The Reading Frenzy: Blog Tour - Finding Light in a Lost Year- Interview with author Carin Fahr Shulusky

Today is my second stop on the blog tour featuring this outstanding gem of a book, where I'm sharing my exclusive interview with the author. If you want to see my review featured on my first stop the link is highlighted below on the blog roll.

Enjoy!

Finding Light in a Lost Year

by Carin Fahr Shulusky

May 16 – June 10, 2022 Virtual Book Tour

Synopsis:

Roni Wright thought she had everything; huge home, successful husband, kids, and a brilliant career. That is until the worse pandemic in 100 years swept away the shallow façade of her life and she nearly lost it all. This is the story of how a broken family navigated the most difficult year of their lives and found hope in the middle of so much loss. You will recognize many of the things that nearly broke us all as we struggled with pandemic restrictions and the new normal. But you will cheer as they work their way out of darkness into a better world.

Book Details

Genre: Family & Relationship, Biographical Fiction Published by: Fossil Creek Press Publication Date: May 2022 Number of Pages: 170 ISBN: 978-1-7362417-2-1 Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Read an excerpt:

April 2020 – When It Rains, It Pours

On April 1, I picked up my calendar, as I did at the beginning of every month—usually to see what we had coming up and to schedule more—and started crossing off everything. I had already crossed off the March trip to Paris. Now I crossed off this month’s planned trip to the banking conference in San Francisco. I slashed through the conference in New York. And with a little more pain, I crossed off the two Broadway shows to which I had tickets. An old college girlfriend was going to go with me to one and Dan the other. Broadway closed. New York closed. All crossed off, as was the St. Louis Symphony concert to which we had tickets. Canceled. Hockey, canceled. Three birthday parties, canceled. My appointment at the nail salon, canceled. Hairdresser, canceled. Canceled, canceled, canceled. April was looking so gloomy. The only exercise I was getting was walking through one of our beautiful parks with the kids. Sometimes, we took bikes and rode a trail. But with April came gloom and rain and even that little bit of escape became impossible. Then the St. Louis County Executive closed all county parks. We were now required to wear a mask if we were out in public, especially indoors, and to stay six feet apart wherever we were. The gloom was growing daily. My life had no order. We were in free fall. On April 9, we got a big shot in the arm, as it were, when $2,400 appeared in our checking account—a gift from the U.S. government. Officially the money was part of the Economic Impact Payment, but the payments were more often called stimulus checks. We just called it salvation. Like many families, we weren’t sure how we would make ends meet. This money was a gift from heaven—or the government, depending on your point of view. By the second week of April, our school district was making an effort at learning. They asked parents to pick up “home learning packets” from the school. When I drove up to the school, someone handed me the packet for our kids’ grade levels. But when I got home, there was little explanation about the work. It was terribly disorganized and made little sense to me. Katlin wanted to learn more, and Oliver wanted to learn less. I just wanted more alcohol. Lots more. I decided hard times called for hard alcohol. Wine was OK now with lunch, but by dinner time, I needed a cocktail. I set up a place in the basement family room for the kids to study. I tried hard to make Oliver work on letters and sight words. He would work with me for maybe thirty minutes, then he’d start disrupting everything I did. He’d rip papers and run away. Meanwhile, Katlin was trying to figure out her lessons with great frustration. She didn’t know what was wanted of her, and I couldn’t figure it out either. Oliver did everything in his considerable ability to disrupt our efforts. Most sessions ended with all three of us crying. Not only was I failing at trying to teach my kids, I was failing at keeping them out of Nathan’s living room office. Every time Oliver ran away from me, he ran right into one of Nathan’s meetings. No order. No peace. No joy. --- Excerpt from Finding Light in a Lost Year by Carin Fahr Shulusky. Copyright 2022 by Carin Fahr Shulusky. Reproduced with permission from Carin Fahr Shulusky. All rights reserved.

My Interview with Carin:

Carin Hi welcome back to The Reading Frenzy!
I really enjoyed reading your latest novel, Light in a Lost Year.

This is actually your second published novel after, In The Middle.
How was this experience different than the first time?
It was an entirely different experience. In the Middle was closely based on my experience, caring for an aging mother. It was my experience laced with fiction to make it more interesting and move faster. Finding Light in a Lost Year was primarily fiction laced with my experiences and new headlines of the pandemic.

This novel is set at the start of the pandemic and ends on July 4^th of 2021.
Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?
I was having a conversation with friends about how the quarantine affected the lives of people who went to the office everyday and spent little time at home. I talked to several people who had to find a way to work from home. They discussed the difficulties of suddenly having children, they have little seen during the week now under foot as they tried to continue to work from home. One friend said he missed the conversations around the water cooler and all the office intrigue. That set fire to my creative process and I’d wake up with more and more ideas of how to make this into a book. I had actually started another book but set it aside because I thought this more-timely.

Carin this novel follows the seemingly perfect, Wright family, but readers will soon learn there are real cracks in the foundation. And I actually had a hard time warming up to your female star, Roni until the middle.
Does this surprise you or was it your intention to make her sort of villainous?
I think I would call her more human than villain. I’ve known so many people like Veronica, so wrapped up in their “work world” they forget how their actions at work might look at home. As long as they manage to keep their worlds apart and moving forward they feel successful. But it’s my observation that the pandemic may have forced these people to face their failings.

Carin faith is an important part of this and your last novel too.
Do you see every novel in your future being faith based and why?
My faith is such a big part of who I am, I don’t think I could write something that was totally void of my faith. It seems to crop up even when I don’t look for it. Christians are so often misrepresented in media, I want to show the true Christians I know, loving and caring.

One of the issues of the novel that really touched my heart is how hard it was for this family with school aged children to cope with the new normal of mandates and stay at home orders during the pandemic. In fact, it was eye opening for me, a senior with no children at home.
Was this based on personal knowledge?
Yes. The school experience in Finding Light in a Lost Year is based on my granddaughter’s experience. She was in second grade when the pandemic closed her school and she didn’t go back in person for nearly a year. I know there were many different experiences of school, but I saw my granddaughter’s situation and I used that as an example. They created a “pod” to study together, too. I think that will be familiar to many parents. I also included another experience. Their cousins attend a parochial school that started back up in September of 2020 and never again closed. The model for that experience was the Lutheran school connected to my church.

Carin all in all this novel highlighted some really important and ongoing social problems that the pandemic brought to the forefront especially the role of women and how they were the ones most affected and are in fact still suffering more than their male counterparts and much of it is due to childcare.
Was it your intention to showcase this or was it just a byproduct?
I did not intend to showcase this, but as I was writing, and observing the effect on many working mother’s I realized it was an important byproduct of the pandemic. It was painfully hard to miss. I’ve observed that it’s been hard for most women to find a way to return to their past work lives. Even now, the restrictions on how long a child must stay home during a sickness and quarantine if they’ve been exposed to Covid makes it hard for mothers to resume business as usual.

Carin thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions.
Good luck with this book and all your future endeavors.
Thank you so much for your interest in my book. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you.

Author Bio:

Carin Fahr Shulusky was born and raised in west St. Louis County. She attended the University of

Missouri, Columbia, where she received a B.J (Bachelor of Journalism). After college she worked in advertising for GE and Monsanto. She was the first professional woman in her division of each. After 25 years in Marketing, she created her own firm, Marketing Alliance. She was president of Marketing Alliance, from 2002 – 2014. She is a past-president of the Business Marketing Association of St. Louis. Carin Fahr is married to Richard Shulusky. They have two grown children and one marvelous granddaughter. Grandma Carin has a life long love of cooking, even writing her own cookbook. In 2014 Carin retired to devote full time to writing. Her first book, In the Middle was inspired by her own battle to care for her beloved mother, Dorothy Fahr. Many of the stories Carrie Young’s mother tells her in In the Middle came from Carin’s mother. Carin is a lifelong member of Pathfinder Church in Ellisville, Missouri, where she volunteers in early childhood.