SquawkRadio

I know there are lots of you out there dying for Christina’s and my books (mostly because you’ve been kind enough to tell us!).  For both of us, it’s the last in a series:  the book that wraps it all up, the book that closes the cover on a whole world, a set of dearly beloved characters, a complicated yarn of love and (for both of us) a group of sisters.  SISTERS!  What is it about sisters?

I think I can tell you without wrecking too much of the plot that my heroine Josie’s sisters are crucial to her happiness in this book.  At the same time, they are innocently responsible for some of her heartbreak.

By this point (the fourth book) all three of Josie’s elder sisters are married—and happily.  Plus, they’re married to titled, rich, wonderful, sensitive men who were given all of my (considerable) attention and love.  How’s that for intimidating?  All she has to do is look at her brothers-in-law and poor Josie instantly feels a qualm of anxiety.  Add that to the fact that her sisters are really gorgeous, each in different ways, and poor Josie has an instant tension headache.  Now consider the fact that Josie is convinced she’s plump...and what do we get?

A major inferiority complex in the face of sisterhood, that’s what.  From Josie’s point-of-view, how is a plump, romance-reading girl who’s afraid of horses and riding ever going to find a man on the level of those her sisters have scooped up?

Behind every story there has to be a grain of truth.  Behind Josie’s story, there’s quite a bit.  I was going to paste a picture of myself as an adolescent here, but I looked at them and changed my mind.  Take it from me:  I was plump in high school.  Plump and miserable.  That would be bad enough, but my sister…

She had blonde straight hair.  She ran on the cross country team, when she wasn’t being Valdictorian and winning a National Merit scholarship.  She was invited to the prom when she was a sophomore.  I was a junior that year and stayed home; she went.  A major truth about sisters is that you can love your sister dearly and still feel a wincing heart-ache, a stab-to-the-belly of jealousy, whenever you think about her.  I should add that there was nothing Evil Stepsister-ish about my sister.  She supported me; dieted with me (though she didn’t need to); and generally watched my back—well, there was one time when she told me that pickle juice “ate” calories, and I believe her, but every sibling relationship has moments. *g*

It’s hard to finish off a long series.  I don’t know about Christina, but for me this was the hardest book of all.  I knew that many people had already fallen in love with Josie, with her wise-cracking, funny voice and her weight problems, and her rash impulse to do with various medicines created for horses (remember what happened to Crogan in Taming of the Duke?

I wanted this to be a book in which Josie’s sisters were there for her, loving her, supporting her—and driving her crazy.  I wanted her to not to lose weight or magically turn slender, but to come into an understanding of how sexy her body was, just as it was.  I went off to college, got taller, discovered exercise, and turned thin in my sophomore year.  But the people I love best from my college years?  My two best female friends, with whom I bonded as freshmen, and my first college boyfriend, who asked me out the first month of college.  When I was a curvy freshmen who had no understanding of how sexy she could be.  He and I stayed together ten years, and he’s now godfather to both my children. 

I wanted Josie to come to the realization I did:  that there are lots of people in this world smart enough to ignore the rules that culture hands out, dictating who is attractive and who isn’t.  There are lots of people out there who understand that women’s curves can be an utterly intoxicating and delicious aspect of her femininity.

I’m curious about your sister or sisters.  Did they drive you crazy, the way mine did?  Did you fight and squabble?  Did a sister ever make you drink a whole jar of pickle juice?  And finally...do you live 5 minutes down the road from your sister now, the way I am luckily enough to do?