Published June 15, 2014 by
Crooked Cat Publishing Ltd.
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Who knows what secrets lie
hidden in your family's past? Southern England, 1982. At 25, single, and under
threat of redundancy from her job in a local library, Emily feels as though her
life is going nowhere - until the day when Carl comes into the library asking
for books about tracing family history. Carl is baffled by a mystery about his
late grandfather: why is the name by which Carl had always known him different
from the name on his old passport? Fascinated as much by Carl himself as by the
puzzle he wants to solve, Emily tries to help him find the answers. As their
relationship develops, their quest for the truth takes them along a complicated
paper-trail which leads, eventually, to the battlefields of the Great War. In
the meantime, Emily discovers that her own family also has its fair share of
secrets and lies. And old sins can still cast long shadows... Can Emily finally
lay the ghosts of the past to rest and look forward to a brighter future?
My Thoughts…
Nice Girls Don’t is a fun and
entertaining story. The setting of a
library could have been slow and quiet, yet this library had an interesting
cast working and hanging out there.
Carl and Alf become instant friends after meeting at the library one day
and Emily, an employee, ends up being the best resource the library has. I found the researching of the heritage of
the characters to be interesting. Family
history is a past time of mine and I truly enjoy learning about other people’s
history. The fact that Carl’s history
is set in World War I makes it even more interesting to me.
The romance between Carl and
Emily is sweet. Their relationship is a
slow moving courtship. They have both
been hurt in the past and are cautious with their future. Both of them have secrets and know that in
order for their friendship to become something more serious they had to come
clean and be honest with each other.
It was great how willing they both were to share their lives and how
accepting of each other they are.
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Meet Sue Barnard
Sue
was born in Wales some time during the last millennium.
After
graduating from Durham University with a degree in French, she returned to
Manchester (where she had spent her formative years) and got married, then had
a variety of office jobs before leaving the world of paid employment to become
a full-time parent. If she had her way,
the phrase “non-working mother” would be banned from the English language.
Sue
has dabbled with writing for most of her life.
Her first success was at primary school, where she won a competition run
by Cadbury’s which involved writing an essay about chocolate. Her prize was a tin containing a selection of
Cadbury’s products. She still has the
tin to this day, and keeps it as a reminder of her humble writing origins. The chocolate is long since gone, but the tin
is now home to her supply of pens and pencils.
In recent years she began to take writing more seriously and studied a
series of writing courses with the Open University. As well as having work published in Best
of Manchester Poets (Volumes 2 and 3), her achievements have included
winning a T-shirt for writing a limerick (which summed up the plot of Macbeth
in five lines) and winning first prize in Writing Magazine’s 2013 poetry
competition for new subscribers. In 2013
she joined the editorial team of Crooked
Cat Publishing, who also published her debut novel The Ghostly Father
(a new interpretation of the Romeo & Juliet story) in February 2014, and
her second novel Nice Girls Don’t (a romantic intrigue set in 1982) in
July 2014.
Sue’s
mind is sufficiently warped that she has also worked as a question-setter for
BBC Radio 4’s fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz – a phase of her
life which caused one of her sons to describe her as “professionally
weird.” She lives in Cheshire and
Anglesey (thought not at the same time – she isn’t THAT weird) with her husband
and a large collection of unfinished scribblings.
Thank you for being part of our promo party. x
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