BRAZEN - all week! by Donna

This week the Muses celebrate the release of BRAZEN by Katherine Longshore.

It seems like such a short time ago when Katherine Longshore and I slipped away from all the craziness of Las Vegas' ALA convention for a quiet  lunch in a little Italian place you could swear was on a Tuscan hillside, if you just didn't look too far.  So it is with many places in Vegas, right?


Boots at a Las Vegas pool

We were both in the trenches of writing new stories and were quickly immersed in plot problem solving before the food even arrived at our table.   Personal conversations with other writers are so so useful and, unfortunately for many of us, increasingly rare.

This particular one was epic.

I remember talking about what our main characters wanted?

It's a harder question than one might think and we wrestled with it, back and forth, for several hours. We were sure (by the time the conversation ended) that Mary Howard wanted love.  Above all else and at all costs.  It is a universal desire, but in her case one with life and death consequences.  When I read the final copy of BRAZEN months later, I was so moved by the love story Katherine created.  It's sweet, poignant, and full of unbearable tension. If that isn't enough, the heart wrenching, gorgeous core of the story is also wrapped in Katherine's beautiful description and historical accuracy. 

I'm so excited to share BRAZEN with you and know you'll love just as much as I do.


Mary Howard has always lived in the shadow of her powerful family. But when she’s married off to Henry Fitzroy, King Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, she rockets into the Tudor court’s inner circle. Mary and “Fitz” join a tight clique of rebels who test the boundaries of court’s strict rules with their games, dares, and flirtations. The more Mary gets to know Fitz, the harder she falls for him, but is forbidden from seeing him alone. The rules of court were made to be pushed…but pushing them too far means certain death. Is true love worth dying for?