#GIVEAWAY Review The Winter Husband - Interview with author Lisa Ann Verge

Today I'm so excited to welcome back to the blog one of my all time favorite authors, Lisa Verge Higgins aka Lisa Ann Verge. 
Today I'm reviewing Lisa's latest historical romance The Winter Husband and she'll be filling us all in on what's she's been doing lately. Oh and Lisa has generously offered a #giveaway to go along with the post.

Enjoy!

Giveaway is for a print signed copy
Of both books in her King's Girls series
US ONLY
Please use Rafflecopter form to enter
Good Luck!

ISBN-13:  978-1940963259
Publisher: Bay Street Press LLC
Release Date: 03-31-2022
Length: 369pp
Source: author for review
Buy It: Amazon/ B&N/ IndieBound

ADD TO: GOODREADS

Overview:

She wants no husband. He wants no wife.

Jailed for crimes unbecoming a lady, Marie yearns for liberty even as she refuses the one choice that will set her free: An arranged marriage with a frontier stranger. Then a brawny ex-soldier offers a more dangerous proposal. Spend one winter as his wife in name only, and come spring he will set her free…

I first met Lisa waaaay back in 2011 when I moderated the General Fiction online book club for Barnes & Noble and we group read her first mainstream women's fiction novel, The Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship in 2012.

This is a pic of the B&N
Group who read the book 
(that's me top left)

But today we're chatting about Lisa's latest, The Winter Husband and during our interview she'll fill us in on what she's been doing lately.

Interview with Lisa Ann Verge:

 

Lisa, wow it’s been a while since you’ve graced the pages of my blog. Welcome back!

I LOVED your new novel, The Winter Husband.
Tell us a little about it please.

Awww, thanks for your kind words, and for having me back, Debbie.  I’m so excited to introduce my latest novel.

The Winter Husband is the story of an unlikely lawbreaker, an orphaned young woman shipped by force to the Canadian wilderness where she faces an impossible choice.  Here’s the blurb:

Jailed for crimes unbecoming a lady, Marie-Suzanne yearns for liberty even as she refuses the only thing that will set her free: An arranged marriage with one of Quebec’s rough, restless settlers. Then a brawny soldier with winter-grey eyes offers her a different, more dangerous proposal. He’ll marry her in name only and gift Marie the freedom she craves, but only after she spends a winter with him in a wilderness cabin….

For those of your readers who might have picked up an earlier novel of mine, Heaven In His Arms, they might recognize Marie as a secondary character in that earlier book.  I left that poor girl stuck in a jail cell.  Now that I’ve dreamt up a perfect man for her (Captain Lucas Girard), I can finally let her out.

Lisa, I love history, especially learning about different historical events through novels. And in fact, The Winter Husband is based on the historical event known as The King’s Daughters.
Give us a snippet of what The King’s Daughters were?

I do love history. I’m a complete nerd about it.  I can’t remember exactly when I read about King’s Daughters, but I do remember gasping when I did.

Back in the 1660s, the French King was furious that the settlements of current-day Canada weren’t much more than man-camps.  Apparently, the kind of thrill-seekers who sailed to that wilderness preferred to explore the forests, live off the land, and hang out with the first peoples rather than settle down and farm like the English and Dutch to the south.

In an effort to change that, the king ordered a rounding-up of women throughout France.  He picked orphans, sturdy farm girls, and impoverished young noblewomen. He dubbed them filles du roi, “King’s Daughters” and then shipped them overseas to marry those ungovernable frontier men, in the hope they’d all settle down.

And it worked. Often, the women married only weeks after arrival. 

Why did this spark your interest enough to base novels on it?

As a writer, the history of the King’s Daughters is pure gold.

First, the tales of the Filles du Roi are tailor-made for arranged-marriage and wilderness-adventure plots, both of which I adore.

Second, my muse purrs whenever I go off the beaten path. I’m irresistibly drawn to uncommon settings and true, but little-known history.

Third, I realized I could create a whole series based on this history, and so I did—the King’s Girls Series.  Heaven In His Arms is the first, The Winter Husband the second. Each book can be read as a stand-alone, but connecting them was a golden opportunity to mirror the many experiences of those who dared the unknown.

Lastly, and most important, is this: Over 800 women arrived on the shores of the St. Lawrence River between 1663 and 1673. Those brave women became the matriarchs of a large portion of the current-day, French-speaking, Quebec population. The King’s Girls Series is my small way of honoring their boldness and courage.

A book based on Girl Power is always what I’m on the lookout for and Marie definitely fits the bill, plus we all know that there were strong women all throughout history, otherwise humans wouldn’t exist.
Is it hard creating strong historical female protagonists, especially ones long before the #metoo movement in our male dominated history?

You know, because the best novels have lots of conflict and struggle, writing strong historical female protagonists is pretty easy.  Women’s choices were so limited in centuries past, their lives were so constrained. Every level of society worked against their natural yearning for independence, freedom, and personal choice. There was so much to fight against! And plenty of villains.  

Your narrative showcases just how hard the living was back in the vast wilderness that was 1600s Canada.
How do you write about such brutal conditions with such empathy without getting frostbite?

Hah!  I’m not sure I’d survive the era, myself.  But although the conditions of frontier Canada were difficult, there was also incredible, breathtaking beauty. The streams were clear and clean enough to drink from. The forests were vast and teemed with game.  Winter in Quebec was deep and long, but there is serenity in a landscape blanketed with snow. For those who grew up amid the crowded, smelly cities of 17^th century France, the freedom and natural beauty of the wilderness was a wonder.  In The Winter Husband, I tried to capture that awe.

Have you visited the sights of these King’s Girls novels yourself?

Yes! I’ve visited Montreal and Quebec City multiple times and have driven the king’s road between them. That road happens to be one of the oldest thoroughfares in all of North America, following the banks of the St. Lawrence River and winding through so many charming towns.

Lisa you are not the only of my go-to, established authors that have gone indie. Some say they like the ease, some say they like the creative control.
What do you like about Indie Publishing?

Creative control is a big part of why I love Indie Publishing, but there’s also another factor I’m grateful for.

A book like The Winter Husband, with its unusual setting, is considered a “niche” historical romance, a bit out-of-the-box. Trade publishers prefer sub-genres that are tried and true, such as Regencies and Highlanders, and that narrows, somewhat, what authors can most easily write and sell. Fortunately, Indie publishing steps into that gap, freeing authors to spin whatever story they’d like.

Even dinosaur romance (not kidding. Look it up!)

I mentioned above it’s been a while since you’ve been here, in fact in our last  interview (click the link to read it)  from (can you believe it) 2017 you mentioned that you were turning a new page so to speak in your role as an author. You mention both writing in different genres and a project about the life of Lola Montez.
Have you met all those goals are is it still a work in process?

Re-reading that interview, I was surprised to see how many goals I actually hit.  And YES, I also tackled that project about Lola Montez.

We talked earlier about strong historical female protagonists…and, boy, there aren’t many stronger than Lola.  Lola Montez was a real-live 19^th century Spanish dancer, a flawed, complex woman slandered by her Victorian contemporaries, a woman whose determination to fight against injustice and live an independent life fueled a year of revolutions that ultimately toppled a king.

Lola’s novel is finished. It required a tremendous amount of research, so…huzzah! I’m shopping it around as we speak. 

Lisa, thanks so much for chatting with me today.
What’s next on the drawing board for you?

The response to The Winter Husband has been so wonderful that I’ve already started working on the third novel in the King’s Girls Series, Cecile’s story. I’m also planning a Christmas novella about Marietta and Philippe, secondary characters who appear in all three books. 

That ought to keep me busy for a while.  But always, always, there’s something different simmering on the back burner…

 My Review:

The Winter Husband
King’s Girls #2
Lisa Ann Verge

The Winter Husband, #2 in Lisa Ann Verge’s King’s Girls series is an awesome historical romance, an action-packed tale of strength and determination. It’s based on the real Filles du roi, or King’s Daughters when between 1663 and 1673 King Louis XIV sent almost 800 women complete with a dowry to help settle down his rowdy inhabitants and settle his new French settlement of Quebec. Many of these female ancestors to modern day Canada were orphans like Lisa’s heroine Marie.

No one can bring a novel to life like the master storytelling of Lisa Ann Verge and that fact is very evident in The Winter Husband where she has no trouble escorting her audience back to the mid seventeenth century and the wilds of a Canadian winter where the Northern Lights glow and game and predators roam the vast wilderness. The narrative is vivid and flowing and ripe with emotion and her characters are all unforgettable especially her standout stars Marie and Lucas. Marie especially is representative of the strong women who first settled Quebec, she’s tough yet cultured and literate and not afraid to face whatever the Canadian winter can throw at her. Lucas is the classical tortured warrior who suffers from what we now know is PTSD yet with all his handicaps is still an honorable man. Fans of this author, historical romance and the novels of Eloisa James and Julia Quinn will devour this unputdownable tale. 

A Seventeenth Century Quebec prison is no place for a lady but that’s exactly where French born Marie Suzanne Duplessis finds herself. To get out she’s told she must trade this prison for the prison of an arranged marriage, but Marie has other ideas and is determined to deny all suitors until she can find a way back to her Paris orphanage. Then a giant of a man makes her an offer she can’t refuse.

Captain Lucas Girard is haunted by ghosts from the past and the only solace he has is a small cabin by the banks of the St. Lawrence river deep in the Canadian wilderness. To get it he must first get a wife, a wife he doesn’t want. A wife who if will agree to his terms will be free after spending one winter with him.

Will these two tortured souls survive a brutal Canadian winter without killing each other, or will they give into their powerful attraction instead?

About the author:
Lisa Ann Verge is the critically acclaimed RITA-nominated author of eighteen novels that have been published worldwide and translated into as many languages. She started her career writing emotionally intense romances about hot men and dangerous women, and now she also writes life-affirming women's fiction under the name Lisa Verge Higgins. A finalist for Romantic Times' book awards five times over, Lisa has won the Golden Leaf and the Bean Pot, and twice she has cracked Barnes & Noble's General Fiction Forum's top twenty books of the year. She currently lives in New Jersey with her husband and their three daughters, who never fail to make life interesting.

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