What will Sara Dewberry be willing to sacrifice to change the world?
For Sara Dewberry, life in the early 1900s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her husband and children is comfortable and pleasant. But an injustice gnaws at Sara’s heart. Women have no say in government, and no voice in politics. Women can’t own land. Most are little more than property to their husbands, and Sara can’t hide behind her cozy walls any longer.
At first, going to the meetings that support the local suffragettes who want votes for women, stays a secret. When her husband rails against the women’s movement and says, “Women should know their place!” Sara nods her head and gives him a thin smile.
But when Sara is arrested at a rally in Chicago that is endorsing the 19th Amendment, the truth spills out. She’s forced to make a choice: does she return to her life in the shadows, or should she make a sacrifice for the women she’s come to love that will cost her everything?
Q: Sara’s Sacrifice, your debut novel, is a historical fiction centering around the women’s suffrage movement. What inspired your writing of this novel?
R: I am a strong advocate for Womens Rights. It was a natural choice in historical writing given our celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the 19th amendment in 2020.
Q: How do you come across your ideas and plot lines?
R: Strangely enough, I just knew the beginning and the end and every time I sat at my computer I became Sara and I just knew where the story was going. Obviously I did massive amounts of research and the story had to follow the historical timeline but I guess you could say, Sara wrote the book.
Q: How long did it take you to write? Approximately how many revisions?
R: It took a little over a year to write the book and revisions never stop. i just picked it up the other day and mentally wanted to revise it. It never stops. You just have to say at some point. “this is it.”
Q: What is your writing process? Do you plot or outline ahead of time or start typing and see where things go? Do you have a writing routine?
R: I would like to say I’m a disciplined writer but life always sends me on detours. I begin with a topic and a character and a goal. In this case the topic was the Suffrage movement. My protagonist Sara had to be a strong woman with courage. My stories always begin by knowing where I am going so I have a beginning and an end. From there I do historical bullet points that determine the timeline. From there I let the story tell me where it is going based on the world she lived in,You clearly did a lot of research in the writing of this novel.
Q: How did your research of these heroic women influence the creation of your characters?
R: The research definitely influenced the development of the characters and the storyline. Many authors of historic fiction have a fictional story first and place it in an era with history as the background noise. My goal is to tell history and how it affected the lives of my characters.
Q: I enjoyed “watching” your main character, Sara, grow confident in finding her voice. Was there a similar point in your life in which you told yourself you needed to write this book?
R: I was a feminist in the 70’s. Women’s issues speak to me. Behind all of that is the roots of the feminist movement so it can never be forgotten. Unfortunately the era is often given little emphasis in our schools and we tend to take it all for granted when in fact it was a hard fought battle.
Q: How many books will be in this series and over how many generations does it span?
R: There are three books in the series “Daughters of Evolution”. The second book “Ella Endures” will be released shortly. It is about Sara’s daughter Ella and her role in “The Greatest Generation”. It shapes her life from prohibition and the roaring 20’s through the Korean War. It includes things such as tuberculosis, the Polio epidemic, cancer. It covers the effect of the ravages of war and there effect on families. It is an era of poorhouses, abandoned children, the dust bowl, the depression and innumerable tragedies and their toll on families. It is guaranteed to make you cry. The third book is “Melissa’s March” with yet another generation of women who fought for justice. The Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and equal rights for women. This book will bring you up to today and the Me Too movement, Black lives Matter and political issues today exploring correlations between Melissa’s causes and her daughters issues of today.The books cover over 100 years of history. Instead of the school history books of wars, dates and generals (Which I hated) these books present history through the eyes of regular people who got involved. Women of courage.
Thank you Flo for such an important book! I thoroughly enjoyed it!:) To order a copy:
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