Spotlight & Giveaway: Two Wars and a Wedding by Lauren Willig

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Lauren Willig to HJ!

Hi Lauren and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Two Wars and a Wedding!

Hello, readers!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Two Wars and a Wedding is based on the true story of a pioneering Smith College alumna who went off to Athens in 1896 to train as an archaeologist– only to be told women can’t dig. When war breaks out between Greece and Turkey, in a fit of pique she goes off to the front as a nurse, starting a journey that changes her life forever, eventually leading her to the jungles of Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in the Spanish American War. (It’s not false advertising– there really are two wars AND a wedding!)
 

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

“What sort of name is Holt, anyway? It’s halfway between halt
and hilt.”
“My mother’s maiden name,” Holt said hoarsely. “If it were between halt and
hilt it would be helt.”
“Details.” Nurse Hayes picked up her basket of dirty dressings.
“I’m trying to cure you, not shelve you.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

This book should be titled “Why not to joke with your editor about titles”. This book features a globe trotting 1890s heroine who goes through a lot of emotional stuff. There’s friendship, there’s loss, there’s love, there are two little known wars (Greco-Turkish War of 1897, anyone?). How on earth do you come up with a title for something like that? We tried all sorts of vague and high-minded titles (“Across Far Shores”… “The Miseducation of Miss Betsy Hayes”….) until, in frustration, I joked, “Why not just call it ‘Two Wars and a Wedding’? Wait– I didn’t really mean– ooops.” And here we are!

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

Snark. So much snark. My heroine, Betsy, is in a Bad Place when she meets the hero– she’s just been nursing in a war, she’s lost the man she thought she loved, and she’s terrified that her best friend, with whom she had a huge fight, is going to go die on the battlefields as Cuba and it will be Betsy’s fault. So she’s gone off to Florida to try to stop her best friend from sailing for Cuba. She’s stranded on a train siding in the middle of the night, and the hero appears and tells her to get back on the train. Betsy does not take this well. And when she doesn’t take things well, she gets sarcastic.

As for what attracts Betsy to my hero…. He’s one of nature’s caregivers. From the moment she meets him, he’s there to grab her when she falls.

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

I sobbed through a whole scene (and I don’t usually do that when I’m writing!). But I can’t tell you about it, because MAJOR SPOILERS. But let me know if you find yourself crying over any bits of this book and we can compare notes and see if it’s the same….
 

Readers should read this book….

For friendship, romance, and lots of history you never even knew you didn’t know! It’s a grand journey of self-discovery as my heroine rackets from Greece to Cuba, learning about love, learning about friendship, learning to trust herself. I hope you’ll enjoy this whirlwind trip around Greece and Cuba in the 1890s as much as I did– and fall in love with the hero along with Betsy!
 

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

Right now I’m working on two things! I’m working on a novel about the Manhattan Well Murder, which is basically Law and Order: 1800. A woman was found drowned in the Manhattan Well in January 1800– and Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were hired as the defense team for the guy accused of seducing and strangling her! (For real. History really is stranger than fiction.) That book, which still doesn’t have a title, is due to come out in January 2025.)

In addition to my own books, I also co-write with Beatriz Williams and Karen White. We call ourselves Team W. We’ve just sent in the manuscript of our latest Team W collaboration, a madcap mystery set in a castle in Scotland. I call this our “Knives Out meets Monarch of the Glen” book and we had a ridiculous amount of fun writing it. That one DOES have a title, but we haven’t officially announced it yet, so keep an eye out on the @willigwhitewilliams Instagram or Facebook pages for a title reveal! Our Scottish Team W book will be hitting the shelves in autumn 2024.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for the last Team W book, the New York Times and USA Today bestseller, THE LOST SUMMERS OF NEWPORT, which comes out in paperback in May! That one’s a multigenerational story revolving around a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, from a mansion makeover TV show in the present day, back through a Gilded Age heiress being married off to an Italian prince and the 1950s Tiffany Ball– and, of course, lots of family skeletons hidden behind the woodwork!
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: I’ll be giving away one hardcover copy of TWO WARS AND A WEDDING to one reader and TWO WARS AND A WEDDING notepads to two other readers. (U.S. only.)

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: What’s your favorite time period for historical fiction?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from Two Wars and a Wedding:

Tampa, Florida
June 2, 1898

Betsy Hayes arrived in Florida with a single carpetbag and sick on her skirt.

The sick wasn’t hers. It was courtesy of a three-year-old who’d been in her compartment since Savannah. The one benefit to her noxious state, as far as she could see, was that the other passengers tended to give her a wide berth. Betsy’s dress felt stiff with sick and her legs felt stiff with sitting and her brain felt stiff with trying to make sense of a situation that didn’t make sense at all.

Betsy wasn’t supposed to be in Florida, barreling toward a war she knew nothing about. She was supposed to be in Greece, digging up antiquities and showing the Harvard boys how it should be done. One minute, there she had been, a newly minted graduate of Smith College, one of only two women at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, all prepared to batter down the prejudices of the male establishment—but then it had all gone so very wrong and now here she was, on a train in the middle of nowhere, covered with someone else’s vomit, trying to stop her best friend from making the same mistakes she had made.

She had to find Ava and stop her from sailing to Cuba.

We’re at war with Spain, in case you haven’t noticed, which you probably haven’t, Ava had written, and, of course, Ava was right, as Ava so often was. From the chatter on the train from New York to Florida, Betsy gathered the war was something to do with the Spanish oppressing the Cubans. Or possibly something to do with the Spanish blowing up an American ship and then lying about it. Betsy didn’t like to ask and she didn’t much care. She’d learned in Greece that it wasn’t the cause that mattered; even the best of intentions wouldn’t stop wounds from festering and disease from spreading.

Two miles to Tampa, the conductor had said. But that had been an hour ago, before the train had stopped with an abrupt jolt, and here they were still. Not moving. Stuck in the middle of nowhere in an endless night made hideous with the belch of coal smoke and enough shouting and clattering and clanking to keep even the most exhausted awake.

“Hey diddle diddle, the train and the fiddle,” sang the loathsome tot who had been ill on Betsy’s skirt, singing the wrong words and then hooting as though he’d done something clever.

The child’s mother was heavily pregnant and feeling it. As Betsy watched, the little boy bumped up against his mother’s arm and, green-faced, weary, the mother lifted her arm so he could snuggle against her, bump in the belly and all.

Betsy’s eyes stung. With the smoke, the blasted smoke. Good heavens, did no one know how to open a window around here?

Rising abruptly, Betsy grabbed her carpetbag off the rack overhead. She didn’t care if it was two miles to Tampa. What was two miles? She’d walk if she had to. If she didn’t get out of this compartment soon, they would clap her straight into one of those depressing places where they prescribed cold baths and electrical shocks and called it healing.

The pregnant woman lifted her head from her son’s. Betsy could see the fine lines the boy’s hair had made on her cheek, imprinted on her. “Where are you going?”

“I’m finding out what’s going on out there,” Betsy lied.

The woman blinked at her. “With your case?”

Betsy pretended not to hear. She swung herself out of the compartment and onto the ground. She had failed to take into account that there wasn’t a platform there, so it was a longer way down than she’d expected. She landed hard on her left foot and staggered before righting herself. The ground on the side of the track was dirt and scrub, studded with chunks of coal that bit through the thin soles of her boots.

She wasn’t the only one taking a break from the train. Half the US Army appeared to have had the same idea. She could see them as dark shadows, as the red circles of cigar butts glowing in the darkness. But even if she hadn’t been able to see them, the smell of an army on the move was unmistakable: unwashed bodies and tinned beef; black powder and oiled leather.

Despite the heat, Betsy was suddenly cold through, shivering in her sick-stained, sweat-soaked dress. Her hands felt numb and bloodless; she rubbed them together, dragging in tortured breaths of thick, smoke-clogged air. Florida. She was in Florida. Not Greece. Two miles from Tampa. Just two miles. Two miles to go.

She drew herself up. She’d been traveling for days, from train to ship to train. Enough to make anyone dizzy. She was fine. Fit as a fiddle. She’d walk to Tampa if need be.

Betsy flexed her hands, grabbed her carpetbag, and squinted down the track. By the light of the train lamps, she could vaguely make out semitropical trees and dense scrub, crowding close to the tracks. And ahead, as far as the eye could see, train after train after train, backed up all the way to Tampa.

Well, that was it, then. All she had to do was follow the tracks.

She’d scarcely gone more than a yard before one of the dark shapes peeled away from the shadows, blocking her path. “Ma’am. May I help you back into your compartment? This is no place for a lady.”

Ha. She hadn’t been a lady in years. Possibly ever, if her brother was to be believed.

Betsy straightened, trying to ignore the way her hair straggled down the back of her neck, half out of its pins. “It’s very kind of you, but . . . no. Good night.”

Those particular cut-off consonants had always had great success in squashing the pretensions of university men who believed her to be a sweet little thing. Little, yes. Sweet, no. Unfortunately, this man seemed to be made of tougher stuff.

“Let me help you back in,” he said, and made the mistake of reaching for her elbow. Betsy jerked her arm out of the way. The man stepped back, saying carefully, as to someone delicate and nervous, “Is your chaperone in the compartment?”

Betsy had given up chaperones years ago, along with her illusions. “If you must make yourself useful, I need a cart or wheeled conveyance. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Just something sufficient to take me the two miles to Tampa.”

The man looked at her as if trying to figure out if she was joking. “Ma’am, everyone is trying to get to Tampa.”

“Yes, but there are a great number of you, and just one of me,” said Betsy, quite reasonably, she thought.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

From New York Times bestselling author Lauren Willig: a dramatic coming-of-age story with a dual timeline and a single heroine—a bold and adventuring young woman who finds herself caught up in two very different wars on both sides of the Atlantic.

September 1896: An aspiring archaeologist, Smith College graduate Betsy Hayes travels to Athens, desperate to break into the male-dominated field of excavation. In the midst of the heat and dust of Greece she finds an unlikely ally in Charles, Baron de Robecourt, one of the few men who takes her academic passion seriously. But when a simmering conflict between Greece and Turkey erupts into open warfare, Betsy rushes to the front lines as a nurse, not knowing that the decision will change her life forever—and cause a deep and painful rift with her oldest friend, Ava.

June 1898: Betsy has sworn off war nursing—but when she gets the word that her estranged friend Ava is headed to Cuba with Clara Barton and the Red Cross to patch up the wounded in the Spanish-American War, Betsy determines to stop her the only way she knows how: by joining in her place. Battling heat, disease, and her own demons, Betsy follows Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders straight to the heart of the fighting, where she is forced to confront her greatest fears to save both old friends and new….

Set during an electrifying era of nation-building, idealism, and upheaval, TWO WARS AND A WEDDING is a tale of remarkable women striving to make their place in a man’s world—an unforgettable saga of friendship, love, and fighting for what is right.
Book Links: Book Links: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Lauren Willig is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than twenty works of historical fiction, including Band of Sisters, The Summer Country, the RITA Award-winning Pink Carnation series, and four novels co-written with Beatriz Williams and Karen White. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages, picked for Book of the Month Club, awarded the RITA, Booksellers Best, and Golden Leaf awards, and chosen for the American Library Association’s annual list of the best genre fiction. An alumna of Yale University, she has a graduate degree in history from Harvard and a JD from Harvard Law School. She lives in New York City with her husband, two young children, and vast quantities of coffee.
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | GoodReads |