I’ll start out with the links, in case that’s all you’re here for. :)

ROSES IN AMBER, available now at:
iTunes || Kindle || Kobo || Nook || Amazon (paperback) || & at bookstores near you! Order with title or ISBN (978-1613171363)

Beauty and the Beast is my favourite fairy tale. Always has been, perhaps since I read “The Wounded Lion” in the gorgeously illustrated ENCHANTED TALES (Rand McNally, 1978) as a small child. I read Robin McKinley’s Beauty until the cover fell off, and Rose Daughter years later. Between those, I loved Gargoyles and the 80s tv series starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman; I watched the 1946 film and the 1991 one, and I read many, many versions of the story. When I learned the story we all knew was based on a 1756 French fairy tale, I read that version too, delighted to have read the ‘original’, in so far as fairy tales have definitive originals.

Except very recently, I discovered the 1756 version was adapted from a longer, more complicated and backstory-heavy version from 1740. Many, many elements are the same familiar ones we know: a wealthy family brought low, a retreat to the woods, a chance at financial redemption, a rose that wrecks everything.

But the backstories, OMG. The wicked fairy wasn’t *just* a nasty old fairy who transformed the prince for being a pill. The kingdom isn’t *just* left bizarrely bereft of its ruling family. There were all *kinds* of other things going on. There are political and sexual revolutions underlying the story. It was amazing!

I had–of course–always wanted to write a version of Beauty and the Beast myself (I mean, the actual fairy tale itself; The Negotiator Trilogy *is* a BatB story, obviously), but I’d never really known what I might be able to bring to the story that others hadn’t. And with this 1740 version of the story in hand, I all of a sudden knew what to do.

A great deal of what you’ll find in these pages is drawn from that centuries-old story. Not all of it, obviously, but maybe more than you’d think. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, because I had SO MUCH FUN!

There is a story of a beast, and a merchant’s daughter, and a curse that must be broken.
This is not–quite–that story.

But like magic, wealth can disappear. Left destitute, Amber’s family retreats to a forest holding far from their city home, where Amber’s love of roses leads her into the heart of enchantment, and draws her into a retelling of the tale as old as time….

iTunes || Kindle || Kobo || Nook || Amazon (paperback) || & at bookstores near you! Order with title or ISBN (978-1613171363)