I am very excited to say that EDITH HOBSON DECLARES INDEPENDENCE is available at most e-book outlets! Alas, Amazon is not one of them, but I am working on rectifying that. (The reason why the e-book isn’t on the Zon may be worth a post by itself, but today I’m focusing on the positive – my book baby is live!)

Even if you’re a dedicated Amazon customer, I hope you’ll consider following a link to one of the sites where the book is currently available just to take a look at the blurb and see if you’re interested.

You can find buy links for EDITH HOBSON on my Books page, but I’d like to tell you about her first.

Edith grew up on a farm just outside Gravel Hill, a fictional town that I plopped onto the map somewhere south of Fremont, Nebraska. Fremont is not fictional, by the way. In 1920, some 9,000 people called it home.

Gravel Hill is a lot smaller — I gave it a population closer to 500. It’s the kind of small town that’s hard to hide in when you get in trouble. You know, like when you’re barely out high school and you get caught locking lips with Frank Novotny at the town’s New Year’s Eve dance. Frank, the son of your mother’s worst enemy — AKA the one boy in town that is permanently and irrevocably off limits to you.

I know, tame stuff in this day and age, but pre-World War I, getting caught exchanging tongue tonsillectomies was a Big Deal. Aside from being labeled as the town floozy at age 18, Edith had to face the ensuing storm of gossip on her own. Frank was shipped back to college by his own overbearing mother.

(You’re not wrong, Frank sounds like a mama’s boy here, but he was also only 18. In his heartbreak he left school and volunteered for the American Ambulance Service. Driving wounded Frenchmen under hostile fire made him grow up a lot.)

The story opens in 1926, when Edith has resurrected her reputation and is well on the way to becoming the kind of spinster that people call ‘a pillar of the community’. She’s valued for her organizational ability and her volunteer work. Edith has had her share of beaus over the years, too, even if none of them made her heart pound like it did when she was 18.

Frank is a mere footnote in her past.

Until he comes back. All he wants to do is wrap up his mother’s estate, sell her house and leave Gravel Hill behind him. This is fine with Edith, until their old attraction cracks her carefully maintained reputation.

Feeling like herself again for the first time in years, Edith defies her disapproving mother and brother to embark on a summer fling with her old flame. Edith and Frank discover that underneath their changes, they are still drawn to one another. EDITH HOBSON DECLARES INDEPENDENCE tells the story of a woman who is confronted with the choice of being what others want her to be, or being herself.