Villains! Across Three Autums by Denise Weimer - Backcountry Brides

[Angela here, and for the past month we had authors from Barbour's Backcountry Brides collection share a little about their villains! I'll let Denise take it from here:]

Love on Colonial America’s Frontier

Travel into Colonial America where eight women seek love, but they each know a future husband requires the necessary skills to survive in the backcountry. Living in areas exposed to nature’s ferocity, prone to Indian attack, and cut off from regular supplies, can hearts overcome the dangers to find lasting love?

Woman Vs. __(you name it!)__ in Across Three Autumns

One of the other authors in our Backcountry Brides collection reminded us that the villain in a story doesn’t have to be a person. That got me thinking, and I concluded that there are a whole list of villains in Across Three Autumns.

My heroine, Jenny White, battles just about everything and everyone. She’s a feisty, fightin’ gal! But before you decide I went off on the deep end with action here, in my defense, I was only following history. As I researched for this story set in Middle Georgia during the Revolutionary War, I came to realize the area’s moniker during that time, “The Hornet’s Nest,” was more apt than I’d ever dreamed. With enemies on all sides, Patriot settlers fought tooth-and-nail for daily survival.

Let’s look at Jenny’s fearsome foes:

Woman Vs. Nature – Eeking a living out of a patch of ground was no small trick for settlers during peace time … when the weather cooperated … much less when the men were away and roving parties of Indians and Loyalists caused women and children to flee their homes. Crops left in the fields needed to spin clothes or feed families got torched. Then what? There was no back-up plan.

Woman Vs. Man – Like the real heroine, Nancy Hart, who inspired my protagonist, Jenny employs cleverness to manipulate roving Loyalists, and her Brown Bess to help defend her forted home against Creek and Cherokee braves. And we won’t even go into the names and ranks of all the British soldiers marching right past Fort White into battles that threatened Jenny’s father, brother, and sweetheart. There were so many, you’d skip this paragraph for sure!

Woman Vs. Nature Again – Jenny discovers there’s one foe she can’t outwit or outshoot: small pox. The dread illness’s stealthy siege leaves her family devastated and her own skin marked. She fears Scottish scout Caylan McIntosh, the only man who’s looked twice in her direction, will no longer find her attractive.

Woman Vs. Herself – Perhaps Jenny’s biggest obstacle is the insecurity that erodes her hope for love. She’s sure she’s too tall and gawky to fit even battle-toughened Caylan’s picture of a wife. Learning to appreciate her own strengths and see herself as God does may take longer than it does for Elijah Clark’s army and seven hundred civilians to escape on foot from Georgia to North Carolina!

  

Denise Weimer holds a journalism degree with a minor in history from Asbury University. A former magazine writer, she is a substantive editor for Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas as well as the author of The Georgia Gold Series, The Restoration Trilogy and a number of romantic novellas including ACROSS THREE AUTUMNS of Barbour's Backcountry Brides collection. Represented by Hartline Literary Agency, Denise is a wife and swim mom of two daughters who always pauses for old houses, coffee and chocolate!