One April After the War by G. S. Boarman - Book Tour - Guest Post - Giveaway - Enter Daily!

Hello, lovelies!!  It gives me great pleasure today to host G. S. Boarman’s Family and his new book, “One April After the War,” here on FAB!!  For other stops on his Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour, please click on the banner above or any of the images in this post.

Be sure to make it to the end of this post to enter to win a $10 Amazon OR Barnes and Noble Gift Card!!  Also, come back daily to interact with G. S. Boarman’s Family and to increase your chances of winning!!

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One April After the War

Louisville to Cumberland

M. Warner Annals Book Series

Book I

by G. S. Boarman

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GENRE:  Historical Fiction

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BLURB:

When Mary Warner is requested to attend a meeting with her estranged godfather, President Ulysses S. Grant, she quickly finds that an invitation from the office of the President is an offer she can’t refuse.

Fresh from concluding a counterfeiting sting in Cincinnati, Secret Service agents Merritt and Argent are tasked by the President to convince Miss Warner to return with them to Washington, D. C. For the two Treasury agents, this simple assignment to escort the socially awkward and willful young woman on an 800-mile railroad journey from Louisville, Kentucky to the White House proves far more interesting and difficult than the men could have ever thought possible. And, in the face of danger, it may just turn out that Mary is more of an asset than a problem for the two agents.

For Mary Warner, the trip begins to take on a sinister meaning as she finds herself virtual prisoner to Merritt and Argent. Madness, morality, and murder all swirl in a strange April storm at midnight turning this odd odyssey into something so much more than a mere trip between cities.

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EXCERPT THREE:

The jailer languidly unlocked the cell door, calling to Miss Warner, “Your custodians have come to claim you. Up with you.” Miss Warner remained unmoved. The jailer turned to Merritt and Argent. “This is how she has been all afternoon. What she needs is a good thrashing to bring her to a proper sense of respect.” Miss Warner’s plain dress, a work dress with none of the frills and fineness of a woman of any means, was not the only barometer by which the jailer measured her: she did not even carry with her a handbag, nor did she wear a hat or cloak or gloves. She gave all the appearance of a woman of the lower classes, and therefore not worthy of any special consideration.

The sheriff had accompanied the jailer to Miss Warner’s cell, mildly curious as to all this fuss over such a woman as she. He had, in fact, delayed sending the message that Miss Warner had asked him to send; he simply did not believe a woman of her apparent stature and committing such a crime could claim patronage at such high levels of Cincinnati’s judicial system or of the federal government.

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GUEST POST:

Five Reasons You Should Read My Book

There are several points of interest regarding One April After the War: Louisville to Cumberland that I hope you will also find interesting.

The first item of interest that I would like to point out is the coincidence of April 1870 (the time in which the book takes place) and April 2022 being exactly the same: they both begin on a Friday, Easter is the 17th in each year, and there is only one day’s (or night’s) difference in the full moon. One April After the War: Louisville to Cumberland is structured so that each chapter corresponds with one day in April. In this way, and in this year in particular (2022), the reader can read a chapter a day and follow the characters in “real” time across the month of April. I have appended a copy of a calendar designed specifically to reflect both the coincidence of April 1870 and 2022 and the chapter-a-day structure. If this interests you, have a copy in hand on April 1.

Speaking of April, the title reflects several influences. First, it is a nod to Irene Hunt’s Across Five Aprils (1964), a novel that was an assignment for my 8th grade history class. April, of course, marked both the beginning and the end of the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln died on April 14, 1865, and this is significant for my novel because of the last thing he did before going to Ford’s Theatre that night: he signed a piece of legislation authorizing the organization of a new federal detective agency, the Secret Service. The two primary male characters in One April, Merritt and Argent, are operatives of this division of the Revenue Department. There is one other historical fact that occurred in April, but that is not revealed until the third book, though it is revealed obliquely in the second book, One April After the War: Cumberland to Washington.

The work of the Secret Service is prominent in the books. The Secret Service’s original mission was to combat counterfeiting, a constant problem all through the history of the United States, but once the federal government decided to print national currency, counterfeiting became the federal government’s personal problem. Before a national currency was established (during the Civil War), people relied on hard currency (gold and silver) or bank notes, issued by individual banks. These bank notes were not universally accepted as legal tender; it could simply be denied by anyone for payment of any kind. It was the phrase ‘legal tender’ that finalized April as the month for the first two books. Originally, I had imagined the book opening on a glorious late March day, but during research, I found that the steamer Legal Tender left Cincinnati (where Merritt and Argent were wrapping up a counterfeit case) on April 1. Being Secret Service men charged with protecting the legal tender of the nation, I thought it was a sign that these men were ordained to travel on this steamer, to leave Cincinnati on April 1. I had already decided that Merritt and Argent would make an assumption about Mary Warner that would set the tone for their relationship. That they would take Legal Tender to Louisville and meet Mary Warner under a confused assumption on April 1 seemed too good to pass up: Merritt and Argent would be the embodiment of April fools on April Fools Day. So, the book would begin on April 1, and I then determined that it would end on April 30 (except for a kind of epilogue covering a few days in May).

One April After the War: Louisville to Cumberland is the first novel in the M. Warner Annals (Books II and III are already written; Book II will be available on March 15; Book III will be available in late summer or early fall). M. Warner is the protagonist, a young woman from Louisville summoned to Washington. Her name is Mary, a name she shares with all her sisters and her mother; only her mother was known as Mary, all the daughters were called by their middle names. M. Warner was therefore known as Lally, a diminutive of Eulalia, her middle name. I came across both this name and the family policy of naming several, if not all, daughters Mary and referring to them by their middle name in a family ancestry book. I immediately knew, years before I wrote the books, that Mary Eulalia would be the name of any female protagonist I might create. I named our only female dog Lally. There were three boys in her pack, and we referred to them as Lally and the Boys. (We just said goodbye to Lally a few weeks ago, after 15 years; Jack and Fry preceded her by two years and 6 months, respectively; only Morty remains. Jack and Morty are M’s pet dogs in the books, and in later books, play important parts.)

In the book, Lally has several names, depending on the people addressing her: Miss Warner, Lally (family only called her this), Miss Mary, and M. M was presented to her as a sort of challenge by Merritt, one of the federal operatives sent to escort her to Washington. It was meant as a distraction at a difficult moment early in the trip, but it stuck, and so she becomes M and, so, the M. Warner Annals. Originally, M was simply a name placeholder I used until I could nail down her name. I hesitated to use Mary because, like the women in the Warner family, Mary is a very common name in my own. But in the end, that day years ago when I first found Mary Eulalia in the family ancestry book won out and I kept her name. But I also kept her placeholder initial, as I came to realize it could reflect so many circumstances in her life. M falls in the middle of the alphabet, as Lally falls in the middle of her family (the eighth of 13 children), and as the first daughter after six sons, she straddles the gender divide of the siblings. (A seventh son is born after M, “out of order.”) M is also the sound of ‘maybe’ or of deliberation, of decisions that someone else makes for her.

Another female character name has an interesting history. Miss Carrie was named for a woman I had never met, but about whom I had heard occasional comments from older brothers, many years ago; I never learned her last name. I only knew that Miss Carrie was somehow connected to my grandmother’s farm near Bardstown, KY and that she “put up” all kinds of fruits and vegetables. I particularly remember the phrase “Miss Carrie’s pickles.” In preparation for this blog, I asked my oldest brother about the mysterious Miss Carrie. I was astounded to learn that she had been the daughter of a slave (she was in her 80s, my brother thought, in the mid 1950s when he knew her). She had lived on the farm not very far from the farmhouse in a much smaller ramshackle house. This house was in serious disrepair and was torn down in the early 60s. I have no memory of this house, but very well remember the root cellar near where the house is said to have sat. I was very afraid of that root cellar. I regret that I never thought to ask my mother, before she died, about Miss Carrie. My mother was reportedly very fond of Miss Carrie’s pickles.

In One April After the War: Louisville to Cumberland, I have experimented with themes and symbolism and other devices, but I don’t think aspiring to literary merit has dulled the story. I hope to have written a story that is both interesting and exciting, that will appeal to more than one type of reader. I hope that I have created a believable and sympathetic female character as well as believable male characters. It is often the case that men don’t develop good female characters and women don’t develop good male characters; we tend to write what we want to see in protagonists of the opposite sex and what we believe is the problem with antagonists of the opposite sex. I hope I have overcome this obstacle.

There are times when I feel like this story has been simmering in my brain long before I recognized it or thought to shape it into a story. It is made of bits and pieces of memories and recalled comments and conversations, of old family photographs (with no names), of old costume jewelry and cracked children’s tea sets, of antique furniture, of an old railroad pocket watch, a monogrammed shaving cup, of brittle land deeds, beginning in the late 1700s, kept in a cigar box almost as old. I have cherished these bits and pieces of my family’s history from the moment I first set eyes on them. They have no monetary value, but they are priceless to me. When I finally formed a story, these random and damaged and disparate heirlooms suddenly found their place, with no effort on my part, as if they had been waiting for decades to be acknowledged.

Please feel free to visit my website, gsboarman.com, if you would like to submit any questions (see Contact page). Excerpts from all three books can be found there.

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AUTHOR BIO:

After the death of G. S. Boarman, a great niece cleaned out the old Kentucky family farmhouse and in the attic, amid the rusting coffee mill, the rickety outdated furniture that was still awaiting repairs, and the stacks of vermin-eaten Harper’s Weekly’s and Police Gazette’s, she found a curious box marked simply “M”.

On the kitchen floor, the metal hasps were flipped back and the top pried off. Lying on the top of a very neat and orderly collection of things was a scrapbook and lying loose inside the scrap book was a note that said simply, “Please finish the story.” The scrapbook itself contained a rough outline of a narrative with sometimes undecipherable glosses and cryptic references to mysterious sources.

From letters and notebooks, ledgers and calendars, train schedules and stockholders’ reports, the story was slowly extracted and pieced together, and the small treasures, carefully wrapped and preserved in the box, took their place in the narrative.

Boarman’s will had already been read, probated, and executed, but the niece, as executrix, felt obligated to fulfill Boarman’s last wish — to breathe life into the long-ago story of a woman who held some importance to Boarman.

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CONNECT WITH THE G. S. BOARMAN FAMILY:

Website:

https://www.gsboarman.com

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Goodreads Author Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18812775.G_S_Boarman

Goodreads Book Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43672527-one-april-after-the-war

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BOOK BUY LINK:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0960064931?qid=1648395341

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GIVEAWAY INFO:

The G. S. Boarman Family will be awarding a $10 Amazon OR Barnes and Noble Gift Card (Winner’s Choice!!!) to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.

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This contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish Promotions.  Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.