New Release Spotlight & Guest Post: The Empty Nesters by Carolyn Brown

Title: The Empty Nesters

Author: Carolyn Brown

Release Date: August 20, 2019

Publisher: Montlake Romance

Dear friends and army wives Diana, Carmen, and Joanie have been through war, rumors of war, marital problems, motherhood, fears, joy, and heartache. But none of the women are prepared when their daughters decide to enlist in the army together. Facing an empty nest won’t be easy. Especially for Carmen. With emotions already high, she suffers an even greater blow: divorce papers. Diana understands the fury and tears. She’s been there.

With nothing to lose and no one at home, the girlfriends impulsively accept an unexpected offer from their elderly neighbor. The recently widowed Tootsie has an RV, a handsome nephew at the wheel, and an aim for tiny Scrap, Texas, to embrace memories of her late husband. Still grieving, she can use the company as a balm for her broken heart. So can the empty nesters.

Embarking on a journey of hope, romance, and healing, Diana, Carmen, and Joanie are at a turning point in their lives. And with the open road ahead of them, it’s just the beginning.

Jump Into Author Carolyn Brown’s Empty Nest    

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to stop by to talk about my new book, The Empty Nesters. I’ll be giving all y’all a few of my favorite scenes and a little commentary during the time we get to spend together.

As Ma used to say on Golden Girls, imagine this—Carmen, Joanie and Diana have just dropped their daughters off at the recruiter’s office. They’ve managed to keep the tears at bay and put up a brave front, but now it’s time to let the tears loose. 

“For the first time ever, Natalie and I won’t decorate the house for Halloween together. Nine months of carrying them, then we basically raised them on our own while our husbands were deployed or got sent someplace to train other officers. And now they’re gone, and we won’t see them for Halloween or Thanksgiving. And who even knows about Christmas? It’s not fair.” 

It’s always amazing what comes to mind during a sad time, isn’t it? Things pop into our heads that seem trivial in the face of the event, and yet, at the time, the good memories are what keep us sane.

Tootsie, their elderly neighbor, has just lost her husband, after they’d bought the huge RV and planned a trip to northeast Texas. She’s trying to convince the women that they need to get away from their empty nest for a while.

“You need to get away for a little while and get some perspective,” Tootsie said.

“Let’s pool our money and blow it all on a trip to Paris. We can shop and have lattes in little bistros,” Diana suggested. 

Joanie sighed. “That’s a pipe dream. We probably don’t have enough money to even get to Paris, Texas, between the three of us.” 

The three of them have known the support of each other through the past thirteen years, and just because they’re now alone in their homes, they have no doubt that the love is still there between them—and that it’s even stronger than blood sisters.

“We’re only half a block and a phone call away. If any of us feel the world dropping out from under our feet, we can get back together in less than five minutes.” 

I was amazed at how supportive all of them, including Tootsie, were of each other. They might disagree, but Lord help the person that tried to come between them, or who had the nerve to say an ugly word about one of them.

Everything happens for a reason and in the time that it should happen. I believe that with my whole heart. Diana had gotten her divorce years before the book opens, but she remembers the pain and anger of it all. Then she focused all her energy and time on raising her daughter. But now it’s her time to find a new love, and a new life—maybe with a younger man.

“That many trips into town on those roads would shake the hell out of their Caddy. And believe me, Aunt Tootsie treats that car like family.” Luke chuckled. “Age, on a truck or on a person, makes no difference. It’s how well they’re maintained that matters.” 

Why, oh, why, couldn’t he have smooth pickup lines like other men? Luke asked himself. What he’d just said could be taken as an insult. She might think that he thought she looked like an old pickup truck at her age, when in reality she was downright gorgeous. He wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she still got carded at bars when she ordered a drink. 

Thank you again, for inviting me into your world, and letting me talk about the amazing ladies (and Luke of course), from The Empty Nesters. Happy reading to each and every one of you!

Amazon US     Amazon UK     Amazon DE

Carolyn Brown is a New York Times, USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author and a RITA finalist with more than ninety published books. Her genres include romance, history, cowboys and country music, and contemporary mass-market paperbacks. She and her husband live in the small town of Davis, Oklahoma, where everyone knows everyone else, knows what they are doing and when . . . and reads the local newspaper every Wednesday to see who got caught. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them young. Visit Carolyn at www.carolynbrownbooks.com.

Website: https://www.carolynbrownbooks.com 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carolynbrownbooks 

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13554.Carolyn_Brown 

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New Release Spotlight and Extract: Head Shot by Victoria Nixon

From the epicentre of Sixties glamour to a double family suicide: how a Vogue model persevered and rebuilt her life in the face of tragedy.

A girl from a Yorkshire mining town is barely thirteen when her father kills himself – her brother

finds him dying. At sixteen she’s spotted by a rock star and becomes an international Vogue

model. Seven years later her brother kills himself in her New York apartment and her mother

dies too. With no family left, her life is now one of extreme choices.

Fifty years later, Victoria confronts her past and takes her readers on an unflinching voyage

through her experiences as a model and beyond. Speaking frankly about loss, love, friendship

and ambition, Head Shot is a book of inspiration and purpose.

Packed with astonishing images by the photographers Victoria worked with, and the defiant

fashions she wore throughout her career, it also bears witness to a time of unparalleled cultural

energy and invention; it’s a story in which bags and shoes can, and do, sit right next to life and

death.

MADE IN BARNSLEY

June 1964. Huddersfield Road.

The red MG, hood down, cuts cleanly across the kerb and stops with a jolt beside the school gates. I recognise the local driver’s face. Everyone does. He’s dating a sixth-form prefect

– the car a seventeenth-birthday gift from his father. We all envy the lucky girl whisked away from school each day. And then he looks my way and smiles.

‘Would you like a lift home?’

‘No thanks, I only live twenty yards away, and besides . . .’ ‘Can I take you out for a drink then?’

‘No, I’m only just sixteen, and what about your . . .’ ‘Well, what if I take you to the Spencer Arms in Cawthorne

and we order a Babycham for you, and if the barman serves you I’ll take you to a club to hear some cool music?’

‘Okay!’

But what about his prefect girlfriend? She isn’t his girlfriend any more.

He said.

My first ever date is the following evening.

The construction of the big date hair-do takes two hours. It’s more a hair-don’t, part beehive, part bagel and uses enough Silvikrin hairspray to massacre an ant colony. I shimmy into a dove-grey sleeveless frock from Sheffield’s Marshall & Snelgrove and perform the perfect three-point turn for my mother. Boy, oh boy . . . Dusty Springfield has nothing on me!

First date hair-don’t, 1964

‘Well, have a lovely time, darling, and be a good girl.’ Make your mind up, Mum!

The date’s a success despite the dodgy barnet; probably

because of it. He can’t stop laughing and even takes a photo. The jilted prefect pretends she’s given him the elbow, and I’ve acquired my first ever boyfriend. He’s bright, handsome, kind – and keen. His parents are charming, his sister an elegant dental surgeon married to a naval surgeon, and all is pinch-myself perfection. My life has changed in a heartbeat. Dreamboat and I waste no time experimenting with exciting grown-up things throughout the next year – most of them at week-ends, down quiet country lanes in his red MG.

‘Don’t kiss me like that!’

‘Sorry, it was just a slip of the tongue.’ ‘Actually, I quite like it. Do it again!’

The more he teaches me how to kiss with an open mouth, the more I almost vanish down his throat. We’re on a teenage high in its purest form, recreational drugs unheard-of and drinking habits tame. The real buzz is an all-encompassing belief in the power of rhythm and blues.

Just off the Barnsley Road to Sheffield, a local self-assured young man named Peter Stringfellow has opened a new club, the Mojo. Formerly a school of dancing, its bouncy sprung floor is excellent for leaping around once you’ve paid your two and six at the door. The inside space, one huge room, has matt black walls streaked with pop-art murals but has no licence to offer alcoholic drinks, just coffee. Peter’s unique knack of booking outstanding groups before their first big hit means the Mojo has live gigs that other UK clubs can only dream of.

Soon he’s booking the world’s major blues stars – but persuading the talent to perform in an alcohol-free zone is

not an easy task. We’re waiting for Sonny Boy Williamson to blow us away but when he arrives he’s tetchy and confronts Peter.

‘Where’s the booze, man?’ ‘We don’t have any, SB.’

‘Man, I don’t go on stage without no booze!’

Peter looks a tad uneasy. Gossip has it that Sonny Boy recently set his hotel room on fire while trying to cook a rabbit in a percolator. The off-licence across the road produces an acceptable bottle of whisky which Sonny Boy knocks back before his performance guaranteeing no-hands harmonica playing that tears our teenage souls apart.

Hours later normality is tardily restored with the upstairs- tiptoe past my mother’s bedroom door and her inevitable . . . ‘Is that you, darling? Make sure you double-lock the

front door.’

Five years earlier, to everyone’s surprise including my own, I’d sailed through the 11-plus exam, insisting on attending the local all-girls grammar school rather than being pushed off to board – the only member of my family for generations to turn down a fee-paying education. I wanted to stay close to my pals. We were rebels, not play-safers and to risk losing them was a step too far.

My fate as a non-privately educated Fifties child was sealed by that 11-plus exam, which had one purpose only for the grammar schools’ ‘pick of the bunch’ – to channel us, via intense study, to careers with realistic prospects of academic success. Barnsley Girls’ High School’s excellent teaching assured us we could be whatever we wanted to be – except perhaps housewives – and we were just as likely to achieve our goals as the boys at the grammar school across town.

Amazon US     Amazon UK

Victoria Nixon was eighteen when she was discovered by Helmut Newton, who photographed her for Vogue . This launched her international modelling career, which led to her being named the Daily Mail’s ‘Face of 1968’. After modelling, she went on to become an award-winning advertising copywriter, television producer and magazine editor. In the 1990s she opened the first deli in the UK to ban plastic packaging, and in 2002 her first book, Supermodels’ Beauty Secrets , was published, followed by Supermodels’ Diet Secrets in 2004. She is cofounder and managing director of a company which designs and manufactures humanitarian aid products used worldwide.