C Gockel Writes

Featured Holiday Fantasy: Ballgowns & Butterflies by Kelley Armstrong

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Featured Holiday Fantasy: Ballgowns & Butterflies by Kelley Armstrong

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The North Yorkshire moors are always a magical place, but they’re particularly enchanting at the holidays…especially if one gets to travel back in time to a Victorian Christmas. For Bronwyn Dale, it is the stuff of dreams. Fancy-dress balls, quirky small-town traditions, even that classic one-horse open sleigh, complete with jingle bells. There’s just the tiny problem of the Butterfly Effect. How does a time-traveler make a difference without disrupting the future forever?

Note: this is a holiday novella not a full-length book

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Featured Fantasy: A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

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99¢ as of October 30, 2021
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Thorne Manor has always been haunted…and it has always haunted Bronwyn Dale. As a young girl, Bronwyn could pass through a time slip in her great-aunt’s house, where she visited William Thorne, a boy her own age, born two centuries earlier. After a family tragedy, the house was shuttered and Bronwyn was convinced that William existed only in her imagination.

Now, twenty years later Bronwyn inherits Thorne Manor. And when she returns, William is waiting.

William Thorne is no longer the boy she remembers. He’s a difficult and tempestuous man, his own life marred by tragedy and a scandal that had him retreating to self-imposed exile in his beloved moors. He’s also none too pleased with Bronwyn for abandoning him all those years ago.

As their friendship rekindles and sparks into something more, Bronwyn must also deal with ghosts in the present version of the house. Soon she realizes they are linked to William and the secret scandal that drove him back to Thorne Manor. To build a future, Bronwyn must confront the past.

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Book Review a Stitch in Time

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A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

99¢ as of October 30, 2021 click for current price on: Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia and Barnes & Noble.

Audio and ebooks also available at: Apple, Kobo, GooglePlay

A Stitch in Time is a love story between two adults from two different times. It is heartfelt and moves at a can’t-put-the-book-down pace. Kelley is famous for her thrillers and it comes out here. There are some very heart in the throat sequences. All the action is really smart–these are adults, and there aren’t any plot contrivances because a character made a decision that was out-of-characterly dumb. The characters are also realistically drawn. The heroine is a university professor from Canada, and she is believably woke. The characters in the rural Scottish village where the titular “stitch” in time is located are not. However, they’re not bigots either. They’re just not up to date on the latest lingo, which doesn’t mean they aren’t accepting.

There was a lot of interplay between cultures–past and present, rural and urban. At one point the heroine points out that the Victorians could crush someone’s reputation with just the insinuation of a sexual scandal, but of course, at least in the U.S., reputations have been damaged and or destroyed by false accusations. For good and for bad, people are just people, but love and friendship are as enduring as the bad … and that was what really made the book.

You can get Stitch in Time in ebook, audiobook, and paperback at Amazon US, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia and Barnes & Noble.

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