5 Things You Didn’t Know About Between Two Shores

Here are five things you might not have known about Between Two Shores, my historical novel set in New France at the height of the Seven Years’ War:

1. Classic film inspiration. My protagonist Catherine’s character is loosely inspired by the character of Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart (pictured at left), in the classic movie Casablanca. Both Catherine and Rick tried remaining neutral during war, both have former loves reappear in their lives, and both are forced to choose a side.

(If you read my interview with Allison Pittman on her blog here, you actually already did know this, plus some other cool behind-the-scenes things.)

2. Broadway inspiration. When I was writing a scene with Catherine and her sister Bright Star having a conversation about Catherine’s ex-fiance, Samuel, I could not get the song “A Boy Like That” from West Side Story out of my mind! (Bright Star would be the voice of Anita.) But the only stanza that is completely relevant to the novel is the second one:

A boy like that will give you sorrow.
You’ll meet another boy tomorrow.
One of your own kind,
Stick to your own kind!

3. Siberian translator research assistant. Matthew Miller, our church’s missionary to Siberia with Wycliffe Bible Translators, turned out to be a willing research assistant after he broke his rib while home on furlough during the writing of this novel. When I told him that one of my characters breaks a rib, he answered all my questions about what, exactly, the injury felt like, and how the recovery process went so I could better write the story. Astoundingly, when I told him I wanted to know if a person could paddle a canoe three weeks after breaking a rib, he decided to try. With permission from his doctor, three weeks exactly after his injury, he loaded and unloaded a kayak himself, and paddled it himself so he could tell me how it went. I promise I didn’t force him to. Yes, he was sore afterwards, but he did it. Now that’s research!

4. Made to match cover and epilogue. As these things usually go, I didn’t see the cover until after I turned the book in. I just hadn’t written the epilogue yet. So when I saw the cover and didn’t recognize her setting or dress or jewelry, I decided to write all of it into the last portion of the book. So now when you read the epilogue, you can look at the cover and know where she is, and what she is looking at out the window, and even what she is thinking.

5. Great minds think alike.  By absolute coincidence, Elizabeth Camden and I both gave the last name of “Duval” to one of our main characters: Catherine Stands-Apart Duval in Between Two Shores, and Alex Duval in her book A Desperate Hope. Our novels released on the same day from the same publisher, and no one noticed this similarity until I saw our books side by side in the Bethany House spring 2019 catalog! Her character Alex, in New York, has an ancestry of French fur-trappers and traders. My character Catherine, in the Montreal area, does too.

Elizabeth says: “I clicked in to the French-trapper heritage of the area, and I chose 'Duval' simply because it was French, easy to spell, and still familiar to an American audience.” My reasons exactly!

These things happen more often than you might think. Remember last year that Laura Frantz and I both released novels about lacemakers within a month of each other? Hers was The Lacemaker, and mine was A Refuge Assured. In that situation, we had enough time to put our heroines in the same family tree. Eagle-eyed readers could catch the names of the same matriarchs in both novels.

What surprised you the most from this list?

Between Two Shores was just one of many historical fiction releases on Feb. 5, 2019. Others include Castle on the Rise by Kristy Cambron, The Sky Above Us by Sarah Sundin, The Seamstress by Allison Pittman, and A Desperate Hope by Elizabeth Camden, as mentioned above. Are any of these on your to-read list, or have you read them yet?