Now it’s March, and how fortunate for me that I named my latest character March. I didn’t plan on using it as a link to a reader letter, but since it applies, I will talk about March Cantrell, from BRIDGE TO HAPPINESS. I love that this newest novel is receiving such great reviews, because it is so close to home for me. I love a big family like my in-laws. 
I love the dynamics in a large and outspoken, but loving family, the joking and teasing, the solid loyalty. In a big family your brother can call you a horse’s patoot (I cleaned that up) but God forbid anyone else does. My wonderful in-laws are a larger-than-life raucous, loving, loyal, funny group who have held me in their arms for almost forty years.
Much of their kind of great dynamic goes on in March’s family, except she’s the matriarch. We had a great matriarch, Louise, my dear mother-in-law, who was the most amazing woman and who died a year after our Chris. I miss her so often. I cannot look at clams without thinking about our lunches together, just Louise and me, drinking white wine and eating steamed clams and fresh bread at a restaurant called Tony’s on the pier in Redondo Beach, California. We always had something to talk about. I could tell her my deepest thoughts. She was as much a mother to me as was my own, who I lost to breast cancer when I was eleven. I was lucky to have the wonderful mothers I did.
BRIDGE TO HAPPINESS is a mother’s story, a contemporary women’s fiction novel, a family drama, a woman’s journey with a love story, two love stories, actually. For over a week last month it was free on Kindle, the number one eBook and a Valentine’s Day gift to readers. Enjoy, because this is the last Jill Barnett contemporary for a while.
Next is the historical trilogy, set in 12th Century Scotland. I love, love, love these stories. They are big, old-fashioned historical romances. You get to spend some time with these characters. After I finished the first one in late 2009, Glenna’s book, I had the same feeling I had after I finished BEWITCHING, a book I wrote a long time ago, back in 1992. Seems it is a reader favorite because it was so different, but still a beautiful, joyous love story. Glenna, the first sister of the new trilogy is also a very different character for me, and her hero has trouble living down his father’s treason. It’s one of the most unusual love stories I’ve written, a complex one, but classic. And for now, that’s all I’m going to say...except she has a dog, a deerhound like the one that just won the Westminster Dog Show.
This month, as promised, JUST A KISS AWAY, my old out-of-print book and decades-ago tribute to the movie Romancing The Stone, will be available on all the eSites. It’s a jungle adventure I wrote back in 1990. The book has Fabio on the cover...Fabio in a eyepatch! The new book has Lollie on the cover. I promised this book last month but we had a little problem. The digital scanning service read every word ‘hut’ as ‘but,’ so the proofing took a long time. There were huts all through that book! Every time Sam and Lollie were captured, they were thrown in hut...or as the scanner thought, they were thrown in a ‘but.’
So I hope you will continue to read and enjoy Jill Barnett books, either contemporary or historical, and that they will earn a place in your memory and on your bookshelf (or in your Kindle or Nook or iPad.) Give BRIDGE TO HAPPINESS a try and let me know what you think of March’s story. I love to hear from readers.
