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Gretchen Craig

Autor de Ever My Love

12 Obras 75 Miembros 6 Reseñas

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Créditos de la imagen: Gretchen Craig

Obras de Gretchen Craig

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
female
Nacionalidad
USA
Lugares de residencia
Florida, Germany, UK, Maine, Texas
Educación
University of Florida (BA|English), Florida Atlantic University (MA|English)
Ocupaciones
mother, writer, teacher
Relaciones
Craig, Steve (husband)
Biografía breve
Gretchen Craig is the critically acclaimed author of novels and short stories. Her ante-bellum historicals are set in Louisiana among the Creoles, Cajuns, and African slaves. Always and Forever, from Kensington Zebra, won the Colorado Romance Writers Award of Excellence for Mainstream with Romantic Elements and was chosen as an Editor’s Pick in the Historical Novel Society reviews. Continuing the saga of the same extended families, Ever My Love won the Booksellers Best Award from the GDRWA. The last book of the trilogy, Evermore, carries the families into the early days of the Civil War.
Gretchen was born in the Florida Panhandle and grew up in St. Petersburg on the Gulf Coast. She and her husband have lived in South Florida, Germany, and Maine, and are now in Texas among the mesquite and sunflowers. Maybe because she’s lived in such diverse climates and terrains, Gretchen’s novels are notable for their strong sense of place. Readers swear they can smell the bayous of Louisiana and taste the gumbos of New Orleans. Crimson Sky, a Kindle Novel inspired by the pueblos, mountains, and deserts of northern New Mexico, evoke the lives of people living under a searing sun among the stark beauty of mesas and canyons.

Miembros

Reseñas

"The bud was beautifully formed, promising a full red blossom, but Cleo spied the tiny bore hole. The bloom would be marred with ravaged petals from the worm nestled in it's center".

The Color of the Rose by Gretchen Craig

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

This book contains three stories. My favorite by far is Summer Heat.

Two of them, Afternoon Tea and The color of the rose are focused on the relationship between Slaves and master.

Summer Heat is set in the great depression and the story is about a young woman, living with her mom who has nobody to talk to and has despaired of ever finding anyone to love. She is lonely but hard working and resigned to her fate. Until a young man appears at the door looking for work.

All three of these stories carry with them the themes of sadness, alienation and fitting in., . The writing is beautifully descriptive and as vivid as a rose in bloom. This stories are my first introduction to the works of Gretchen Craig but I can already tell she is going to be an author I absolutely love.

The stories are short but contain as much depth and wild beauty as any full length book. I was entranced. Recommended strongly for fans of Historical Fiction. You will love this delightful book.
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Denunciada
Thebeautifulsea | otra reseña | Aug 4, 2022 |
Esta reseña ha sido escrita para Sorteo de miembros LibraryThing.
The novel is set in an adobe pueblo village in Texas during the 1590s. The village is placed on top of a mesa with its fields down below. The men are away hunting for meat to store for the winter. The Querechos, a tribe who do not farm, raid the village in the dead of the night. No one is hurt, but all the stored food is stolen. And Mitsa, a woman, is taken. One of the sentries – ShoHona – is found just alive, but scalped.
Zia, the wife of one of the absent hunters, sees a fire belonging to the raiders in the distance. She and other women and some of the older boys creep up on them. The men are taking turns to rape Mitsa. Zia manages to give her a drug to supply the men with. At dawn all the men are killed, Mitsa rescued and the stolen food recovered.
On return to the village they discover a troop of Spanish soldiers demanding supplies aggressively. Fortunately their captain, Diego, arrives and calls them off when Zia says they have no stores because of drought.

Meanwhile TapanAshke, Zia’s husband, kills an elk but is attacked by strangers and then falls down a short cliff. Injured, he makes his way back to the hunting campo to discover that all but six of the group have been killed and all the meat stolen. He is rescued by hunters from Acoma, a neighbouring village,. In time his wounds heal and he can go home.
At his home village the hunters return without some of their number. Zia believes that TapanAshke has been killed and is badly affected by her grief. ShoHona slowly recovers from being scalped and helps the boys in the village make bows aand arrows and how to shoot them He also teaches them hunting. But he starts to have absence spells which Zia and Mitsa worry about.

In Acoma, TapanAshka is still not quite strong enough to walk all the way home. He constantly thinks about Zia. Then thee Spaniards arrived. Following the village’s refusal to supply 200 men, there was a skirmish. The Spanish captain was so angered by the way the villagers threw the dead Spanish soldiers over a cliff that he ordered all surviving men to be kept as slaves for 220 years. He made examples of some of them, including TapanAshka, by chopping off one of their feet. The whole village, including the maimed, is marched off. TapanAshka and the village medicine woman manage to escape and she more or less heals his stump.
Back home, Zia’s brother-in-law Soshue, has been paying her unwanted attentions. He accuses her of witchcraft but she successfully defends herself. He is executed.

Later in the year the village suffers severely from a food shortage. They reluctantly decide to go to the Spanish mission at Oke in the hope of help. Diego Ortiz, the Spanish captain who had earlier helped them, meets them and helps them reach the mission. He takes Zia, her baby son TyoPe and her grandmother to live in his house. The rest of the village is given an area to live in away from the village. Zia’s sister HaNa spurns her for living with the Spaniard.
Diego insists on Zia going to church and converting to Christianity. They don’t make love for a long time. And then, after he has been away for several days, they do make love.
Measles strikes the villagers camp and kills many of them. Zia and TyoPe also catch it, but survive thanks to a special medicine her grandmother makes.

Meanwhile TapanAshka has managed to get back to the village. He is surprised to find it empty and showing signs of a planned departure. He sustains himself and then stores supplies in a secret cave in case of trouble.
Zia, talking to the people in the village, learns how brutally the people of Acoma were treated by her Diego. The next time he is away, she and TyoPe together with her sister HaNa and ShoHona escape. They find a cave near their home village to live in and hide from the Spaniards. Diego and two soldiers as well as his hunting dogs appear.
To find out how the story ends most satisfactorily you will need to read this book. It is easy to read and well-written. I enjoyed it and think you will.
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Denunciada
PeterClack | 2 reseñas más. | Jun 29, 2011 |
There are three stories in this collection, the first two of which are linked. They are all set in the Deep South of America.
In Afternoon Tea Josie, aged 6, has a doll as a present from her wealthy father. She is playing with Cleo, also aged 6, her slave half-sister dressed in a sacking dress. When a black servant, Bibi, comes in to serve tea, the mother deliberately makes her spill the tea. She shouts at her and then beats her. He, however, sweeps up the two young girls and takes them to his room where he sits them on his knees. It is clear that he has been having an affair with Bibi and that his wife is aware of it.
We return to the same family fifteen years later in The Color of the Rose. Cleo is now a house slave who has annoyed her mistress. As punishment she is made to hoe over the rose garden. She continues to work the rose garden all summer long after she has completed her housework because she found that she enjoyed the work. It was certainly preferable to emptying spittoons and ‘night jars’. She is, nevertheless, worried that she will be sunburned as black as the field hands because of her exposure. She loves the colour of the roses which are mainly red, but her favourites are yellow.
Josie’s mother is determined to get her married off. One morning Cleo is told to get flowers for a corsage and two buds to put in her hair. Because a gentleman is calling for her later in the day.
Cleo does this and takes a yellow bud for herself. In her room in the evening she put it in her hair and studied herself in the mirror. She knew there would be no gentleman caller for her. She crushed the rose and blew out the light.
Summer heat on the other hand is set on a small farm in the great depression of the 1930s. A mother and daughter, Etta, 24, attempt to manage the farm following the death of the husband out in the fields. Etta had taken charge of the kitchen and cooking when she was 15. Her mother effectively did nothing about the house or on the farm. All she liked was listening to President Roosevelt and hymns on the radio. She hated Etta listening to anything else, especially modern music.
Then, one day, a man passes by asking for work in return for a roof and food. Etta gives him the work her father used to do, a bed in the barn and meals on the kitchen step. In time, she made a pot of coffee for them to share after supper. He told her about the places he’d been and things he’d done. As is only to be expected, mthey fall in love and made love in the barn in the dead of the night.
Etta’s brother Earl appears on the farm at heir mother’s request. He takes the man away with him to the nearby town where he lives. Etta is heartbroken.
Several weeks later he reappears. When Etta sees him she runs down the road. He carried a present for them of a 40 lb block of ice. Her brother had got to know him and had found him work.
After supper, he and Etta went indoors and listened to the radio and danced quietly.

These are three very different stories. The third is about family closeness and distrust of outsiders, while the first two are about slavery and the bad treatment of slaves. All three are eminently readable.
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Denunciada
PeterClack | otra reseña | Jun 3, 2011 |
Esta reseña ha sido escrita para Sorteo de miembros LibraryThing.
Crimson Sky provides detailed insight into the lives of Native Americans and Spanish Conquistadors in the south eastern United Stated during the 1500s. I immediately got drawn into the story, even though it's not a topic I'd normally be interested it. Zia is a mother willing to do what it takes to preserve her people and protect her child. Her husband, TapanAshka, who is believed to be dead after a raid, must struggle to reach his family after they have moved onto a Spanish settlement in order to not starve. Both the main characters have their flaws, but they are still likeable and their actions are understandable.… (más)
 
Denunciada
kkunker | 2 reseñas más. | Feb 15, 2011 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
12
Miembros
75
Popularidad
#235,804
Valoración
3.8
Reseñas
6
ISBNs
21
Idiomas
1

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