Two Holiday Stories by Dee Ann Palmer from Exquisite Christmas #EQuills

Exquisiste Christmas AdSixteen years ago, Dee Ann Palmer finished her first novel in a writers workshop in the mountains. Later, as a public health nurse visiting pregnant and parenting teens in those same mountains, she became aware of young men eagerly awaiting the first snowfall so they could work at the ski facilities. With those memories, it’s not surprising she chose the mountains, a blizzard and a ski resort for her two stories in this winter romance collection.

Exquisite Christmas print coverThe opening to A Night to Remember

It was the worst Christmas Eve Marlee had ever lived through. Providing she did live through it, she thought. People who longed for a white Christmas obviously didn’t expect it to come with a power outage and a blizzard like she was creeping along in in her old Nissan.

Squinting to see, she switched the heat to the front and rear windshields. If she didn’t reach her house soon, the wipers wouldn’t be able to cut through the ice forming there. The snow had thickened and the temperature had dropped in the last thirty minutes…

Opening to Snowfall–

What a glorious day! Riley filled her lungs with the icy air as the seat of the lift slid under her. She looked out as it pulled her upward. The night’s storm had floated fresh powder over High Mountain as far as she could see.

She smiled. Great. We’ll be busy today, and we’ll have a white Christmas.

Angels Ski Resort was on the California side of the Sierra Nevada range, and as the ski instructor she worked at the base of the lift and runs. Today, her task as a senior ski patroller was to do a trail safety sweep. Arriving early, she’d keyed open the drive terminal, stepped inside to set the chairlift in motion, then exited the building and relocked it. She’d turned on the heat in the next building, which held the instruction rooms and ski patrol offices…

Read them both in Exquisite Christmas, available in print or digital from your favorite bookseller, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

~*~

In every age, the heart loves, and Dee Ann Palmer’s romances over the past twelve years have reflected those eras in contemporary, historic and fantasy tales. Palmer is a member of Sisters in Crime and Romance Writers of America’s PAN group. She’s married to her college sweetheart, and they live in beautiful southern California in easy reach of mountains, desert and beaches.

Find Dee Ann online at:
Website: http://deeannpalmer.com
Blog: http://deeannpalmer.blogspot.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorDeeAnnPalmer

Recycled Review: A Night To Remember by Walter Lord

A Night To Remember
by Walter Lord
Henry Holt, 2005 edition
Trade Paperback (from library)

It has been over one hundred years since the Titanic disaster, and people are still fascinated by the ship and her fate. Lord’s classic account of the sinking is still noteworthy for the painstaking detail, much of it based on eyewitness accounts by survivors still alive in 1955. Step by step, he takes us through the events of that night, starting with the lookouts who didn’t see the iceberg in time because the binoculars they were supposed to be using were locked in a chest and the key was in London. (The result of a last-minute change in the officers assigned to the ship.)

We hear from people from all three passenger classes – the very wealthy, the middle class, and the lowly immigrants – and crew members from the officers to humble stewards. Though at times the book reads like fiction, it is not. He did an impressive amount of research which is detailed in the Acknowledgements section at the end. From the retrospective of the 21st century, the book represents an impressive undertaking in a world of print-only resources.

I also rented the film, produced in 1958, but it wasn’t the movie I remembered from my childhood. That one was Titanic, starring Clifton Webb, which came out two years before Lord’s book. The film version of A Night To Remember is a British production starring Kenneth More as Second Officer Lightoller and a young David McCallum as Officer Lord. I was surprised at first to realize A Night To Remember was filmed in black and white, but I soon understood why. By not using color, they were able to mix archival footage of the actual ship with the movie reels. So we see the Titanic being christened and sailing off from Southampton as it really happened. There was no such thing as CGI in 1958!

 For the best sense of what it might have been like to actually be on the Titanic, nothing can beat James Cameron’s 1997 epic. Like the fictional love story or despise it, the special effects are overwhelming and incredible. In my opinion, it deserved the Oscar simply for being a monumental and innovative piece of moviemaking. And the musical score is both beautiful and haunting.

After reading A Night To Remember, I think I understand why the story of the Titanic still draws us. It was one of the greatest disasters of all time, and it changed maritime history (and law) forever. But at its heart, it’s a very human story– of arrogance and hubris, negligence, bad luck and denial, bravery and cowardice, indifference and sacrifice. A testament to the bad and the good to be found in human nature. And for that reason, it is a story that will live forever in human memory.

At the end of a recent documentary on the Titanic, James Cameron talks about the ship as a microcosm of 1912 society, with its class distinctions. He also sees the image of the unwieldy ship sailing into the iceberg as a metaphor for a continent about to go over a cliff and into one of the most destructive and unnecessary wars of all time. (WWI) And then he talked about how things are not much different now. We are headed for an iceberg called “global climate change” and it’s too late to correct the system in time to prevent the crash.

If you haven’t read this book, I do recommend it.

Linda

First posted at Flights-a-Fancy 6/6/12