Guest Post: David Burnett

Thursday, 22 January 2015

To Fall In Love Again by David Burnett

Release Date: 30th November 2014

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Brook Cottage Books has been honoured with the task of coordinating the book tour for To Fall In Love Again by David Burnett. The book has been very well received by all the tour hosts and its obvious from the reviews that readers think that David Burnett is a very talented writer. If you want to read my review you can check it out HERE.

David has taken time out of his very busy schedule to write a fantastic guest post. Don't forget to check out the amazing giveaway too. Enjoy!

Love Never Ends

“Why write a Romance about two fifty-somethings?” I was asked.

My knee-jerk reaction: Why not?

While teen-agers may think that the need for companionship, romance, and love withers and dies as one enters the third decade of life, surely no one else seriously believes that people over fifty do not fall in love. If you do share the adolescents’ belief, however, then you, like they, are quite mistaken. We cross no great chasm as we age. There is no line drawn in the sand over which we step and − poof! − we are ancient. We need love when we are young; we need love when we are old.

Romance is not the property of young adults, and novels quite realistically are written about those who are several generations older than the twenty-year olds who traditionally inhabit the world of Romance. My new book, To Fall in Love Again, tells the story of Amy and Drew, She is fifty-five; he is fifty-seven. And they fall in love.

Believe it, or not, none of us sees ourselves as old!

In The Thorn Birds, a novel by Colleen McCullough, Mary Cleary Carson, the seventy-two year old matriarch of the Cleary family, has what today’s high school students might call a “major crush” on Father Ralph de Bricassart, the handsome young priest who is the family’s spiritual advisor and friend. The night before she dies, she tells him that she loves him. He denies her feelings, and she responds, angrily.

You're wrong. I have loved you. God, how much! Do you think my years automatically preclude it? Well, Father de Bricassart, let me tell you something. Inside this stupid body I'm still young-I still feel, I still want, I still dream, I still kick up my heels and chafe at restrictions like my body…

McCullough perfectly captures the feelings of those over thirty, or forty, or wherever you draw the line between young and old. Those on the north side of that line know that, inside, they are no different from the way they were twenty or thirty years before.

Books with older characters are not new, and I expect we will see more of them in the years ahead. Our population is aging, and in a guest post in Publishing Perspectives, Claude Nougat, a former project director for the United Nations, wrote on the topic, Is Baby Boomer Lit the Next Hot Genre?

A baby boomer, a “boomer,” is anyone born between nineteen forty five, following the Second World War, and nineteen sixty four, when the birth rate bubble that followed the war began to deflate. Boomers are now between the ages of fifty and sixty-nine and there are over seventy-seven million of them in the United States and twenty million in the United Kingdom. Nougat writes that they are retiring in large numbers, that they have free time, money, and that they like to read. She compares Boomer Lit to YA, a genre that came into its own when boomers were approaching age twenty.

Both genres target issues with which people are concerned at crucial transition points in their lives. YA addresses problems confronted by children as they morph into adults. Boomer Lit deals with issues of concern to adults who are adjusting to the prospect of growing older. These are issues which are important to boomers, today, and which will be important to other generations as the make this transition in the years ahead.

In To Fall in Love Again, for example, Drew and Amy have each lost a spouse, one to cancer, the other in an accident, and both are struggling with the prospect of loving someone new, experiences being faced by increasing numbers of people over the age of fifty.

It is a mistake, though, to conclude that the issues that Drew and Amy face are peculiar to people of their age. They are not. Many of the issues addressed by YA and boomer lit are the same. Am I in love? Can I trust him? What will my family think? Is it possible to fall in love a second time? These questions are timeless.

Boomer lit is not only for older adults, any more than YA is only for adolescents. One benefit of reading is that books allow us to view our world from the perspectives of those who are different from us. When our stories concern characters from a generation not our own, we find that, while the problems they face are much the same as ours, they will understand them in different ways. And we can learn from each other.

About the Book

Drew Nelson did not plan to talk with anyone that morning. He did not plan to make a new friend. He certainly did not plan to fall in love.

He resisted all of Amy’s attempts to draw him out− at the hotel, at the airport, on the airplane− giving hurried responses and burying his face in a pile of papers. It was only when the flight attendant offered coffee, and a muscle in Amy’s back twitched as she reached for it, and the cup tipped, and the hot liquid puddled in Drew’s lap that they began to talk.

Earlier in the year, each had lost a spouse of over thirty years. Drew’s wife had died of a brain tumor, Amy’s husband when his small airplane nose-dived to earth, the engine at full throttle − an accident, it was ruled.

They live in the same city. Both have grandchildren. They are about the same age. Consciously, or not, they both are looking to love again.

But relationships do not exist in vacuums. Drew is wealthy, and Amy is middle class. Amy is “new” in town – she and her husband moved to Charleston twenty-five years ago – while Drew’s family has lived there for three centuries. Drew lives below Broad, a code word for high society, old families, power, and money. Amy’s home is across the river.

Class warfare may be less violent than it was in the past, but when Drew invites Amy to the St Cecelia Ball, battle lines are drawn. In a city in which ancestry is important, the ball’s membership is passed from father to son, and only those from the oldest families attend.

Family, friends, co-workers all weigh in on their relationship and choose sides. Allies are found in unexpected places. Opposition comes from among those who were thought to be friends. Though they are gone, even their spouses − through things they have done and things they have said − wield influence in the conflict that follows.

Amy begins to suspect that Drew is one of them, the rich snobs who despise her, while Drew concludes that Amy neither trusts him nor cares for him. As each questions the other’s motives, their feelings for each other are tested, and Drew and Amy are challenged to consider if they truly want to fall in love again.

The Author

I live in Columbia South Carolina, with my wife and our blue-eyed cat, Bonnie. I enjoy traveling, photography, baking bread, and the Carolina beaches.

We have traveled widely in the United States and the United Kingdom. During one trip to Scotland, we visited Crathes Castle, the ancestral home of the Burnett family near Aberdeen.

My photographic subjects have been as varied as prehistoric ruins on the islands of Scotland, star trails, sea gulls, and a Native American powwow.

I went to school for longer than I want to admit, and I have graduate degrees in psychology and education. I was formerly director of research for our state education department.

We have two daughters and three grandchildren. To Fall in Love Again is my third novel.