beckylettering
      ST. MARTIN'S PRESS          Hardcover January 2008, Trade Paper March 2009                           beckycover
becky soft
                   
 
Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher

                                                                                                      
   by Lenore Hart


    It's 1910, and the renowned novelist Mark Twain has passed away -- "gone with Halley's comet"-- just the time he always said he'd pass away. Now Becky Thatcher would like to set the record straight: she was never the weeping little ninny that Twain made her out to be in his famous popular novel. Yes, she was Tom Sawyer's childhood sweetheart, but the real story of their love for each other, and the terrible secret that finally tore them apart, never quite made it into Twain's books. Becky had her own reasons for rejecting Tom, and marrying his cousin Sid . . . as all women have their reasons.

     Bold and brave beyond the expectations of her sex, in a time of war and westward expansion, this wildly conflicted wife and mother struggles to reconcile her fierce and independent spirit with the limitations of traditional Nineteenth-century expectations for women. She seeks fulfillment, passion, and a measure of independence. She's haunted by the lies she's told, and the men she's loved and lost -- or betrayed. As she marries and moves from steamboat-era Hannibal to a Civil War battlefield to the mining towns of the Sierra Nevada to Barbary Coast San Francisco, she tries to find meaning, and her own place in a changing, post-war world. Even as she tries, less successfully, to forget and leave behind the maddening, sweet-talking, and very unreliable Tom Sawyer. If that's at all possible. . . .

    A READ-IT-FIRST.COM SELECTION
    See the Reading Group Guide, additional reading, more information, and author interview here.
    Hardcover -- $24.95.  ISBN 978-0312-37327-6.
    Trade Paperback - $14.95.  ISBN 978-0-312-53965-8.


"In this old-fashioned, newfangled adventure story, Hart re-imagines and expands on Becky Thatcher . . . in an episodic style not so different from Twain's, she presents the "real-life"adventures of this tenacious and clever survivor. This is a hefty, vigorous, and engaging work with nothing dainty about it!"
              
                                                                                                                       
  -- Sheri Reynolds, The Rapture of Canaan and Firefly Cloak

 "In liberating Becky, Hart liberates our longing to cut loose historical women, to let them out of their corsets . . . and hand them a pistol instead of a frying pan and see what they'll do."

                                                                                                                          -- Los Angeles Times                                                       

"Lenore Hart writes a novel with the grace of a poet. Her command of time, place, and language is enviable.  Becky is a marvelous journey readers will so enjoy."

                                                                                                                         --
Steve Berry, The Amber Room and The Templar Legacy


"Those curious to know the fate of Tom Sawyer's puppy love will enjoy this deft sequel, which finds crybaby Becky all grown up -- and a firebrand."
                                                                                                                        -- Good Housekeeping Magazine   
 
 

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