On tour with The Coffee Pot Book Club – Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury by Kinley Bryan #HistoricalFiction #BlogTour #CoffeePotBookClub @kinleybauthor @maryanneyarde

 I have an excerpt for you today from Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury by Kinley Bryan.

 

Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury

By Kinley Bryan

Three sisters. 

Two Great Lakes. 

One furious storm.

Based on actual events...

It's 1913 and Great Lakes galley cook Sunny Colvin has her hands full feeding a freighter crew seven days a week, nine months a year. She also has a dream—to open a restaurant back home—but knows she'd never convince her husband, the steward, to leave the seafaring life he loves.

In Sunny’s Lake Huron hometown, her sister Agnes Inby mourns her husband, a U.S. Life-Saving Serviceman who died in an accident she believes she could have prevented. Burdened with regret and longing for more than her job at the dry goods store, she looks for comfort in a secret infatuation.

Two hundred miles away in Cleveland, youngest sister Cordelia Blythe has pinned her hopes for adventure on her marriage to a lake freighter captain. Finding herself alone and restless in her new town, she joins him on the season’s last trip up the lakes.

On November 8, 1913, a deadly storm descends on the Great Lakes, bringing hurricane-force winds, whiteout blizzard conditions, and mountainous thirty-five-foot waves that last for days. Amidst the chaos, the women are offered a glimpse of the clarity they seek, if only they dare to perceive it. 

Icy spray pelted the life-saving station’s boathouse windows like bird shot and Agnes thought better of standing next to the glass. She moved to the center of the room, between the lifeboat and surfboat. She ran her hand along the lifeboat’s cedar planking. These were some of the finest small craft ever built. That’s what Amos used to say. 

Agnes climbed the stepladder into the lifeboat, careful not to disturb the meticulously packed equipment: an anchor, a funnel-shaped drogue, various lines and sheets, a life buoy, oars for eight men plus a steering oar, boat hooks, a lantern. She loved this boat, which had been put into service when her father was the keeper. He’d named it Stalwart. She sat on a thwart where Amos used to row. Her husband had been Surfman Number One, a position second only to the keeper.

Remorse and admiration swirled in her chest. This was where he had been sitting right before he died that terrible October day three years ago. With the crew a man short, Agnes had wanted to help row. She was an excellent oarswoman and Amos knew it. When he refused to let her volunteer, she’d threatened to ask the keeper directly. But what Amos countered was true: the keeper wouldn’t allow what her own husband prohibited. And so instead they’d used a volunteer oarsman from the village. In Agnes’s estimation they’d have been better off leaving the thwart empty. Even now she found herself wanting to change Amos’s mind. To undo what had happened.

Dear Amos. She had loved her husband and their life by the sea. To now have feelings for someone else, it felt like a betrayal of his memory, of everything they had shared. Agnes swallowed hard, forcing down the lump of conflicting emotions lodged there. Couldn’t one thing be true, and then another, totally different thing, also be true?

There came a tremendous roar and Agnes dropped to the footings. A crash, a shattering. Her hands tingled. Several long seconds later she peered over the gunwales. The north-facing window, the one where she’d stood only minutes before, was gone.

The howling came fiercer now that the boathouse had been breached. Waves pounded on the double doors like a wild bull trying to get in. Water splashed through the broken window. Her heartbeat raced in her chest. She should get back to the main building, further from the water, but didn’t want to leave the security of the lifeboat. She felt like a hunted animal.

“Agnes! What are you doing out here?”

Keeper Duncan’s voice came from somewhere behind her. She turned her head just as the electric lights went out. Now the sole light came from the main building behind Keeper Duncan, putting him in silhouette.

“Come back to the kitchen,” he said, approaching the lifeboat. “It’s a hurricane out there.”

“What about the watchman?” Agnes asked. The watchtower sat atop the boathouse, and if it wasn’t safe in the boathouse, it certainly wasn’t safe above it.

“He’s got a job to do.”

Agnes climbed down from the Stalwart and followed Keeper Duncan through the breezeway to the main building. They’d only just crossed into the kitchen when there was a horrific sound. She’d once heard lightning strike a tree in her backyard. The cracking sound had been so loud she’d half expected the roof to cave in. This sound now was louder, fiercer; instinctively she crouched and covered her head.

When she looked back the breezeway was gone.

Doesn't this novel sound amazing!! 

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Kinley Bryan

Kinley Bryan is an Ohio native who counts numerous Great Lakes captains among her ances-tors. Her great-grandfather Walter Stalker was captain of the four-masted schooner Golden Age, the largest sailing vessel in the world when it launched in 1883. Kinley’s love for the in-land seas swelled during the years she spent in an old cottage on Lake Erie. She now lives with her husband and children on the Atlantic Coast, where she prefers not to lose sight of the shore. Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury is her first novel.

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