Thursday, April 18, 2024 – 5-7:00 PM EDT
Price: $15 (includes a glass of wine and refreshments by Mimi Rodrigues)
Registration: Register at Eventbrite
Venue: The Rhett House Inn | 1009 Craven St., Beaufort
Website: Facebook Event Page
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center, in collaboration with the award-winning Rhett House Inn, will host an evening with historical novelist Carolyn P. Hartley, author of the Buried Sunshine Series, on Thursday, April 18, at 5:00-7:00 p.m., at the Rhett House Inn (1009 Craven St., Beaufort). $15 registration fee includes a glass of wine and refreshments by Mimi Rodrigues. Books will be available for sale and signing.
Register at Eventbrite
“The Buried Sunshine Series is a courageous family saga, a sizzling coming of age story, as heroine, Adele Dawson discovers her roots in this action-adventure series.”—Millie West, award-winning author and screenwriter awards
About Book One: Redemption
Greed is invisible until you see the damage it inflicts on innocent children. Redemption exposes raw families caught between social lines when federal funds, intended to trickle down from corporate landowners never makes it into the hands of tenant farmers.
When agriculture was the bedrock of the American economy, families, suddenly penniless lost nearly everything in historic floods, bank failures, political and social annihilation. But at their core, one family would not let catastrophes defeat them. Adele Christina Dawson, the oldest stepchild of an imbittered farmer, is suddenly thrust into adulthood when her mother dies giving birth to a tenth child.
“Adele Dawson is intelligent, feisty, and strong, and she emits a beam that carries this story forward, that lifts it up from the rushing current of thick Mississippi Mud.”—Main Street Rag
About Book Two: Reconciliation
Adele Dawson, finally back with her West Virginia birth family, is driven to learn why her father died so young and why her mother remarried despicable August Beck, a con artist, then gave birth to eight of his children. When her half-sisters also come to live with her, they get wise to a secret museum of treasures in Adele’s once-lavish stone mansion. She unlocks secrets inside a locked trunk about her mother’s coerced life in corruption, greed, and extortion, secrets that now threaten to extinguish the entire family.
Her paternal grandmother’s final wish is that Adele rebuild the family’s coal mine, nearly bankrupt from the Depression, and restore the river stone mansion to its original beauty. The more involved she becomes in the mining business, the more she discovers her mother’s enemies have concealed themselves within the family business. On the verge of gaining trust from superstitious coal miners, her saboteur stepfather creates mine blasts that injure workers, forcing the reconstruction to miss critical deadlines.
“This thrilling novel series leaves the reader spellbound with a story that captures everything a reader could wish for. Once you start reading you won’t stop. A must read.”—William A Petty, historian, curator, and author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carolyn P. Hartley is an award-winning author, most recently for the Buried Sunshine novel series: Redemption (2019), Reconciliation (2022), and Rebellion (forthcoming 2024).
Reconciliation achieved #1 bestseller rank in seven Amazon categories, including American History Romance. She is lead author of The Caregiver’s Toolbox (CTB), an Amazon #1 hot new release for nine consecutive weeks in two healthcare categories. After six years, CTB is still a popular backlist title.
In prior careers, Carolyn was a book packager for Prentice Hall, McGraw-Hill, Universal Press Syndicate, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and VP of marketing and communications for Fleishman Hillard International, where she placed clients on The Today Show, CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, Fox and Friends, among others. Carolyn publishes her creative non-fiction, essays, and short stories in literary and consumer magazines, including North American Literary Review, Child, Whispering Prairie Press, Family Circle, and Working Women’s Magazine, and, for six years she was a columnist for Woman’s World. She developed public service announcements for Al Franken, Miss America, and the Points of Light Foundation. She also is founder of JMerrillPress, LLC, an independent woman-owned publisher that focuses on women of courage.
