Congratulations to Connie for winning Katy Lee’s Silent Night Pursuit.
This week I’m hosting Lisa Belcastro with A Shenandoah Family Christmas (print US only, ebook worldwide). If you want to enter the drawing for this book, please leave a comment on your post with your email address. I will not enter you without an email address (my way to contact you if you win). If you don’t want to leave an email address, another way you can enter is to email me at margaretdaley@gmail.com. The drawings end Sunday (December 20th) evening.
Bio of Lisa Belcastro:
Lisa Belcastro lives with her family on Martha’s Vineyard. She loves time with her family and friends, running, gardening, outdoor activities, cooking, chocolate, reading, traveling, a healthy dose of adventure, and her cat, Ben, who keeps her company while she creates fictional lives for the numerous characters living inside her head.
Lisa runs as an ambassador for TEAM 413 (www.team413.org), and has completed a marathon (26.2 miles) in all fifty states.
Lisa’s stories are set on the Vineyard amidst the magnificence of the ocean, the beauty of sandy beaches, rolling hills, and ancient cliffs, as well as the people and events that make the Island so very unique.
Lisa has published five books to date, with a Christmas novella due out in November. Lisa’s debut novel, Shenandoah Nights, won the Christian Small Publishers Association’s Romance Book of the Year in 2014, and also won the RWA New England Chapter’s Reader’s Choice Award in 2014. Shenandoah Nights and Shenandoah Crossings, book two in the Winds of Change series, were finalists in: the SELAH Award and also The Carolyn Readers Award, Inspirational Romance category. Shenandoah Crossings was a finalist in Christian Small Publishers Association, Best Romance category. Shenandoah Nights was also a finalist in the Grace Awards, Speculative Fiction category.
Shenandoah Dreams won the 2015 Christian Small Publishers Association’s Romance Book of the Year, and is currently a finalists for the Book Buyers Best Award . Shenandoah Dreams was also a finalist in the Grace Awards, Speculative Fiction category, and the SELAH Award, Speculative Fiction category.
A Shenandoah Christmas won the 2015 Booksellers Best Award and the 2015 SELAH Award for Best Novella.
When she’s not at her desk, Lisa is living in paradise, volunteering at her daughter’s school, serving in her church community, planting and weeding her numerous gardens, training to run the Walt Disney World Dopey Challenge in January 2016, walking the beach looking for sea glass, or enjoying a great meal while she pens the cuisine column for Vineyard Style Magazine.
Blurb for A Shenandoah Family Christmas by Lisa Belcastro:
Where is Christmas?
Disease, freezing temperatures, and the Revolutionary War bring bitter reality to the Reed home in December 1777. Captain Benjamin Reed is ordered to sail a supply shipment south to General George Washington. Days before Shenandoah’s scheduled departure, Ben’s first mate succumbs to smallpox.
Rebecca Reed had never feared the dreaded disease until her one-year-old daughter Felicity breaks out in the telltale rash. In the cold, dark days of Advent, Rebecca, Ben, and the Reed family wait in prayerful hope as Felicity fights for her life and they wonder who could be next.
With the rest of the family at risk, they decide to obtain the forbidden cowpox vaccine. Ben’s brother Jonah, his uncle Isaiah, and Shenandoah’s cook Adam Greene venture off in search of the outlawed vaccine. A blizzard hits. A tree crashes. Jonah crumbles to the ground. A woman with the face of an angel aids Jonah, but is it too late? And where are Adam and Isaiah?
As the death toll rises throughout the Colonies, the Reed family prays for more than one Christmas miracle.
