Hi, lovelies! It gives me great pleasure today to host Olga
& Christopher Werby and their new book, “Twin Time”! For other stops on their 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 TWO Signed Books!! Also, come back daily to interact with Olga
and Christopher and to increase your chances of winning!
Thanks for stopping
by! Wishing you lots of luck in this
fabulous giveaway!
Twin Time
by Olga Werby &
Christopher Werby
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GENRE: Time Travel Historical Fiction Urban Fantasy
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BLURB:
Alex
and Sasha are twin sisters, physically identical down to their freckles. But
the resemblance is only skin deep—Sasha is profoundly autistic, while Alex is
not. Sasha can’t communicate and acts bizarrely, and the family revolves around
her and her intense needs. Yet the aged, wealthy, and mysterious Aunt Nana
seems to have a particular interest in both girls. Offering a helping hand, she
encourages the family to move to San Francisco to be near her. And when the
young twins discover a tunnel in Nana’s tool shed, it leads them on a journey
across the world and back 100 years in time. The tunnel is a pathway to the
Firebird Estate, the home of their ancestors, located in rural Russia at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Even more remarkable, through the effect
that twisting time has on cognition, Sasha is not autistic when she’s at the
Firebird Estate. Now, growing up in two strikingly different times and places,
the twins must face their separate destinies among the ravages of the incipient
Russian Revolution. Can they save their families on both sides of the tunnel?
Can they simultaneously stay true to their own hearts, to each other, and to
the people they left behind? Each sister must face her own personal
challenge—but only together can they discover their own future within their
family’s past.
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EXCERPT ONE:
“Alex?”
“Dad?”
There was noise on the line. Alex heard the sirens of emergency vehicles. She
had a sick feeling, making her hand tremble as she jammed the cell phone harder
against her ear. “Dad!”
“Alex,
honey, there was an accident.” Alex’s father sounded all wrong. “I need you to
get to Mills Hospital on the Peninsula right away. Okay?”
“Dad?
What’s going on? Is Sasha all right? You’re really scaring me.”
“There
was a fire. Aunt Nana has been taken to Mills. Can you get someone to drive
you? Mom and I will meet you there.” There was more shuffling, and Alex heard
someone tell her father to move. Alex’s father shouted something back, but it
was muffled and she couldn’t understand what was being said. Then the line went
dead.
Alex
held the phone in front of her, hoping to get more information from the mute
device. Her legs felt weak as she tried to stand. She needed to borrow a car.
It was midday, mid-week, and everyone was in class. Alex had been about to go
as well. She was minoring in Russian Literature, and her teacher didn’t make
late arrivals welcome.
Her
roommate’s keys were on top of her desk. And then they were in Alex’s hands–her
subconscious mind had made the decision before she had. She would text an
explanation later.
At
this time of the day, UC Berkeley was at least an hour away from San Mateo–the
small town on the San Francisco Peninsula where Mills Hospital was located. It
would be at least an hour before Alex knew what was really going on.
She
ran out the door.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WANT TO READ
MORE???:
The authors are offering their readers the first few chapters of
their new book, “Twin Time,” for FREE!!!
Check it out here:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR
INTERVIEW:
Good morning Olga!
Welcome back to Fabulous and Brunette!
We are thrilled to have you here again and can’t wait to learn more
about you and your new book, “Twin Time.”
Thank you very much for this opportunity to connect with the
Fabulous and Brunette Blog readers. The
book I’m promoting right now is “Twin Time”.
Tells us a bit about your new book, “Twin Time.”
“Twin Time” is a story of identical twins, where one is
autistic and the other’s not. It is also a time loop story. I wanted to explore
the psychology and family dynamic of a family with a sick child. I wanted to
give autism a voice. Like many of my books, “Twin Time” is fully
illustrated. You can see some of the
visual research that went into this story on a special Pinterest page set up
for this book: https://www.pinterest.com/OlgaWerby/scifi-book-twin-time
Although your book hasn’t been out for long, it seems good
reviews are already pouring in. What are
readers saying about your new book? Can
you please provide one of the reviews you’ve received?
“There are doors to stride through with purpose, and doors to
peek through with trepidation. But maybe once in a lifetime there is a door to
another reality, a door that connects worlds within multiverses.” In Twin Time
by Olga and Christopher Werby, nineteen-year-old Alex and Sasha Orlov are
identical twins, but different at the same time. While Alex is a vibrant
university student, Sasha is autistic. In 2019, a fire burnt down their
great-aunt’s home. Nadezhda Orlova, affectionately known as Aunt Nana, is badly
hurt and Sasha is missing. When Aunt Nana’s personal attorney, Boris Blackburg,
insists on talking to Alex, she’s about to find out that the important clues on
Sasha’s whereabouts are in the past.
The Orlovs' secret time tunnel paves the way for an interesting
plot. The story has different time settings and is also told from different
characters’ points of view. That said, I find that these aspects are
well-handled and that the narrative isn’t overwhelming. I gravitated towards
Sasha right from the start and rooted for her when she decided that Russia
would be her home. I love how her character changes and she is able to express
herself freely compared to her restrictive nature and environment back in the
present time. Personally, I find it hard to empathize with Alex and her mother,
Emma—most of their attitude toward Sasha is unacceptable to me. Overall, Twin
Time is a refreshing time travel-themed story with its vivid pre-revolution,
20th century Russia background and character-driven plot. This is a great read
for YA and adult readers.
~
A 5-star review from Readers' Favorite
Tell us about your book’s illustrations.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of this novel is that
it is fully illustrated. These illustrations are partly based on the works of a
painter Willian-Adolphe Bouguereau, who painted a lot of peasant children in
the French countryside. Sasha and Alex are based on his portraits. I’ve also
used old photographs from the era. I’ve set up a Pinterest page with my visual
research for this story:
https://www.pinterest.com/OlgaWerby/scifi-book-twin-time
Can you share some of
those illustrations with us?
Here are a few illustrations from the book.
These are the mysterious
photographs from the family archives:
This is Sasha teaching math
at her grandmother’s orphanage:
This is the portrait that
hangs in Aunt Nana’s house:
World-building can be the most important element of your
book. What media outlets, role-models
and real-life inspirations did you draw from while writing this book?
I guess I should start with the fact that I was born in Russia.
I lived in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) until I was thirteen and a half. I
came to America as a refugee. So I have some affinity for the place my story
takes place in and its culture, its language…its smell, its light, its trees,
its flowers, its architecture, its temperature… I have find memories of the
White Nights and days when the sun never fully rose above the horizon. I left
when I was already a pretty formed human and I had to make myself fit into a
new place that was very foreign and scary, in many ways. I also didn’t really
speak any English when my family arrived in New York City. I couldn’t even
write my name down on a piece of paper in school. So the idea that I now use
English as my primary language of telling fiction is crazy! I don’t think it
would be possible if not for the Internet, my external brain and linguist. Add
to that that I’m dyslexic and you can see how improbably the idea of writing
and publishing books is for one like me. Yet, here we are.
But there’s more. My family, from both sides, had suffered
incredible damage at the hands of the Russian government and during the WWII.
But for this novel, “Twin Time”, I focused on my grandmother’s story, who lived
an extraordinary life…mostly in secret. She was born into a wealthy (and
titled) family just after the 1917 revolution. But she lived in a relatively
small town and politics takes time to drift into the rural areas of the
country. Years after the revolution, her life hadn’t changed much until one
night, when a former student from her grandmother’s orphanage knocked on the
door of their estate and told them to run. You see, the boy they raised and
educated became a cop in the newly formed Soviet Union. He came to warn the
family that was kind to him that the powers in charge were coming to burn down
their house and kill everyone inside. So my grandmother, who was just a child
at the time, and her family got on their horses and ran, leaving all of their
possessions behind.
They ran for years, scattering into the four corners of the
world. Eventually, my grandmother, her brother, and their mother met up in
Moscow at a home of a former nanny. She gave them shelter. By then, the family
was destitute. My grandmother remembers waiting for her mom to come home from
work one evening. She waited for many hours and then went to the train station
to find out what could have happened. Her mother was standing alone by the
tracks. She went blind from hunger and couldn’t find her way home.
The nightmares didn’t end there. In May of 1927, British police
made a bust of Soviet trade delegation in London. Under the cover of diplomatic
immunity, the All Russian Co-operative Society was spying on the British,
stealing some top-secret documents. For this, the men of ARCOS were expelled
and diplomatic relations between the nations were dissolved for several years.
The Soviets had to retaliate, of course. Shortly afterwards, they rounded up
all British citizens living in Moscow and shot them. That was my family—my
grandmother’s father was a British citizen. Fortunately, my grandmother, her
brother, and her mother survived. Unfortunately, my grandmother had a very
un-Russian last name (we have no idea if it was Lee or Leigh or Li or some
variation there off—the spelling in Russian is all the same). To run from the
authorities, my grandmother married an officer in a Soviet army and gained a
very ordinary last name. She never talked about her family. Ever! What we
learned about her past we learned when we did an interview in her late 80’s in
a safety of my living room. And even then, she kept telling us that walls had
ears and some things are just best forgotten.
For those who are interested in learning more about the ARCOS
affair, please visit the Wikipedia:
Some of the backstory of “Twin Time” is actually the story of my
grandmother’s childhood. She lived in a similar pretty wooden house. Her family
was the pillar of their community. Just like in “Twin Time”, there was an
orphanage and a little church. I tried to incorporate as many details as I could
into my story from my grandmother’s memories of her childhood. And of course
the historical facts as presented in my story are all accurate.
My professional career took me from getting degrees in Math and
Astrophysics (remember, I really didn’t know English back then and couldn’t go
into fields of study that required solid control of language) to getting my
doctorate in education. As a kid with learning disabilities, I am very
interested in cognitive differences. I’ve diagnosed my first case of autism about
twenty-five years ago. That child was non-verbal. Since then, I’ve come across
many families that had children with “differences”. It is extraordinary
difficult to raise a child who is different in this (or any other) country.
“Twin Time” gave me a way of talking about autism and its costs to the family
and friends. The time travel device opened up the possibility of giving a child
with autism a voice. Again, everything you will read in “Twin Time” is
carefully researched. When I discuss autism and family dynamics and therapies,
I draw on actual research. For those who might think that I’ve meant to make
anyone in Sasha’s family evil, that’s not true. There are no bad guys here
really, there are just victims of circumstances and fate.
I did want my book, my story to have a happy ending. I wanted to
show the possibility of love even in dire situations. And I wanted for my
readers to love Sasha as much as I did. But to learn what happened, you’ll have
to read my story.
One final thing, when
my grandmother died, about a decade after my grandfather’s death, she insisted
that her ashes were scattered in a different ocean from my grandfather.
Here is my grandmother’s
portrait from the era of this story:
What is the craziest thing you’ve done in the name of research?
Many years ago, my husband and I ran a creative writing project.
It was one of the first online entertainments and it was one of the first
online learning opportunities for writers. The Company Therapist project was a
soap opera written collaboratively by its audience. You can still see the
project at TheTherapist.com. (At the time, we could have had Therapist.com,
that URL was available. But it was pointed out to us that Therapist.com could
be read as TheRapist.com. So we went with TheTherapist.com.)
The main idea was that there was a therapist hired by a
high-tech company in San Francisco that helped maintain sanity for the
company’s employees prior to going through IPO. So all of the patients knew
each other and worked in the same location. Different writers from around the
world wrote different therapy sessions. It was a blast.
One of my characters was into S&M. So to add a bit of color
and reality into my writing, my husband and I went to the Folsom Street Fair in
San Francisco and then got to write about it! It was pretty out there…
What were your favorite memories spent at the local library?
When I was young—about ten or so—I used to spend a lot of time a
tiny library a block from our apartment. I lived in Leningrad, Russia (Saint
Petersburg now) and winters were long and dark and cold. Books were
surprisingly hard to come by, but one could just go to a library and spend a
few hours reading a small rooms with two rows of chairs with little tables
assigned to each. While no one was allowed to visit the stacks, a library
visitor could ask a nice woman at the desk for a book and she would go and get
it (if it wasn’t banned and available at that location). When done for the
night, the books were all returned, whether finished or not. I loved that
little library. It was warm and full of yellow light. And it was a perfect
escape from reality, even back when I was just a kid (a pretty antisocial kid).
One evening, I asked the nice librarian if I could go and look
in the dark room behind her, back where all of the books were stored. Since I
was the only one there, she let me. It was magical. There were so many books.
And the shelves were so tall that there was a little black metal ladder that
led to a little balcony that encircled the whole back room to make it easier to
get to the books stored up high. I was a little afraid of heights and I was
very afraid of the dark but I climbed the ladder and scooted along, feeling a
bit dizzy with fear, and found a book—“A Thousand and One Nights”. I remember
sitting there and reading it in the dark until I was told it was time to go
home.
That’s my favorite library memory!
What are five reasons we should read your new book?
1.) Despite all of the
ugliness and pain, “Twin Time” is ultimately a story with a happy
ending.
2.) Autism is difficult to
understand. Most of us have a very limited experience with it. And even those
who are immersed in that world as caregivers are at a remove of how it feels to
be so different. When I wrote “Twin Time”, I wanted to make my readers
fall in love with Sasha, to empathize with her, to feel her struggle, to
experience the world through her being. The time travel aspect of this story
allowed me to give Sasha the gift of language when she is no longer in the
present. So we learn about her through her own voice.
3.) I also wanted to write a
story that included some of the details of my grandmother’s childhood. She grew
up in post revolutionary Russia, in a rural village where the political change
was slow to arrive. When it finally did, her family had to run in the middle of
the night to stay alive. They lived through unspeakable horrors and didn’t
survive unscathed. Most died. When and where we are born shape our lives. When
you read “Twin Time”, you will get to experience what it was like to
live in another time and place with different value system and different
culture. Ultimately, this ability to transport us someplace completely
different is the true power of reading.
4.) “Twin Time” is a
very special story. The historical events and descriptions are accurate and
based on eyewitness accounts. But so are the descriptions of what it’s like to
live with autism, to live in a family that has an autistic child, to have an
autistic sibling. “Twin Time” is fantastical, historical romance. But it
is based on truth.
5.) “Twin Time” is
illustrated! Yes, why should only kid’s books have illustrations?
Thank you so much for spending time with Fabulous and Brunette
readers and sharing your exciting new book with us! We wish you all the best on your book tour!
Thank you again for allowing me to share my story with your
readers!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR BIO:
Olga Werby, Ed.D., has a Doctorate from U.C.
Berkeley with a focus on designing online learning experiences. She has a
Master's degree from U.C. Berkeley in Education of Math, Science, and
Technology. She has been creating computer-based projects since 1981 with
organizations such as NASA (where she worked on the Pioneer Venus project),
Addison-Wesley, and the Princeton Review. Olga has a B.A. degree in Mathematics
and Astrophysics from Columbia University. She became an accidental science
fiction indie writer about a decade ago, with her first book, "Suddenly
Paris," which was based on then fairly novel idea of virtual
universes. Her next story, "The FATOFF Conspiracy," was a
horror story about fat, government bureaucracy, and body image. She writes
about characters that rarely get represented in science fiction stories --
homeless kids, refugees, handicapped, autistic individuals -- the social
underdogs of our world. Her stories are based in real science, which is
admittedly stretched to the very limit of possible. She has published almost a
dozen fiction books to date and has won many awards for her writings. Her short
fiction has been featured in several issues of "Alien Dimensions
Magazine," "600 second saga," "Graveyard
Girls," "Kyanite Press' Fables and Fairy Tales,"
"The Carmen Online Theater Group's Chronicles of Terror," with
many more stories freely available on her blog, Interfaces.com.
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CONNECT WITH OLGA:
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Company/Publisher Website:
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BookBub Book Page:
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Amazon Author Page:
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BOOK BUY LINKS:
Amazon Kindle eBook:
Amazon Paperback:
Barnes and Noble Paperback:
The Book Depository Paperback:
BAM! Books-A-Million Paperback:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
GIVEAWAY INFO:
Olga will be awarding two signed books to a
randomly drawn winner (US ONLY) via Rafflecopter during the tour.
**This post contains affiliate links and if clicked and a
purchase is made, I may receive a small commission to help support this
blog. This does not cost you anything,
it just helps pay for all those awesome giveaways on here.**
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.
