Book II in the Rose Series
A Burnished Rose - Book I
Today women have a glass ceiling. In the 1930s that ceiling was made of wood, so following your dream only took you so far - especially if you went against societal norms and what your friends and family told you you should or should not do. This is the story told in A Burnished Rose, the much-anticipated sequel to the award-winning Rosebloom.
Rose Krantz, a soon-to-be eighteen-year-old, has just come home to the family farm in southwest Wisconsin after running away from home two years earlier to follow her dream. She’s home because her mother has been ill, but Rose is not looking to stay. Despite the strong objections of her family and a new man that comes into her life, Rose makes it back to her second home, New Orleans, and her boyfriend, Malcolm.
Then early one morning on December 7th, 1941, bombs explode on the small, distant island of Hawaii. This incident pushes Rose, who is in Baton Rouge training to be a nurse, into a global conflict that ironically will come to be known as “The Good War.”
A Burnished Rose entertains, inspires, and reminds us what life was like for women of that era and the nurses, right along with the men, made significant sacrifices for their country.
Behind the Story
About partway through writing Rosebloom, I knew I was going to continue Rose's story. I'm not sure the initial motivation but I wanted to tell a nurses story of WWII, something we don't see or know much about.
I was fortunate enough to find two real nurse in the 95th Evacuation Hospital and one that lived in driving distance of Wisconsin, in Pelican Rapids Minnesota. Her name is Marcy Korda and she is a petite, effervesant woman of 90 something. She was gracious enough to share her story with me and connect me to Bea W. Hansen, another nurse in her unit. I consider Marcy a friend and we still correspond to this day.
Part of the fun of writing a story is to be able to put some personal information in your stories. In A Burnished Rose I was able to talk about the Army unit my father was a part of - the 3rd Armored. My character Earl (also one of my brother's names) follows where my father traveled with the 3rd Armored. My dad also was wounded twice by shrapnel and recuperated in England on at least on one of those occasions. The picture on the back of the third Rose book - Rose From the Ashes - is my father in a park in England before he was shipped back to the front.
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I am proud to be able to honor the sacrifices my father and nurses like Marcy made in the war by writing this book.