This month’s blog theme is Family. This Sunday is the day we set aside to honor mothers and grandmothers everywhere. Our featured book, The Key to Everything, tells the story of what happens when a nurse practitioner inherits her late grandmother’s home.
Author’s Inspiration:
Sometimes the tiniest things inspire me. I try to listen to God and see where He might be leading me. With The Key to Everything, I kept seeing in my mind a key with a red ribbon in a box and decided to find out more about it through my writing.
About the book:
When nurse practitioner, Dr Genny Sanders inherits her late-grandmother’s house, she moves back to her hometown of Worthville, Georgia, determined to leave her past—and her scheming ex—behind her with a new job and new friends. But during a meeting with her grandmother’s estate attorney, David Worth, she learns of a threat to her property. A local developer wants to buy her land and demolish her house.
Genny refuses to sell, but the land developer isn’t taking no for an answer. As if personal threats aren’t bad enough, a foreclosure proceeding looms, and a fire flashes in the night. Everything Genny holds dear is threatened. If she can’t find a way to save her grandmother’s house, Genny will be forced to give up the fresh start she so desperately wants. And to complicate matters further, she’s falling for David.
While going through her grandmother’s belongings, Genny finds a mysterious key with a red ribbon. What does it fit? Could it possibly be the answer to her problems? What do the messages of love and forgiveness she keeps hearing have to do with everything? As she searches for these answers, she learns more about herself and her grandmother’s legacy than she could have ever imagined.
Excerpt:
Before bed, Genny took a moment to sit on the porch swing beside Elizabeth, who was roosting on one of the cushions. There’d be eggs in the morning for sure. Crickets chirped, and an owl hooted somewhere close by. Tree frogs joined the chorus. Even though the temperature that day had neared ninety degrees, a breeze blew across the porch, carrying the scent of jasmine, which grew on the side of the house. The sounds and smells of a thousand nights spent in the safety of this house brought comfort in the middle of all the swirling questions.
She imagined her grandmother coming to the screen door and calling for her, asking whether she wanted a snack before bed, maybe a biscuit with honey and milk. They’d bring the snack back out onto the porch and sit and talk over their day. Right about then was when Genny would have said, “Grandmother, what am I going to do about all this mess?”
Maybe her grandmother would have paused, lifted her eyes to the southern sky, and said, “I don’t know, sweetie, but don’t the stars look especially bright tonight?”
About the author:
Award winning Southern writer, Beverly Varnado, is a novelist, screenwriter, and blogger who writes to give readers hope in the redemptive purposes of God.
She has written a nonfiction memoir as well as several novels and screenplays, one of which was a finalist for the prestigious Kairos Prize in Screenwriting. The novella, A Season for Everything, is the third work in a series set in Worthville, Georgia. Previous novels set there are A Key to Everything and A Plan for Everything. Her work is also included in several anthologies and periodicals. As an artist, her work was recently chosen for exhibit at a State University gallery.
She lives in Georgia with her husband, Jerry, and their chocolate Aussiedor who is outnumbered by several cats. Beverly is Mom to three children and Mimi to two grandchildren.
Author media links:
Read her weekly blog One Ringing Bell, peals of words on faith, living, writing, and art at oneringingbell.blogspot.com. Also catch her at http://www.BeverlyVarnado.com , on her Facebook author page https://www.facebook.com/BeverlyVarnadoAuthor, Twitter @VarnadoBeverly, or @Beverly Varnado on Instagram.
Inspirational Author 