Today, as part of Simon and Schuster Canada’s #TimelessTour blog tour of historical fiction, I’m interviewing Susanna Kearsley, author of Bellewether.

1. If you lived during the time period in your book, how do you think you would have fared and why?

2. If you lived in the future and were to write historical fiction about 2018, what do you think you would write about and why?

3.When you worked as a museum curator, was there a particular story about your museum that captivated you like Lydia and Jean-Philippe’s story did for Charley?

No, but the home of one of my United Empire Loyalist ancestors, on the east coast of Canada, is now a museum, and reading letters from that side of the family, as a child, gave me one of my earliest feelings of connection to my own past, so I’ve always had a special interest in filling in details of the lives lived in that house.

Celebrate historical fiction with the Timeless Tour, from April 16 – May 4!

For more information, visit www.timelesstour.ca.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for the invitation to participate in this blog tour.

Today, for Simon and Schuster Canada’s #TimelessTour blog tour on historical fiction, I have a guest post by Susanna Kearsley, author of Belleweather. 

In Bellewether, Charley’s job at a museum leads her to getting caught up in the story of Lydia and the soldier from Montreal. For this guest post, Susanna Kearsley writes about her favourite museum, and what about it or its collections she finds so compelling.

Guest Post By Susanna Kearsley

Visiting museums, after having worked in that field, can be a bit of a busman’s holiday for me. While other visitors are walking around enjoying the exhibits, I’m noticing that the lux levels are too high, or that the artifacts aren’t properly supported in their display case, or that the flow of the exhibit space is all wrong, or not accessible enough; and even if all that is perfectly done, I’m watching the other visitors and feeling my blood pressure rise every time someone takes a flash photograph after being told not to (because the intensity of that flash, multiplied by the number of people who will do it, will inevitably degrade and ruin the piece you’re taking a photograph of, when you could just go and buy a postcard of it in the gift shop).

But when I travel for research, I still wander through them from time to time, and I have found that it usually isn’t the grand and impressive ones I love the best.

In St. Petersburg, Russia, for example, I spent some hours in the famous Hermitage Museum, with its sweeping, gilded staircases, palatial rooms, and priceless works of art. And it was beautiful. I found some portraits there that made me stop and look a moment in that quiet kind of way you only feel when you’re communing with a painting. It was memorable.

But a little while after that, I went across the river to the Menshikov Palace—a smaller museum, less well-known among tourists—and wandered through that with my mother, and that day was magic.

There was almost no one else there. Every room we walked into, it felt like the 18th century occupants had just left moments before. You could feel them around you, the women and men who had lived in those rooms—hear the swish of their skirts and the murmur of voices, a swift fall of steps in the shadows.

Maybe it’s because my own museum background is in historic houses, but most often those are my favourite museums—the places where, like at the Menshikov Palace, I feel a connection with people who’ve walked there before, in an earlier time.

Celebrate historical fiction with the Timeless Tour, from April 16 – May 4!

For more information, visit www.timelesstour.ca.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for the invitation to participate in this blog tour.

Bachelor Girl begins with an estate auction: Jacob Ruppert, the millionaire owner of the New York Yankees, has just left his estate and the bulk of his fortune to an unknown actress, Helen Winthrope. The book then takes us back to 1920s New York, where Helen is enjoying the life of a “bachelor girl” – a working woman living on her own terms. Having just recovered from a major medical procedure, she fills in for the manager of a struggling theatre and discovers a love for producing plays. Jacob Ruppert, who was partially responsible for the accident that killed Helen’s father years ago, has kept in touch with her family, and takes an interest in supporting Helen’s career. Helen becomes close friends with Ruppert’s secretary Albert, a gay man who keeps his professional life strictly separate from his weekends with the gay community, and they form a comfortably platonic partnership.

Bachelor Girl is such a captivating story and I had a lot of fun losing myself in it. I love the characters of Helen and Albert, and I was totally caught up in how their feelings for the people they loved were so constrained by the social mores of their time. I love the subplot about Helen and her friend Clarence, and how they kissed when they were younger but because Clarence is black, they both got in trouble for it. Helen had her mouth washed out with soap and Clarence likely got it worse. There’s a moment where Clarence falls in love with a light-skinned biracial woman, and Helen thinks bitterly of how her skin isn’t that much lighter, but there’s a world of difference in how Clarence can interact with each of them. Helen falls in love with Albert, who is also unattainable, and while she goes to questionable lengths to ensure he never leaves her for a man, she still remains a sympathetic character.

I also absolutely love Albert, and his story arc. He starts off really confident that he has figured out his boss’s secrets and that they share an intimate understanding of each other, but then at several points realizes he may not understand his boss as much as he thinks he does. There’s an appealing naivete about him overall, and how he tends to just trust people. He falls in love with a couple of men over the course of the story, and I wanted more than anything for him to find happiness.

Bachelor Girl is a wonderful snapshot of life in 1920s and 1930s America, with compelling characters you can’t help but root for. I had a great time with this book and would love to learn more of Helen and Albert’s stories.

Celebrate historical fiction with the Timeless Tour, from April 16 – May 4!

For more information, visit www.timelesstour.ca.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.