Today, Passionate Encounters will be hosting their FIRST EVER Scavenger Hunt! OH-MY-God. How I love Scavenger Hunts (that is why I'm capitalizing). I can remember back to my childhood when...I never really got to go on any, well if you count Easter egg hunting. But that's not really the same thing.
Anyway, on to today's hunt!
OHHH! I guess I should explain what your hunting for!! (forehead smack).
We're hunting excerpts from Margaret From Maine.
Excerpt and tour link is below.
Author: Joseph Monninger
Title: Margaret from Maine
Publisher: Plume (Penguin)
Release date: December 24, 2012
Age Group: Adult
The end of Maine Guardsman Sgt. Thomas Kennedy’s conscious life is ushered in by a flash of light on a plain in Afghanistan. While he languishes in a veterans’ hospital, Thomas’s devoted wife, Margaret, is raising their son on a dairy farm in rural Maine. She receives an invitation to Washington, DC, to meet the President of the United States as he signs a bill in support of wounded veterans with war veteran and West Point graduate Charlie King as her appointed escort. Charlie and Margaret’s shared circumstances inspire them to confide in one another. Suddenly, the pair creates a private world all their own, leaving the effects of war behind them. Margaret’s vows to her husband linger, raising a series of harrowing choice
Links to find/buy the book:
“This is the right place,” the man said. “Did you find it okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Charlie answered.
“Well, you’re right on time. Margaret should be ready in a jot.”
“Yes, sir.”
Charlie climbed the steps, aware of his leg not behaving properly as he did so. He felt the tiniest bit unsettled that the man had appeared on his porch so soundlessly. But the man had a kind face and held out his hand.
“I’m Ben Kennedy,” the man said. “The boy up at the hospital is my son.”
“An honor to meet you, sir,” Charlie said and meant it. Charlie had never felt a hand with more work in it.
“I was going to come down to Washington, but we have the cattle to care for,” Ben Kennedy said. “You thank the people for asking me, though.”
“Yes, sir, I will.”
The man turned and called softly into the doorway. “Come on now,” the man said. “Don’t keep the gentleman
waiting.”
A boy came out first. He pushed open the door, obviously excited, but then became shy in the next heartbeat. The boy turned and held the door, waiting, though he glanced quickly at the meerkat and then looked back into the house. The boy, Charlie saw, wore clean khaki shorts and a sweatshirt. His hair was cut short and he had a child’s tan even this early in the season. He looked fresh and wholesome. A country boy, Char- lie thought.
The woman following the boy through the door caught him by surprise.
She was younger, for one thing, than he expected. He quickly did the math—adding together a husband in the service, a young child—and realized she was essentially his age. Call it twenty-seven or -eight, thirty at the outside. Charlie was not sure why he had assumed she would be older. Perhaps it had been in her phone voice, he thought, or maybe it was merely the idea that someone living on a farm with a child in Maine was likely to be older. That made no sense whatsoever, and perhaps betrayed a slight prejudice against rural people on his part, but his mind, always fair when it grasped the facts, rapidly made the necessary revisions. His mind was further pushed in that direction by the woman’s beauty. Prepared as he was to behave in his official capacity, he could not ignore her loveliness. She did not dazzle. No one would mistake her for a runway model or a social climber down in the District of Columbia, yet he could not remember feeling so attracted to a woman in a long time. Part of the attraction, he imagined, came from the sense of the house, the open door into a fine old parlor, the sight of the boy leaning on the screen door, the benevolent father-in-law beaming his good wishes. She reminded him of a woman in a painting—was it Andrew Wyeth’s pictures of Christina?—her beauty somehow matched to the landscape. She possessed a natural lightness, a grace fortified by the ease with which she moved through the open doorway. Her hand reached out and brushed her boy’s hair, and then she smiled a deep, warm smile that carried upward into her eyes. The small crow’s-feet at the corners of her sockets crinkled with pleasure. She wore a plain dress that did not reveal her figure, and yet it suggested simplicity and elegance in a way that many women in D.C. sought but failed to capture. He found he could not look away from her eyes once they met his.
Scavenger Hunt: To read the next part of the story, visit A Tale of Many Book Reviews tomorrow, Wednesday, Feb. 27th. Each day of the tour will reveal the next installment of Margaret and Charlie’s story.
To read the previous installment, visit:
Joseph Monninger is the author of Eternal on the Water and The World as We Know It, as well as several award-winning young-adult novels. A professor of English literature, he lives in New Hampshire. Visit him online at http://joemonninger.com
Social Media links:
Website: www.joemonninger.com
Twitter: @joemonninger
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