I was done with it, I had a hard time penning a review of it. This story needed digesting and coming to terms with. Stories of these three women were just hitting too close to home. I identified with all three of them. I saw bits and pieces of myself in them, and like them, had at one time or another come with that same dilemma, so in the end I did…well, this is not about me, is it?

If you like well written contemporary stories, with lots of humor and plenty of reality, this one’s for you. I’d say if it comes to ‘Fifty Shades of Gray’ and this one, skip the ‘Shades’. You’ll be glad you did!

Fan2Author Interview with…Marilyn Brant!

K:  Hello Marilyn!  Thank you so much for stopping by to chat with us!  It is a pleasure to have you here! 

MB:  Thanks, Kristal—it’s wonderful to be at bookworm2bookworm!! Thank you so much for inviting me.

K:  My first question involves your extensive travel!  On your bio, I read that you have traveled to 46 states and over 30 countries??  That is amazing.  I have only ever been to a handful of the states and Canada!  How do you decide where to go next?  Do you have a favorite place to travel to? 

MB:  When my husband and I met, we were both public school teachers. During those few years that we were married but before we became parents, we lived in a little apartment and we’d save up all year and then choose a few interesting spots to visit during summer vacation. My husband still teaches world history, so he particularly loved getting to visit some of the incredible historical sites he talked about to his high-school students—like those in Italy, England and Greece. And I studied French for 5 years and had an insatiable love of Swiss chocolate, LOL, so between the two of us, we wanted to see A LOT of places!

We traveled as backpackers then. We never checked our luggage on a flight, so everything that we brought for one of our trips had to fit into a carry-on backpack. For us, that made it easier to travel light and visit multiple places on a trip. When we went to Europe, we would purchase Eurail passes in advance so we’d have full access to their extensive train systems. It allowed us to easily change plans because we could hop on almost any train we wanted with very little notice. We might decide to begin our journey in Austria but, then, while we were there, some random person we met would tell us we just had to visit this small community in Switzerland…so we’d look at our map, consult the train schedules and figure out what connections we needed to get there. (That actually happened by the way—it’s how we discovered the beautiful town of Zermatt in the Swiss Alps.) It was very freeing and really fun to be able to be that flexible.

Of course, that was 15 years ago, and our lives have changed a lot since then! We now have a house, a teenage son and aging parents who need care. We can’t just take off and go to Europe for a few weeks. However, we really wanted to introduce our son to the joys (and, sometimes, the challenges) of travel, so we went on our first international trip as a family last month, and we took him to England and northern Wales. My husband and I hadn’t been in the U.K. since 1996, so it was thrilling for us to go back there for a week and a privilege to get to see our son experiencing the wonder of places like Stonehenge and the Tower of London for the first time.

K:  Do your extensive travels inspire your books?  Any particular place that brings out the creative muse in you? 

MB:  I love so many, many places…sigh. I’d dreamed of visiting the Alps since I was in 6th grade. I even wrote a descriptive piece for my middle school English class on the beauty of the mountains there, though it would be more than a decade before I’d get to see them with my own eyes.

When I was in high school, I was fortunate enough to be accepted into an exchange program through AFS, and I spent the summer when I was 16 in Brisbane, Australia. I *loved* that! If I hadn’t already been a totally travel-obsessed kid that trip would have made me so.

But the place I always think of as my “creative muse” is Venice, Italy. I love everything about that city. The uniqueness of it. The colorful masks. The way the light plays against the many footbridges and piazzas and how the reflection of the buildings in the water makes it seem like the paint is sliding off of them and into the canal… And, oh, there are to-die-for gelato shops and beautifully crafted pieces of art and jewelry to look at and be dazzled by. There are the historical sites, the famous rituals/carnivals and the fact that the place has looked essentially the same for centuries.

So, short answer: Yes. My travels have definitely inspired my books. My most recent novel, A SUMMER IN EUROPE (Kensington), is all about a woman who’d never before left the United States but is getting to discover the beauty of Italy, France, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and England for the first time…and how those experiences change her perception of where her life is and where it’s going.

K:  I see that you are a Jane Austen fan!  My daughter and I have watched Pride and Prejudice a hundred times.  I really am a sucker for the epic love story.  Have you read all of her books and seen all of the movies about her?  How much of Jane’s influence can we see in your books?   

MB:  Depending on the book you’re reading, Austen had quite a lot of influence! My debut novel, ACCORDING TO JANE, is my personal homage to her. Austen has been my favorite author since I was a high-school freshman, and my first book is about a woman who has the ghost of Jane Austen in her head giving her dating advice…for about 2 decades! (It takes my heroine a long time to get the love thing right, LOL.) And, yes, I have read all of her published novels, as well as quite a few biographies and letters she wrote and unfinished writing projects. I don’t think I’ve seen *every* movie made about her or adapted from one of her books, but I’m pretty close on that. I don’t blame you for watching PRIDE AND PREJUDICE a hundred times, by the way!! I’ve watched and read that brilliant story countless times, too.

Two of my other books—ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAE and FRIDAY MORNINGS AT NINE—reference Austen’s novels in there somewhere, but A SUMMER IN EUROPE has some Austen-esque elements. It also shares a lot with E.M. Forster’s classic story, A ROOM WITH A VIEW, which is another novel I’ve loved for years.

K:  All of your books have received wonderful reviews.  People love them and relish the characters and the dimensions of your stories.  How does it feel to know that people love your books so much? 

MB:  Oh, thank you for saying that! I know that no author can be loved by *everyone*—much as we wish we could. However, I do feel tremendously excited and honored when readers will take time to leave me a comment on Facebook or to send me a tweet or an email saying that they read one of my books and it made them laugh or it touched them in some way. It’s the best feeling. I also love when they post reviews on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads or their personal blog and recommend one of my books to others. An honest, enthusiastic review from a reader is like getting a very special gift. It’s proof that a connection exists between us—a bond of understanding authors and readers share—and, to me, that’s priceless.

K:  What inspired you to become a writer?  Was it something you always knew you wanted to be or did it come to you over time?  Can you tell us a little bit about the creative process that takes place in your mind? 

MB:  The reason I became a writer was because I felt so indebted to other authors for either giving me a fun story to escape into or convincing me that they really understood whatever struggle I was dealing with in my life at the time. I’ll always appreciate Jennifer Crusie and Susan Elizabeth Phillips for creating such laugh aloud romantic comedies, and I’m just as grateful to Sue Miller, Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Berg for making me feel as though I wasn’t alone in being frustrated with many real-life issues or relationships. It’s my biggest hope that I can be an author who brings that kind of humor and/or reassurance to a few readers out there, too.

As for the creative process, I think it mostly comes down to the fact that I ask myself hundreds of “what-if” questions every day. “What if you had to run an ice cream parlor for the summer with the guy who’d broken your heart a decade before…and he didn’t even know it?” Or, “What if Jane Austen could advise you on the guys you’re interested in…and what would happen if you didn’t listen to her or if she were even wrong on occasion?” Or, “What if you were given an amazing summer trip as a gift but you’d never been far away from home before…how would you feel being truly out in the world for the first time?” I think creativity originates in curiosity, so I really enjoy contemplating all kinds of questions like these.

K:  What can we expect next from you?  Any books in the works right now?  What releases can our readers watch out for in the future? 

MB:  I’m working on three different projects right now, and I hope all of them will be published in the next year or two. The first is a new romantic comedy that (fingers crossed!) will be released at the end of this year. (I’ll always post the publication dates of any upcoming books on my website: http://www.marilynbrant.com) The second project is the first book in a romance/women’s fiction series set in a warm climate that involves a cast of funny, unique characters and a community that cares deeply about the environment. And the third is a project I’m in the midst of writing, and it’s a little too early for me to describe it accurately. I’m still learning who these characters are and what they desperately need in their lives. Every day, I’m excited to get back to it so I can figure out a little more about them and delve a bit deeper into their story…

Thanks, again, for having me as a guest today. It was a pleasure to be here!

I’ll give away a PDF copy of my romantic comedy, DOUBLE DIPPING, to one of the commenters on this post .