NBtM Virtual Tour and Giveaway: The Unveiling of Polly Forrest by Charlotte Whitney

Welcome to my stop on the NBtM virtual tour for The Unveiling of Polly Forrest by Charlotte Whitney. This tour was organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. On my stop, I have an excerpt from the book as well as a fantastic guest post from the author. There's also the tour wide giveaway for a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift card. Be sure to visit the other stops on the tour for more content. Enjoy!

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Title: The Unveiling of Polly Forrest

Author: Charlotte Whitney

Publisher: Lake William Press

Publication Date: March 15th 2022

Print Length: 322 pages

Genre: Historical Mystery

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Rural Michigan, 1934.

During the throes of the Great Depression Polly marries for money. After her husband Sam dies in a bizarre farm accident, new bride Polly assumes she is set to pursue her dream of opening a hat-making business. Instead, she becomes the prime suspect in Sam’s murder. Secrets abound and even Polly’s family can’t figure out the truth.

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EXCERPT:

Sarah Wolcott Johnson

Thursday, May 24, 1934

I couldn’t hold back. “Polly, you’re such a liar. You kept making excuses for all your bruises and now you’re still hiding stuff from us. Sam’s letter. And now the coffee. When will it all end? All these lies. All this deception.”

Contrary to what Wes said, I was not going to apologize for anything. She was the one who needed to make amends.

Polly stiffened, put the coffee cup on the table, and stood rigid, arms crossed. I looked out the kitchen window and could see Sailor Dog in the yard a few feet away, probably drawn close by our voices.

Polly wrinkled up her nose. “Well, sometimes deception is the best course of action. Fewer people get hurt.” She was making no sense.

“I think not,” I responded. “Deception only builds and builds until you have such a mess you can’t get out of it. Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”

“That’s enough, Sarah,” Wes said to me. He was speaking as if I were a misbehaving child, which perturbed me even more.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Charlotte Whitney is the author of historical fiction set during the Great Depression in the rural Midwest. Her most recent work, The Unveiling of Polly Forrest, a stand-alone historical mystery follows her groundbreaking novel, Threads A Depression-Era Tale, which was met with both critical acclaim and commercial success. She received a master’s degree in English at the University of Michigan, and after a short stint of teaching at two community colleges, worked at the University of Michigan where she was an associate director of the Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts. Currently living in Arizona with her husband and two dogs she enjoys hiking, bicycling, swimming, and yoga.

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GUEST POST:

- Author Charlotte Whitney Reveals Memories of her Childhood that Appear in The Unveiling of Polly Forrest

While almost all of the mystery of The Unveiling of Polly Forrest is totally fabricated from my imagination, there are several settings that are familiar from my childhood, living on a small family farm between Marshall and Battle Creek, Michigan. Of course, I wasn’t alive in 1934-1935, the time the book was set, but my family farm hadn’t changed much since the days of the Great Depression. We lived in an old termite-ridden farmhouse, used an outhouse, and I walked down a gravel road to the local one-room country school.

Two scenes in the book are set in the silo which stands next to the barn. I used the silo of my childhood farm as the model. When my father was working there, we’d go in and play blindman’s bluff, sing, shout, and listen to the echoes. It was always dark, stinky, and spooky—a perfect setting for a murder mystery.

Canning fruits and vegetables was another familiar chore from my childhood so it was natural that I included a scene where Sarah and Polly are canning corn in Sarah’s kitchen during the hot sticky days of August. Canning corn is no easy feat. First you must pick it, husk it, pull away the silk, then blanch it in a hot water bath, and cut it off the cob. After that you must pack it into pre-sterilized cans and cook it in the old, somewhat dangerous pressure cooker. Sarah and Polly didn’t have indoor plumbing and the kids had to carry in buckets of water from the well. Similarly they had to carry in firewood to keep the stove burning. A daylong chore, it was hot, messy, sticky, and tiring from beginning to end.

Mending clothes was another one of many chores familiar to my childhood. In The Unveiling of Polly Forrest there is a scene in which Sarah and Polly’s mother comes for a visit from Connecticut and we meet the female characters mending clothes. The scene was familiar to me: cutting out patches from leftover material and sewing them onto the frayed fabric so that the garment would last another few months until another patch was needed.

Finally, the climax plays out “down the lane” –a path that connected the various fields and ended up at the neighbor’s property, divided by a fence with barbed wire across the top. I used to go down the lane to gather up my father’s cows for the late afternoon milking. Similarly my mother and I would go down the lane to take my father water while he was working in a back field. We’d also go down the lane to the back forest, where we’d have a picnic or a campfire in the fall. It was a familiar part of a family farm and I couldn’t resist including it in the book.

With the development of agribusiness very few small family farms still exist. It was hard to eke out a living after the Great Depression, but I have vivid memories of a childhood spending much of my time outside, “assisting” my father with chores and remembering the women folk sweating it out in the non-air-conditioned kitchens putting up food for the following winter. Times were different, not simpler, and, of course, made an interesting setting for a mystery.

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GIVEAWAY:

Charlotte Whitney will be awarding a $50 Amazon gift card to one random winner via Rafflecopter. Good luck!

(All the Ups and Downs is not responsible for this giveaway, its entries, or the prize. Goddess Fish Promotions and the author assume all responsibility over this giveaway.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway