I am thrilled to welcome author, Francesca Capaldi, onto the blog today. Francesca has previously featured on the blog when she was kind enough to tell us about one of her other books, Dark Days at the Beach Hotel.
I have also reviewed another book in this series, Love and Loss at the Beach Hotel.
Stormy Skies at the Beach Hotel is the part of the Beach Hotel series, and I am really looking forward to hear what Francesca is going to tell us about this book.
But first is the blurb...
The Blurb
Chambermaid Fanny is thanking her lucky stars she has had a second chance at life. As an unmarried mother, it could have been very different, and she is happy.
But when new maid, Susie, arrives at the Beach Hotel, it isn't long before sparks fly. Susie begins to meddle in Fanny's friendships and even in her budding romance with Walter, an American working at the aerodrome.
Meanwhile, a flu epidemic starts to spread and as more people fall ill, the hotel is forced to close.
Matters come to a head when Susie plots to reveal secrets about Fanny that could spell her ruin.
Can the hotel and the hardworking women who run it survive?
***
Welcome to the blog Francesca. It's over to you...
Creating a back story for the love interest
When I started planning Stormy Skies at the Beach Hotel, I knew I needed a compelling love interest for Fanny Bullen, long-time chambermaid at the hotel.
This is the fifth book in the series (all can be read as standalones), and I’d had to find four love interests already – not easy during a war when many of the men are away fighting. But the history of the area – Littlehampton in Sussex – handed me a nice young man on a plate, so to speak.
In January 1918, the Americans started building several aerodromes in the area, one being in Rustington, a mile or so up the road from Littlehampton. And so, I dreamed up Walter Lehman, an American at the base. At first, I thought he might be a pilot but, although there were a few US airman in the area, practising for when the aerodromes were completed, there were far more craftsmen, like bricklayers and carpenters, which is what I decided Walter would be.
My next problem was, where on earth would he hail from? I’ve only ever visited New York in the US. On top of this, I needed to know something of the chosen area well over a hundred years ago. I wanted Walter, born in 1890, to be able to tell Fanny something of his homeland.
It was then I remembered that, in previous books, Fanny had been reading The Oz books by L Frank Baum, one of which is, of course, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A prominent character in most of them is Dorothy, who was from Kansas. So why not have Walter come from there?
But I still had the problem of knowing nothing about the place!
I researched online to see whether there were novels set there at that time and finally came across The Little House on the Prairie. Many of you will remember the television series, with the Ingalls family, taken from the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, in turn based on her own life. Although the TV series itself isn’t set in Kansas, this one book is, detailing a year of living on the Prairies there. It’s set around twenty years before Walter’s birth, but, with a little other historical research, I managed to extract what I needed for Walter’s background.
Despite being a children’s book, The Little House on the Prairie has a wealth of description about the setting and how people lived. It tells of how they built nearly everything they needed, mostly of wood, and how they interacted with neighbours who might live three miles away. It highlighted how different Walter’s early life would have been to that of Fanny. She lived in a busy tourist community with lots of neighbours, in a place where houses were built by businesses, and mostly of brick, and where there were shops around the corner, not a day’s horse ride away. It made a nice contrast between their two lives, even while there are aspects of their upbringings that they do have in common.
The aerodrome in Rustington, where Walter ends up, was one of four being built in the area. This includes one in Tangmere near Chichester, which is, coincidentaly, where my mother-in-law first met my father-in-law (he was doing his national service at the RAF base there and she was doing teacher training in Chichester), despite them coming from Devon and Tyneside!
A couple of the scenes involving Walter in Stormy Skies at the Beach Hotel include events that did really happen. The Americans did play baseball on Littlehampton common, and there were Independent Day celebrations at Worthing and Rustington.
None of the aerodromes were completed before the war ended, and today, there is little evidence that the Rustington aerodrome ever existed, so it was interesting to bring it back to life, along with the real Beach Hotel, which was sadly pulled down in the late 1980s.
Thank you so much for being my guest today. Your new book looks great.
Book Details
ISBN: 978 1804368473
Publisher: Canelo Hera
Formats: e-book, audio and paperback
No. of Pages: 400 (paperback)
Purchase Links
Bookshop.org
Amazon UK
About the Author
Francesca Capaldi has enjoyed writing since she was a child, largely influenced by a Welsh mother who was good at improvised story telling.
Writing both under her maiden name, Francesca Capaldi, and her married name, Francesca Burgess, she is the author of historical saga novels, short stories published in the UK and abroad, and several pocket novels. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association and the Society of Women Writers and Journalists.
The first novel in the Beach Hotel series, A New Start at the Beach Hotel, won the Romantic Saga Award at the Romantic Novelists' Association Awards in 2024. The first novel in the Wartime in the Valleys series, Heartbreak in the Valleys, was shortlisted for the Historical Romantic Award in the RoNAs in 2021. Both the Valleys series and the Beach Hotel series are published by Hera Books.
Francesca was born and brought up on the Sussex coast. She currently lives in Kent with her family and a cat called Lando Calrission.
You can also find Francesca at:
Author Website
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Instagram
(media courtesy of Rachel's Random Resources)
(all opinions are my own)
(bookshop.org affiliated)
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