Spotlight & Giveaway: Should Have Told You Sooner by Jane Ward

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Jane Ward to HJ!

Hi Jane and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Should Have Told You Sooner!

 
Hello, Readers!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

At age eighteen, while studying art history at a London university, Noel Enfield falls passionately in love with aspiring artist and art school student, Bryn Jones. Shortly after Bryn leaves for a five-month painting trip through Italy, Noel discovers she is pregnant. She is ecstatic and believes Bryn will be too–they have plans to marry, after all. But mishaps and misunderstandings part the two lovers, and, desperate, Noel makes a split second decision to move forward in a way that will change not only her life but the lives of everyone she loves.

Three decades later, when she is offered a six-month secondment to a London museum, Noel decides it’s time to prove she really has moved on from that difficult period by returning to the city where she met and lost Bryn. But rather than proving she has persevered, the move lands Noel in the thick of London’s insular art world, and only one or two degrees of separation from her past and the people she once loved.

After she reconnects with an old, dear friend and learns finally what kept Bryn from returning to her all those years ago, the revelation rocks the very underpinnings of her life. Some decisions made in the past could never be put behind her, she realizes, and armed with this new understanding, she sets out on a journey to reclaim what–and who–she left behind.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

Marrying Bryn was a choice she couldn’t see around the corner of—would she hurt him or someone else somehow, somewhere down the road, simply by saying yes, by standing up with him and taking vows? Could she be certain nothing bad would happen? Being here, loving him, was not so much making a choice as it was fulfilling a necessity, like taking breaths, and she was fine with that for now.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The inspiration for this book came from a Welsh folk tale called “The Lady of Llyn Y Fan Fach” in which a mortal man falls in love with a water fairy who rises from a magical lake. I used this mythology and its landscape as the setting for Bryn’s early painting of Noel.
• I got to spend a day with a Massachusetts painter–Sue Fontaine–observing her techniques so that I might write with authority about my characters’ art works. Between that and all my museum visits, research for this book was so much fun!
• The characters are still very much alive in my imagination and I’m trying to decide what to do about that. Sequel? Maybe.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

University students Noel and Bryn meet while on a night out at a disco. Noel doesn’t want to be there and instead of dancing, she’s standing off in the shadows alone. Or mostly alone – there’s another person nearby, a young man, also off in his own world. She doesn’t think much of it until a slow song comes on and she feels a tap on her shoulder. It’s the young man, Bryn, asking her to dance. When the song ends, they part without another word, but the encounter with Bryn stays on her mind. A few days later, Bryn is waiting for her outside her classroom building. He’s been thinking about her too, and he wants to paint her. From that moment on, they are enmeshed, inseparable. As their relationship develops, Noel begins to understand their bond. I write, “…how alike she and he were, navigating the complicated world of higher education and aspiration and belonging without the guidance of someone connected and knowledgeable, without an advocate. So what, she’d thought. We have each other.” They are each other’s safety.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

The ending made me burst into tears because I figured out what would happen only as I was writing it! They were tears of relief, but also tears of emotional release as two characters who had been moving toward some kind of resolution between them finally found it. Here’s a piece of the scene, edited a bit to avoid spoilers:

“Of the four people who’d ever known the full story of those intervening years, one was dead, one was Cal, and the other two lived right here in this house. She’d never considered telling anyone else, and so years of her life continued to be held secret. What she held inside, though, felt like an impediment to every part of moving forward. She wondered if finally telling the story to someone…and releasing the pressure that comes with holding things in for no reason other than shame, might let life flow forward as if it was a river freed from a dam. ‘Would you like to go for that walk now?’ she suggested. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’”

Readers should read this book….

I approach every story I write with curiosity about why people do what they do and whether or not they use all their experiences–good and bad–to grow. This is my desire when I write: to understand the world around me. Should Have Told You Sooner is a very human story about the kind of mistakes we all make and the grace we all deserve. It should make the reader think about the arc of a life and how, in the words of one of the characters, “Everything you did and didn’t do brought you exactly here.” It’s the mistakes as well as the triumphs that make all of us who we are, and this, I think, is universally relatable.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

When the writing of Should Have Told You Sooner ended, the characters kept nudging me as if they had more to say. So I’m currently in the middle of discovering what’s next for Noel and Bryn and Henry and Noel’s stepdaughter, Alice. Maybe stay tuned for a sequel. When that’s put to bed one way or the other, I’m going to turn to a modern ghost story set in Switzerland. My first love as an early reader were the classic gothic novels, and I’d love to give that genre a try.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A copy of SHOULD HAVE TOLD YOU SOONER by Jane Ward

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: Noel’s grandmother’s advice to draw a line under tragedy and move forward–”What’s done is done”–shapes Noel’s approach to life. This kind of stoicism and advice to move on is common, but is it ultimately helpful or harmful to a person?

Excerpt from Should Have Told You Sooner:

The dance beat pounded, steady and unvaried. At the song’s chorus, the press of people on the disco floor raised their arms into the air in unison while colored lights strobed, illuminating the floors and walls and bodies. “Take me dancing naked in the rain!” Noel stood apart from the scene, looking down from the balcony where the drinks were sold. She nursed a gin and tonic; she couldn’t stand the sweet, yeasty smell of ales or cider. Discotheques were unfamiliar to her and she was too self-conscious for dancing. Alone up here, she felt out of place and conspicuous.

She had come at Calum’s urging but knew no one in the crowd well except for him, and he was currently one of the arm wavers down in the crush of moving bodies. As she watched them, her overactive imagination conjured a fire breaking out, a stampede that might block a mass exit from the disco, the newspaper story she might not live to see the next day: Death, Disaster at the Disco.

“I should go home,” she whispered to herself.

“You must come out tonight,” Cal had said earlier that day on their way out of the lecture hall. He had linked his arm through hers and batted his eyes at her until she laughed. He was the first friend she had made at university, and now her closest one.

“You know I’m hopeless in crowds,” she had protested while still laughing at his mugging.

“Even introverts need to blow off steam after the grind of exams and papers. You’ll see, the minute you get out on the dance floor you can be alone in your own world, if that’s what you want.”

She’d taken a beat to give some thought to what he’d said. “Oh, all right,” she’d finally agreed, “but only because you look so pathetically sad when I tell you no.”

Cal and his easy-going ways had put her at ease from their first meeting over books at the bookstore. Other students in her course had acted aloof at first, wary of potential rivals. The art history college was competitive; museum jobs in London were scarce and highly sought-after. Such circumstances didn’t breed easy camaraderie, and it didn’t help that she was from America, still trying to find her way so many miles from home and her grandmother. But in a few short months, Cal had managed to endear himself to a large network of friends and acquaintances—male and female, foreigners and locals alike—both in and outside of university. He especially believed in balancing study with dancing.

He was also a good friend. Noel knew he’d look for her when he came up for air, and if she wasn’t there, he would be disappointed to find out she had ditched him.

Resigned, she sighed and sipped her drink. It was warm. She had asked for ice and the bartender had given her one ice cube in return. She turned to look back at the bar, wondering if there might be a different server tending who would be more generous. Blocking her view was a young man dancing by himself, eyes closed, shoulders loose, his head bobbing and keeping time with the synthed beat.

He was breathtakingly good-looking. Not cute, not even handsome. Beautiful was all she could think about him. Sleek, dark hair that looked blue-black under the recessed lighting of the bar alcove and long enough to curl slightly at the nape of his neck. Olive skin, maybe; looked it, but it was hard to tell in the low light. He was compactly built—not short, not tall—and supple, at one with the rhythm of the music. Soccer player, maybe, she thought. Football, she corrected herself, and she watched him a moment longer, certain he was too lost in the music to notice and take offense at her staring.

She smiled, shook her head at him and at herself for watching, and then looked back out over the crowd. The song was ending finally, and she could see Cal below, searching the balcony for her. When their eyes met, he held up a finger for her to stay put, and he started to push his way through the other dancers.

As she waited for Cal to climb the stairs, a new song started, opening with an odd trill of plucked guitar strings followed by a simple chord progression on the keyboard. It was a song she knew, she realized, one her mother had sung to her often when she was in second or maybe third grade—in any case, only a short time before she’d had to pack up and go live with her grandmother. Ellie would play this one song from her favorite album over and over, picking up and dropping the needle each time it ended, saying to Noel as the song opened again with those first few, funny, plucked notes, “This is a song about us, sweetie, about how we’ll always be together.”

She hadn’t heard this song since she was a child. Slow, a love song—nothing like the hard-driving dance music that had been playing all night.

Cal appeared at the top of the stairs. “Noel,” he called across the room, “you missed . . .”

But the rest of what he said was lost, because someone behind tapped her on the shoulder and she turned to find the beautiful boy standing before her, his hand outstretched, palm up, fingers wiggling, calling for hers. He was smiling, and now that his eyes were open, she could see they were blue.

“Dance with me,” he said. “I can’t dance to this one alone.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

WHILE STUDYING ART HISTORY at a London university, Noel Enfield falls passionately in love with aspiring artist and art school student Bryn Jones. But mishaps part the two lovers, and a desperate Noel makes a split-second choice to move forward in a way that will change her life and the lives of everyone she loves. Three decades later, when she is offered a six-month secondment to a London museum, Noel decides it’s time to prove she really has moved on from that difficult period by returning to the city where she met and lost Bryn. But the move lands Noel in the thick of London’s insular art world, with only one or two degrees of separation from her past and the people she once loved. Some decisions made in the past can never be put behind her, and armed with this new understanding, she sets out on a journey to reclaim what-and who-she left behind.
Book Links: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Jane Alessandrini Ward is the author of Should Have Told You Sooner, In the Aftermath, The Mosaic Artist, and Hunger. After graduating from Simmons College, Jane began working in the food and hospitality industry almost immediately, taking on a range of roles that included planning private events and working as a weekend baker in a neighborhood bakery. Later, she became a contributing writer to an online regional and seasonal food magazine, as well as a blogger and occasional host of cooking videos for an internet recipe resource affiliated with several regional newspapers. Most recently, she has contributed book reviews to Story Circle and Mom Egg Review. She loves to travel and often documents her trips through travel photography. Jane lives north of Boston.
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | GoodReads |