Every year, summer comes too slowly, and speeds by too fast. After a brutally cold winter, and no spring at all this year (literally overnight, the weather hop skipped from still wintry to instant summer), our minds are already turning to fall projects and getting kids ready for school. September is always a super busy month. I start my heavy fall/winter writing schedule on the first of September, so I savor every minute of August, but already with my eye and mind on new projects and ideas for new books.
I hope you’ve managed to have some downtime this summer, even a real vacation, or at least a few days somewhere—or even a “staycation” in your home city or town for some much-needed time off. I have loved every minute I was able to spend with my children this summer, always the best part of any year for me, the time we spend together on vacation. We still spend vacation time together in the summer, even now that they’ve grown up.
We have some exciting new books for you for this half of the summer, that I hope you’ll love. Joy is coming out in hardcover this month, with one woman’s search for what truly matters in life to bring her peace, happiness, and fulfillment—and her journey to get there—while facing the challenges and varied surprises that life puts on our paths.
And The Ball at Versailles is a really fun read, in paperback, to put a happy spin to the end of summer. It’s about a real ball that took place in Paris, at the Palace of Versailles (still a spectacular place to visit!!), in the 1950s. The book (a novel) is set at the first debutante ball that was held there, with all the elegance and the excitement of the event, livened up even more with the kind of mischief 18-year-olds can get up to, and the concern it can cause their parents. The setting is gorgeous, the event a historical wonder, and the fictional situations many or most of us face with teenagers spreading their wings and flying into young adulthood!!! Two hundred young women were chosen to make their debut at the real event, thirty-seven of them Americans who came to Paris to be presented at the Ball. (The new third season of Bridgerton on Netflix is about debutantes in the nineteenth century, being presented at court and all the drama that went with it—in those days, debutantes were expected to meet the men they would marry a month or so later, men they barely knew. By the 1950s, at the Ball at Versailles, the pressure was a little less extreme, but the expectations were fairly similar.)
I hope you love both books, and enjoy them for the last of your summer days, with time to read them, before you leap into fall.
I wish you a very wonderful month of August, and that you make every day count for big and small pleasures, and memories that you will treasure.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An irresistible novel about a woman whose seemingly perfect life comes crashing down—and learns to find joy in rising above.READ MORE »
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