Showing results by publisher "She Writes Press" in Historical Fiction

Based on a true story, this is the tale of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s fight to take her rightful place in the competitive art world of 18th-century Paris. With a beautiful rival who’s better connected and better trained than she is, Adélaïde faces an uphill battle. Her love affair with her young instructor in oil painting gives rise to suspicions that he touches up her work, and her decision to make much-needed money by executing erotic pastels threatens to create as many problems as it solves.

In the jubilant aftermath of Japan’s surrender in World War II, San Francisco erupts in celebration. But for Sandy Zimmer, the thirty-two-year-old widow publisher of the Prospect newspaper, the revelry masks a darker truth. In the chaos of the VJ-Day Peace Riot, eleven deaths and six rapes take place. Driven by journalistic integrity and battling her own instincts to maintain peace, Sandy directs her paper to investigate the riot.

It's 1942. Cynical young gossip columnist Jane Benjamin joins FDR’s Office of War Information propaganda unit, aiming to replace big league gossip queen Hedda Hopper and get syndicated across the country. Jane scours the shipyard for a picture perfect Wendy-the-Welder poster girl to boost ship production by coaxing women into the workforce and to get her own name on newspapers everywhere. But when two top candidates die on the job, Jane’s got to choose between personal ambition and service, before the murderer kills another woman welder and America’s best chance of winning the war.

In 1660, Amsterdam is the trading and map-printing capital of the world. Anneke van Brug is one of the colorists paid to enhance black-and-white maps for a growing number of collectors. Her artistic talent brings her to the attention of the Blaeu printing house, and she begins to color for a rich merchant, Willem de Groot. But Anneke is not content to simply embellish the work of others; she longs to create maps of her own. Cartography, however, is the domain of men - so it is in secret that she borrows the notes her father made on a trip to Africa in 1642 and sets about designing a new map.

On the brink of World War II, Jane Benjamin wants to have it all. By day she hustles as a tomboy cub reporter. By night, she struggles to raise her toddler sister, Elsie, and protect her from their mother. But Jane’s got a plan: she’ll become the San Francisco Prospect’s first gossip columnist and make enough money to care for Elsie. Jane finagles her way to the women’s championship at Wimbledon, starring tennis phenom Tommie O’Rourke. But then she witnesses Edith “Coach” Carlson, Tommie’s closest companion, drop dead in the stands of apparent heart attack.

In 1933 in the Shenandoah Valley, there isn't a place for Lum (short for Columbia), a 33-year-old intersex woman. She travels by schedule from one branch of the family to another, assisting with cooking, childcare, and housework. Always an outsider, even in her own family, Lum secretly collects postcards of people like the Dog-faced Girl, imagining their stories, and nurtures her lifelong friendship with Smiley, an African-American man who sells furniture, odds and ends, and a little moonshine.

Like the braiding of three strands of brioche, three women whose lives have separately been touched by World Wars—a French mother, her adult daughter and their American friend—become inextricably intertwined once shared cups of coffee turn to revelations of wartimes past. After searching through old letters and diaries for clues, two of the women are compelled to travel throughout the French countryside in order to honor the dying wish of the third woman—“find my father.” Along with this quest to redeem her name, each woman is surprised to discover forgiveness and redemption awaiting her, one she risked revealing her own secrets.

What would Jesus do? This wry, irreverent, fictionalized account of his life and ministry—told from the perspective of disciple Mary Magdalene—will implode everything you thought you knew. Jesus Christ—Yeshua, to his friends—is not happy. Two thousand years after his death, he sees Earth heading toward oblivion. Ever eager to save humanity, he asks Mary Magdalene (Magda) for help. It’s time to tell the real story of our time together, he says. Time to correct all the misinformation, misogyny, and lies spread by Peter, Paul, and the Roman Catholic Church.