Spotlight & Giveaway: The Moonlight Healers by Elizabeth Becker

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Elizabeth Becker to HJ!

Hi Elizabeth and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, The Moonlight Healers!

 
My name is Elizabeth Becker, and I am a former pediatric nurse turned author. I am so excited to share my debut novel, The Moonlight Healers with you all!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

The Moonlight Healers is the story of multiple generations of women in a single family who possess a secret, magical healing ability. Through two interweaving stories, one set in WW2 era France and one set in modern-day Crozet, Virginia, we learn how this healing ability affects the lives of the French-born Helene and her granddaughter, Louise, who both find themselves struggling to learn what it means to be a healer, especially when they face real life and death consequences.
 

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

“The greatest healing we are capable of is in death.”
“You didn’t look away, Louise. And that’s all it really means. To be a nurse. To be a healer. It’s standing in a room with someone in pain, and not looking away.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The working title of the book was always “The Healers”, because to me the definition of healer/healing really is at the heart of the story.
• The inspiration came directly from my time working as a pediatric registered nurse, and in particular being a nurse for people in the dying process and understanding that there can be healing in death. I was also inspired by the concept of “healing touch”, which is a real, evidence-based intervention taught in nursing school, that touching someone can have tangible benefits. I thought putting a magic twist on healing touch could be really fun.
• I listened to Brandi Carlile A LOT writing this. Her voice and style sound very Appalachian to me (even though I know she is not from this region). She also writes about female dynamics and motherhood in some of her songs and that worked nicely with the themes of this story.
• Most of my research was for the France portions of the book. I dove deep into Rouen in WW2 France, in particular the Augustinian order of nuns who worked at the Hotel Dieu in Rouen as well as the Resistance activities of the era. There is a real-life sister, Agnes-Marie Valois, known as the “Angel of Dieppe” who put tended to the wounded after the Dieppe raid and put herself between a German with a gun and a Canadian soldier. She was definitely some of the inspiration for the character of Cecelia.

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

In the present-day storyline, Peter and Louise are best friends from childhood who know each other better than anyone. Louise has always convinced herself that Peter would never see herself as more than a friend, but all of that changes when he tells her at a high school graduation party he is in love with her.

In the WW2 storyline, Helene and Thomas met under very dramatic circumstances, in the aftermath of the failed Dieppe raid. He is her patient, but he is also her age, and kind, in a world often devoid of kindness, and he sees her for who she is and challenges her to see a future she might not have considered.

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

Definitely crying! The last several chapters of the book are tear-jerkers, but there is one scene between Helene and her daughter, Camille, that I couldn’t get through without crying, even though nothing particularly dramatic or tragic happens, but as a mother it really resonated with me, the desire to protect your children from the hard parts of the world and realizing you may not be able to.

“I wanted to follow you, Mama,” Camille said. “I’ll go home, though, right away. I promise.”
Helene still couldn’t believe her daughter even existed, that such a miracle of a creature was truly hers. After the war, after all the pain and evil and heartache, Helene had been ready for a life of solitude.
But John had an answer for every one of Helene’s excuses from the moment he took her hand in the orchard on that warm spring day after he came to the clinic. And when Camille was born, Helene no longer had any defenses at all. Her daughter was the sunrise after an endless night, and the light Camille emitted reached every dark corner inside of Helene, until she was forced to see herself the way her daughter saw her, as someone worthy of love.”

Readers should read this book….

They love sweeping multi-generational female driven stories with high stakes, epic romances, and elements of historical fiction and magic.

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

I am working on a second book that is still under wraps at the moment, but will definitely have a similar feel as the The Moonlight Healers, a mix of epic, high stakes drama but with recognizable, intimate human conflicts and relationships.
 
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 2 print copies of THE MOONLIGHT HEALERS, open to US winners!

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: I would love to know what you are looking for in a new book and what really grabs your attention and makes you want to read!

 
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Excerpt from The Moonlight Healers:

2019
Louise stood in the quiet of the orchard where she’d been born. Around her, the mountains rose against the pink skies. The tree branches were ripe with fruit, the light of a thousand fireflies glowing beyond them. She knew there was someone up ahead, out of sight, just on the other side of the tree line. She had caught a glimpse of a woman in a long, white nightgown, her hands trailing the branches.
She tried to follow but her body wouldn’t obey. She was stuck, anchored in place, her legs heavy. From somewhere behind, she heard the distant sound of sirens, muffled, as though she were under water. She squeezed her eyes shut as the noise grew louder, clearer.
When she opened them again, the orchard was gone. She was alone, in the passenger seat of Peter’s car, blinking into the bright June sun that streamed through the windshield. Only it wasn’t a windshield anymore. The center was gone. All that was left were shards of glass along the edges.
Her head throbbed, her thoughts jumbled. She tried to sort through the confusion and find something real. Peter had been in the car. He was driving. She knew that. She clung to the solidity of that fact like a lifeboat.
But he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, despite her chiding. She remembered the van swerving into their lane, Peter’s voice shouting her name, a white flash as the airbag exploded, and then only silence.
Louise continued to search her memory, moving up from the depths that surrounded her toward the light of the surface, and her stomach twisted as the previous night crashed back on her. The reason she hadn’t wanted to open the door for Peter this morning. A bright, moon-drenched sky, the blue-green glow of the pool lights in the backyard of Kyle Tan’s house, hundreds of voices, laughter, lukewarm beer in sweaty cans.
And Peter.
Peter at the end of the night, standing in front of her, saying the three words she used to want to hear more than anything, but years too late for her to be able to believe him.
Louise didn’t want to open her eyes again. She didn’t want to see the empty driver’s seat, or the broken windshield.
She pushed her mind back to the night before.
She had been awkward at first at the party, unsure of which circles to join. But then she and Peter took a shot of coconut rum, followed by another. Louise recalled the blooming affection, the rush of nostalgia for people she had barely spoken to over the years propelling her into conversations and games of flip cup, into one more beer, then another, her desire to leave early receding as the night went on.
They had been there for hours when Peter asked her to take a walk, pulling her to the edge of Kyle’s backyard, his hand firm around hers. She wasn’t sure if he had ever held her hand. If he had, it had been years, since the days of pretend play and tree houses.
They were both drunk by then, and they laughed as they stumbled over enormous old magnolia roots that raced across the ground like primordial snakes. The branches were dotted with soft, white flowers, their sweet scent hanging in the air as Peter stopped abruptly and gazed down at her.
A preemptive sadness cut through the haze of alcohol. She knew what he was doing. She was leaving in five days for New York to attend Summer Start, a six-week program for incoming freshmen at NYU. This would be their first summer apart, the first summer in years they wouldn’t be counselors together at Camp Staunton Meadows, where they had cemented their friendship as kids, sitting on warm grass under a glittering sky, drinking flat Cokes from the camp store.
Louise knew he was going to tell her goodbye, or good luck, or some other horribly meaningless phrase that would signify the end of the world they had shared since childhood.
But when he looked at her, there was no sadness, only a question. “I think, maybe… I love you,” Peter said.
Louise’s mouth curved up into a smile even as it hit her that he wasn’t joking. After all these years she knew what his voice sounded like when he was being real.
The pause lasted for hours. Music from the party shook the ground beneath them. There were loud splashes from the pool, the distant sounds of glass breaking inside. She wanted to turn away, but he held her eyes in a way that made it impossible.
“Oh right,” she finally said, widening her smile. She felt frozen, trapped between two worlds. One was the safe, dependable life she knew, where Peter was her best friend. And the other was a future she had long convinced herself she didn’t need, where Peter loved her the way she loved him, an unbearably wonderful but fragile idea.
She grasped for words that could defuse the tension, though she knew how false they would sound. “Isn’t that how it always goes in the movies? Graduation-party declaration of love.”
Peter watched her, his expression still hopeful. But then his
The entire body seemed to fold inward. He looked down at the ground and cleared his throat. “Right.”
When he looked back up at her, he was smiling, but even in the dark she could tell it wasn’t genuine. “You’re too smart to fall for it, though.” He glanced back toward the house, the boisterous noise of their classmates. “I need another drink. You want one?”
She nodded blankly, and he turned and walked back to the party.
___
In the car, Louise opened her eyes. With a shaking hand, she groped for her seat belt. It was her fault. All of it. But she could fix it. If she could only find him, she could put everything back together, make it whole again.
Louise leaned against the dented car door, but it wouldn’t shove open. The guardrail was in front of them. They must have hit it. She slammed into the door harder a second time, with all her weight, and this time it gave. She pulled herself out with a wince at a soreness in her shoulder.
There was a person lying on the road, a few yards away. She felt herself sway and grabbed for the car frame, her whole body trembling as comprehension roared toward her like a freight train.
She took a few careening steps, her legs numb, until she reached him.
“Peter,” she said hoarsely.
His eyes were open, and for a second, she wanted to laugh. Of course, he was okay. He was right there, awake.
But then she noticed the trickle of red from his bottom lip, the way his mouth hung, the horrible angle of his neck. His eyes weren’t bright anymore, just dull, empty spheres.
Louise crouched beside him, recalling her CPR training from her babysitting certification course two years earlier.
She pressed hard into Peter’s chest. “One…two…three…four…five…”
She took a ragged breath as her vision swam.
“Six…seven…eight…”
His skin was still warm. It couldn’t be too late. She had read stories of trauma victims brought to the hospital in full cardiac arrest, kids who had drowned, or heart attack victims. Sometimes they were down for nearly an hour. But they came back.
“Come back.”
She wasn’t sure if she had said the words out loud or in her head. She continued to press into Peter’s chest. There was something about the depth of compression, the degree and number of inches. She had known that in the class, gotten a hundred percent on the quiz. But it was so much harder on a real person. She couldn’t even tell if Peter’s chest was moving.
She reached “thirty” and started the cycle again. With the blood coming from his mouth, she couldn’t bring herself to do rescue breaths.
She heard voices behind her, people approaching, but Louise ignored them. She could do this. She felt the wetness on her cheeks, the scream inside her lungs, but she didn’t stop.
“Please come back,” she said, her words choked. She didn’t care who heard it. She didn’t care about the people on the road watching her with pity. She didn’t care that she looked ridiculous. She only knew that he had to come back.
“Twenty-two…twenty-three…twenty-four…”
This time she pushed down onto Peter’s body so hard she thought she might break his ribs, but instead a jolt of heat shot out from her own chest, sparking down her arms and into her hands.
She jerked away as though she had been electrocuted. She didn’t know what she expected, burns maybe, a wound, some sign of the current that had just exploded at every nerve ending. But she was uninjured, the skin of her arms intact.
From the sirens she could tell the ambulance was right beside her now. Several car doors slammed behind her, followed by loud footsteps.
Two people in navy blue uniforms set down a stretcher and equipment and knelt next to her. There was a C-collar and oxygen tanks, medical kits. It all fell to the ground around her.
The paramedic across from her pumped up and down into Peter’s chest, and the other jammed a needle into the crook of his arm.
There was a hand on Louise’s shoulder. “Let’s get you taken care of. They’ve got him now.”
Louise looked up to find a very tall firefighter in full gear above her. He was wrinkled around the eyes, gray at the temples. She gazed past him farther up the street. The entire road was lit up with flashing lights, blue-and-red pulses all wrong against the pale sky. She felt the strange desire to laugh. It was absurd. A few minutes ago, a blink of an eye ago, Peter was beside her in the car, on the way to the pool.
“Let’s get you checked out,” the firefighter repeated, his voice kind but firm, his hand tighter on her shoulder.
Louise let herself be pulled to her feet. But she couldn’t move away. If she left, they would stop. If she was still there, if they worked to save him, he wasn’t fully gone.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Book Links:  Amazon | B&N |

Meet the Author:

ELIZABETH BECKER is a former pediatric nurse and Pushcart Prize-nominated writer. She has worked as a correspondent for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times Dispatch, and her award-winning essays have been featured on national sites including Motherwell, Scary Mommy, Motherly, Swamp Pink (formerly Crazy Horse), and Winning Writers. She received a degree in creative writing from the College of Charleston before earning a bachelor’s degree in nursing. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband and four young children. Find her on Instagram, @elizabethbeckerauthor.
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