Straw in the Wind. Booklist Review.

Author: JANET WOODS
Title: STRAW IN THE WIND
Publication: BOOKLIST
Issue: 1st MAY 2010


Straw in the Wind, Woods, Janet (Author), Jun 2010. 256 p, Severn, hardcover, $28.95. (9780727868930).

Who is Sara Finn? Is she the baby sister long thought dead by the Honeyman sisters in Salting the Wound (2010) Adam Chapman sets out to determine if the baby exists and is truly the love child of sea captain Erasmus Thornton. Sara is happy to find a good position as a housekeeper at Leighton Manor in Dorset County. Her early life is a blur: first the home she hardly remembers, then the farm where she labored incessantly, followed by the workhouse, and lastly her position as an unpaid maid for a reverend by whom she was summarily dismissed when his oldest son tried to kiss her and she slapped him. Adam finds Sara at Leighton Manor and immediately falls in love with her, not knowing for certain whether she is the woman he is searching for. Once again Woods gives her readers an appealing historical romance with intriguing, multidimensional characters.

Looking the part

I've often wondered why writers pose with tools of trade on display. One office is very much the same as another office. We have desks with computers. Filing cabinets, and shelves. As a former professional housewife and mother (now retired) I suspect that the books make me appear more scholarly, the computer, more technically proficient. In actual fact I'm neither. What happened here was that I discovered that my computer (the one you can't see with the tennis court sized screen) could take photographs. So I decided to fiddle with it. I put my best blouse on, turned the computer round and posed with my retired computer and the new set of shelves I'd been waiting years for and finally got. Anyway, I squared myself up in the little square viewer and clicked my mouse. One...two...three!!! The resulting flash nearly knocked me off my chair. When I was a professional housewife and mother I didn't pose for photographs with my broom or mop and bucket held aloft. Do plumbers pose proudly with their plungers and S bends? No don't answer that one. Anyway, for what it's worth, here I am looking the part as best I can.

PS. Can I call myself a photographer now? No? Oh...okay.