A lovely coastal  town in Maine provides the setting for more than half of Falling Through Trees, and it’s no coincidence that I am a Maine native. My formative years were spent in Bath, before heading over the Old Carlton Bridge to Woolwich where I spent the remainder of my childhood days.

This past week, my own family and I have been vacationing in Maine. After the first hectic day of getting settled into ‘vacation-mode’, unpacking our things, and surveying our new surroundings, I soon remembered why I loved living here. There is a charm, a quaintness, and a feeling of “real life” here that I have truly missed. Some say that New Englanders, Mainers perhaps even more so, can be rather cold, aloof and markedly reserved. However, as with everything, there are two sides of the picture, and I can see a group of people who are true – to themselves and towards others – without any guile or fake sense of interactions. Maine people, as the old Humpty Dumpty brand potato chip slogan used to say, are as real as anything and “What you see is what you get!”.

We have one more day here to appreciate the rugged beauty of the Maine waters, and the numbing feel of the ocean I will admit, yet I am already feeling the loss of being “home” that I know I will feel once we board the plane to fly back to Atlanta. Our week has been filled with great friends and family, country breakfasts, lots of beer and meat-filled barbecues. Our children have spent countless hours jumping into the clean refreshing waters of Thomas Pond, and laughing with their friends and cousins, many of whom they only see once a year.

In between all of this fun, I managed to sneak in a number of book signings during the week for Falling Through Trees, and gratefully put my first novel into more than forty new homes and readers from all over the United States. Thank you to all of those who took a chance on a new, unknown author and purchased my book.

If you are looking for a great summer read with some drama written in and haven’t already, I hope you’ll pick up your own copy of Falling Through Trees…  and I hope my little family comes back to Maine soon to enjoy all that Maine has to offer everyone who crosses its borders.

Maine… the way life should be.