Virtual Book Tour and Giveaway: New York Orphan (Tales of Flynn and Reilly Book 1) by Rosemary J. Kind

Welcome to my stop on the virtual book tour for New York Orphan by Rosemary J. Kind. This book tour was organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. On my stop, I have an excerpt for you as well as a fantastic guest post about changing the course of history. There's also a tour wide giveaway. Be sure to visit the other stops on the tour for more excerpts, guest posts, interviews, reviews, and more. Enjoy!

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Title: New York Orphan
Series: Tales of Flynn and Reilly Book 1
Author: Rosemary J. Kind
Publisher: Alfie Dog Limited
Publication Date: October 23rd 2017
Genre: Historical Fiction

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From fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, to losing his parents on the ship to New York, seven-year-old Daniel Flynn knows about adversity. As Daniel sings the songs of home to earn pennies for food, pick-pocket Thomas Reilly becomes his ally and friend, until he too is cast out onto the street.

A destitute refugee in a foreign land, Daniel, together with Thomas and his sister Molly, are swept up by the Orphan Train Movement to find better lives with families across America. For Daniel will the dream prove elusive?

How strong are bonds of loyalty when everything is at stake?

Goodreads * Amazon * Other Retailers

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EXCERPT:

“Oh, Miss Ellie, Miss Ellie…” Molly was panting hard as she ran up the steps of the guest house, calling for her friend. “Oh, you’ll never guess what.” Her hands were shaking uncontrollably and she was gasping for air.

“Sit down, child, and start from the beginning.”

“It’s Daniel. Oh, Miss Ellie, he needs our help. I do believe the good Lord has sent us to him in his hour of need.”

“Whatever has happened?” Ellie guided Molly to sit upon the settle.

“I was in the town… wondering whatever we should do. Oh, it’s dreadful!”

Miss Ellie quietly rose and left the room, returning only a minute or two later with a tray of tea. “I’d just asked for this to be prepared when you came back. It looks to me, girl, as though you’re in need of it.” She poured the tea and held the cup to Molly’s trembling hands.

Molly sipped her drink, sat back, took a deep breath and began again. “Daniel is in prison, Miss Ellie. Whatever are we going to do?”

She told Miss Ellie the tale of how she’d met Ben and then how he’d gone to make enquiries. “Anyway, one of the Deputies was there and he told the man about Daniel.”

“Lord have mercy, whatever has he done?”

“He ran away from that dreadful man we met at the farm. Oh, how can one man think he has the right to own another in these times?”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rosemary J Kind writes because she has to. You could take almost anything away from her except her pen and paper. Failing to stop after the book that everyone has in them, she has gone on to publish books in both non-fiction and fiction, the latter including novels, humour, short stories and poetry. She also regularly produces magazine articles in a number of areas and writes regularly for the dog press.

As a child she was desolate when at the age of 10 her then teacher would not believe that her poem based on ‘Stig of the Dump’ was her own work and she stopped writing poetry for several years as a result. She was persuaded to continue by the invitation to earn a little extra pocket money by ‘assisting’ others to produce the required poems for English homework!

Always one to spot an opportunity, she started school newspapers and went on to begin providing paid copy to her local newspaper at the age of 16.

For twenty years she followed a traditional business career, before seeing the error of her ways and leaving it all behind to pursue her writing full-time.

She spends her life discussing her plots with the characters in her head and her faithful dogs, who always put the opposing arguments when there are choices to be made.

Always willing to take on challenges that sensible people regard as impossible, she established and ran the short story download site Alfie Dog Fiction for six years building it to become one of the largest in the world, representing over 300 authors and carrying over 1600 short stories. She closed it in order to focus on her own writing.

Her hobby is developing the Entlebucher Mountain Dog in the UK and when she brought her beloved Alfie back from Belgium he was only the tenth in the country.

She started writing Alfie’s Diary as an Internet blog the day Alfie arrived to live with her, intending to continue for a year or two. Thirteen years later it goes from strength to strength and has been repeatedly named as one of the top ten pet blogs in the UK.

For more details about the author please visit her website. For more details about her dog then you’re better visiting this website.

Website * Facebook * Twitter

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GUEST POST:

If you could rewrite any major event in history, which would you choose and why?

I spent ages thinking about this and argued myself out of many key historical events. If the Second World War hadn’t started, would the world be better, or simply differently bad?

In the end I settled on the discovery of oil. Oil has changed the face of the world more completely and more rapidly than any other single event, or so it seems to me. Given that it was not discovered (except for an early limited discovery by the Chinese) until 1859 in Pennsylvania, it has become ‘essential’ pretty quickly.

Without it we wouldn’t have the easy access to transport by car and plane. We wouldn’t have plastic or any of the other things which have come out of the petro-chemical industry, including many clothing materials. It has become a universal essential. Progress would have been slower without it.

How would that be good? The easiest part of that to answer is with regard to the current plastic crisis. The level of pollution and waste we have built up to due to the easy availability of plastic is shocking by any standard. We have senselessly and selfishly done untold damage to our environment. Of course, the fact that I cannot stand the feel of manmade fibre clothing may make me a little biased in some of these matters, but its low cost, easy availability has driven our throw-away consumer society. In simple terms it has driven our greed.

Without the proliferation of transport, World Wars I and II would have been very unlikely to have taken place on such a grand scale, nor any of the conflicts which have followed them. There might have been some transport methods, but they would have been more cumbersome and more expensive, potentially reducing conflict. The investment in developing transport methods would have been less intense, leaving them less effective.

Globalisation could not have happened on the scale it has. We would have had to rely more heavily on locally produced materials and foods. Perhaps that would give us a more basic lifestyle, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. You don’t miss what you’ve never had, or at least you miss it less actively. We may yet have to face a world of returning to that simplicity, which will be far harder to do.

By contrast, it might have led to heavier investment in battery development and to other forms of power for transport and heating. Ultimately, one would hope, those might be less damaging to the environment.

On the downside, it may have meant that air pollution was overall greater with more dependence on coal and wood fired power. Perhaps, ironically, that would have made global warming worse than it is. It may certainly have meant that the air in cities was of poorer quality and many may have suffered as a result. Maybe we would have been more dependent on nuclear fuel and maybe that would have led to crises and disasters of a different nature.

It’s quite possible that I have argued myself out of oil being a good answer and proved instead that whatever course history takes, man will shape the world accordingly. We will continue to get it wrong on many occasions, simply because we are human and because we want more than the world can give us without consequences. In any event, it is all good material for a fiction writer.

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GIVEAWAY:

Rosemary J. Kind will be awarding a $30 Amazon or Barnes and Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter after the tour. To increase your chance of winning, be sure to leave a comment at a different blog that's participating in the tour. Good luck!

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