I love the fact that this Staying in with… feature on Linda’s Book Bag is enabling me to ‘meet’ all kinds of authors and am delighted to welcome Lindy Keane Carter to the blog today to tell me about Annaliese From Off.

If you’re an author who’d also like to stay in with me to tell me about one of your books, please click here for more details.

Staying in with Lindy Keane Carter

Hi Lindy and welcome to Linda’s Book Bag.

Which of your books have you brought along to share with me and why have you chosen it?

Hi, Linda. Thank you for inviting me to share an evening with you. I’ve brought along Annaliese From Off because it is my first novel . . . and, frankly, my only novel, though I’ve just finished writing its sequel and a third novel is simmering in my brain. I’d like to explain that “from off” is a southern term that locals use when referring to a newcomer. It means “she’s not from here,” which pretty much sums up the root of all of Annaliese’s troubles.

(Aha! I had wondered about the ‘from off’ element. That explains a lot.)

What can we expect from an evening with Annaliese From Off?

You can expect a visit with Annaliese, a young wife and mother wrenched in 1900 from her comfortable life in Louisville, Kentucky and dropped in her husband’s north Georgia lumber camp. To make matters worse, her insufferable sister-in-law—suffragette, sexual pioneer, domestic skills disaster—has joined her there. You’ll learn a lot about the Cherokee Indians, the birth of forest conservation in the U.S., two women struggling to save their children from the wild and the wild from their husbands, sex, 1900’s birth control, and which kind of root to sprinkle over a man’s apple pie to keep him in the privvy all afternoon so you can slink off and do something without interference.

(This sounds really interesting, though don’t tell my husband I know about that root now!)

What else have you brought along and why?

I’ve brought Socks, my cat, who sits in my lap while I write because he’s my co-author. And if you’ll open that box I’ve laid at your feet, you’ll see I’ve also brought Annaliese’s yellow satin messaline dress with tulip-shaped skirt that flared at the hem, which she wore when hosting a dinner for her husband’s new friend, a very distracting local attorney. She’d want you to have it. In the sequel, she’s moved on to trousers mostly.

Well please thank Annaliese for the dress. I must say I envy you Socks. I used to have four cats at once – one, Dennis, a diabetic needing insulin injections twice a day – and I miss having a cat around the house.

Thanks so much for staying in with me Lindy. You’ve certainly piqued my interest in Annaliese From Off.

Annaliese From Off

The year is 1900 and young mother Annaliese Stregal is forced by her husband, John, to leave their comfortable life in Louisville, Kentucky to live in a lumber camp in the north Georgia mountains where he has launched a timber business with his brother.

Joining her there with even more outrage and dismay is the prickly sister-in-law she loathes, Lucenia, who is full of opinions about every women’s issue of the day – social justice for the oppressed, equal rights, birth control, the morality of female sexual pleasure – and possessing not one domestic skill.

To protect their children and battle the mountain enemies they have in common, the women strike a fragile truce, but a new national controversy is gaining steam: the annihilation of America’s forests, and this one Annaliese cannot ignore. The brothers pick up their pace in scraping their fortune off the pristine hillsides just as John begins to unravel, putting the families’ future in jeopardy.

Unlikely help comes from a pair of Cherokee Indian brothers, but it is Annaliese who must act decisively to save John from the grisly reckoning he foresaw all along and save the mountains from him.

Annaliese From Off is available for purchase here.

About Lindy Keane Carter

Lindy Keane Carter is a journalist whose work over the last 40 years has appeared in numerous national magazines, trade publications, and academic medical journals.  Her non-fiction articles as well as her fiction have won awards, including being selected in 2003 and in 2009 as a winner in the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Fiction Project contest. Earlier, she won second place in a fiction contest sponsored by the South Carolina Academy of Authors.  Lindy, the mother of two daughters and a son, is a medical science writer in South Carolina.

You can find Lindy on Facebook and visit her website for more information.