Today's Special -- Liz Talley & Once Upon a Wedding

It's my pleasure to welcome the sweet, sassy, southern, and oh-so-talented Liz Talley to The Romance Dish today. It took only one book - The Thornbirds - to hook Liz on romance. Following that discovery, she devoured the Harlequin SuperRomances at her aunt's used bookstore and Mills and Boon medical romances she borrowed from her grandmother's stash. It wasn't until college that she entertained the idea of writing one of the stories she already loved reading. Her first book debuted in 2010 and she's gone on to publish 25+ novels since, finaling in the Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart and RITA contests. 

Liz married her high school sweetheart and has two sons. According to her, when she's not busy writing she can be found working in her flowerbeds or doing laundry. 

Welcome, Liz!

Hello, reader friends!

I’m so happy to be here to share with you a whoppingly large anthology by some of the best romance and women’s fiction writers in the business. I’m incredibly honored that they let me join them. I mean, they put me last and so…just kidding. We did it alphabetically so, yeah, Liz Talley is last. But that doesn’t matter because once people start these fun stories of second chance love, they will not stop until the last page.

So how did this come about?

I’m not sure if you were wondering that, but I’ll go ahead and tell you. First, the authors are all part of a Facebook group called Fiction From the Heart. This cozy nook on the internet was Jamie Beck’s brainchild. She and I met at RWA Nationals and struck up a friendship. In talking about how to reach readers and build community, we reasoned Facebook was a natural place to hang out with people who were like us – wanted a place with no stressors (aka no politics) and loved books. Voila! FFTH was born. We invited like-minded authors, with an eye on a variety of styles. I think if you peruse the list of authors there, you’ll see plenty of diversity in style and theme, but the unifying element is we’re all hard-working writers who write the same genre and love what we do.

So the anthology…well, several of our authors wanted to try their hands at self-publishing. It’s daunting to strike out on one’s own and indie-publish a book. It’s much easier to do it together where you can be assured of hand-holding. We picked a month that we thought would work for most of us since most all are under contract with publishers. And then we chose a unifying theme. We couldn’t decide between weddings or second chances so we did both.

Pulling together new stories, some connected to current series, was a huge undertaking. Many of our authors write several books a year, along with other writing projects. So it was a bit like lassoing kittens at times. But in the end, we persevered. And now we have this gorgeous collection of romantic stories we can be very proud 

of.

Why price it so low?

It’s totally affordable, right? We intentionally priced it at an introductory offer so we could (hopefully) sell A LOT of copies. Our main goal was cross-readership. All of us have our own readers, but we’re constantly looking for new ones. Of course. And we had a lot of discussion about pricing the anthology so low. We really didn’t want to devalue our work. Writing is hard (even now I’m penning this from my standing desk because my back is toast) and we always want readers to see value in what they are reading. Often a 99 cent book doesn’t feel very valuable. Still, in our discussions we came back around to publishing this anthology as a way to brand us together as Fiction From the Heart and to give readers exposure to new authors they can fall in love with.

I love being a member of this group of authors. We’ve established such a lovely friendship with one another and the FFTH members, so I’m especially proud of this anthology and what it represents for us. I hope you will grab a copy. TODAY is the last day to get it for 99 cents. Tomorrow it will be $4.99. (It's also available in print.)

Thanks, Romance Dish, for letting me come talk about this special project.

***Giveaway***  

One commentor will win a digital copy of Come Home to Me and a $15 Amazon card to buy MORE books!

PJ, here. I love discovering new-to-me authors in anthologies. There were a couple in Once Upon a Wedding that I hadn't read before. After enjoying their second-chance novellas, I'll definitely be seeking out more of their books!

Do you enjoy anthologies? Have you ever discovered a previously unknown author in an anthology who has gone on to become one of your favorites? 

Have you read any of Liz Talley's books yet? Do you have a favorite? 

Check out the rest of Liz's books at her website (including an upcoming July release) and connect with her online at Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.

Come Home to Me

by Liz Talley

Publisher: Montlake Romance

Buy at: http://bit.ly/ComeHomeToMe

 

Healing the wounds of the past doesn’t come easy in this novel of friendship and forgiveness from award-winning author Liz Talley.

Summer Valentine has returned to Moonlight, South Carolina, a very different woman from the naive wallflower who left years before. These days she’s straightforward and savvy, determined to do right by her son, David—even if that means cashing in her struggling music career in Nashville and returning to the town that drove her away. Sure, she took a fall. But at least she now knows where she stands…

Despite her anger over the past, Summer believes David deserves a relationship with his father, Hunter “Hunt” McCroy. Though Hunt’s illustrious career has faded, privilege still protects him from his worst mistakes.

Someone else is back in Moonlight too: Rhett Bryan, the golden boy of Hollywood, who’s taking stock of his own life after a tragic accident. As his rekindled friendship with Summer quickly deepens, she must reconcile the painful history that ties her to both men—one she’s finally forgiven, one she’s afraid to love—to claim healing and happiness.

Review - - Come Home to Me

Come Home to Me

By Liz Talley

Publisher: Montlake

Release Date: April 17, 2018
Reviewed by Janga 

Fifteen years ago, three members of the Class of 2003 of Mangham High School, Moonlight, South Carolina, left their small hometown. Summer Valentine, a brainy girl with a gift for composing and singing, left for Columbia, South Carolina, where she had a full scholarship to the University of South Carolina. A short time later she was back home, pregnant, and dealing with her father suffering because they were targeted by the wealthy, influential family of her baby’s father. She kept her child against all advice, attending a community college to earn a business degree instead of the life she had planned. From the moment she made her decision, her child has been the most important person in her life. It was for David, now fourteen, that she left Nashville and her dream of making it as a singer-songwriter to return to Moonlight so that her son’s father could be part of his life in a way not possible with eight hours distance between them.

Rhett Bryan left Moonlight to attend college in California. He discovered his freshman year that he had a gift for standup comedy, and through hard work and compromise, he has parleyed that gift into A-list stardom as the host of a popular late-night television show. But when he accidentally kills a child who chases a ball into the street, his life changes. A pending wrongful-death suit and a public meltdown on his show have NBC suggesting he take a long break. He heads home to Moonlight, to his grandfather’s house where he grew up after his parents’ deaths. Maybe in his hometown he can find the boy he used to be and healing for the man he has become.

Hunt McCroy left Moonlight to attend the University of Florida and play baseball for the Gators. Baseball was his life, and when Summer informed him of her pregnancy, his only concern was not letting fatherhood interfere with his dream of a successful college career followed by playing professional baseball. He had little to do with his son for the first nine years of the boy’s life. That changed five years ago when an injury and subsequent addiction to pain medication destroyed his baseball career and sent him back to Moonlight to work for his controlling father. Hunt is determined to be a good father and to avoid repeating the errors his own father made, errors that left Hunt feeling as if he never measured up.

Summer, Rhett, and Hunt discover that the choices they made when they were only a few years older than young David are still impacting their present. Summer always saw Rhett as a golden boy without blemish, but she learns that he is as flawed and vulnerable and scarred as she is. Rhett must learn that Summer is a woman made strong and beautiful by her experience, far different from the teenage girl who tutored him. He and Hunt, once best friends, find out how little they knew about each other. And Hunt learns that to be the father he wants to be he must face the truth of his past and accept responsibility for his mistakes.

Talley uses multiple points of view and a narrative that switches between past and present to give her readers a compelling story that packs a powerful emotional punch. Although Summer and Rhett’s romance is essential to the story, this book is more a general fiction/romance hybrid than a conventional romance. There are really no heroes or villains here. While some of their mistakes are more consequential than others, all three of the central characters are faulty, deeply human creatures who struggle to make meaning out of their lives. Each of them grows during the story and eventually achieves new self-awareness and earned happiness. I liked Rhett and developed a degree of sympathy for Hunt, but Summer is my favorite character. Her love for her son and her capacity to forgive—which is NOT the same as forgetting—is amazing.

The secondary characters add more depth to the story. Rhett’s grandfather is a curmudgeon with a good heart, David is a credible adolescent with an endearing sweetness and the errors in judgment common to teenage boys, and Summer’s sister Maisie is an interesting and sympathetic character. Even Hunt’s father, although a jerk of the first order, is more than a stereotype. Additionally, Talley gives a clear sense of Moonlight’s low-country appeal, but she avoids making the town unbelievable idyllic.

I've been a Liz Talley fan since her Boys of the Bayou Harlequin Superromance series, and her Morning Glory books all earned stellar reviews from me. (I look forward to the fourth book in that series set to be released this summer.) Talley has never been afraid to push the boundaries of the genre, and she is particularly adept at weaving stories around the second-chance trope. This is one of her best. The ending left me sighing happily.  

If you like stories about flawed characters who fall down and get up--and ultimately grab their second chance, I think you will enjoy Come Home to Me as much as I did. I highly recommend it. One caveat: parts of this book may be a problem for readers for whom non-consensual sex is a trigger, and the cover copy fails to warn of this.