Book Spotlight: Winds of Change by Carole Eglash-Kosoff

The racially charged love and conflict of the critically acclaimed When Stars Align become more entrenched after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Amy had taken her daughter, nephew, and a son she’d had never been able to acknowledge, born from her love with Thaddeus, her colored lover, to San Francisco, as a refuge from the intense racial scrutiny of the South.

They are forced to return to their old home, Moss Grove, a successful Mississippi River cotton plantation, as young adults. They discover facts about themselves that refute everything they believed regarding both their parents and their racial background. It changes the lives of each of them. Bess and Stephen’s love is thwarted. Josiah struggles with echoes of his past.

It is a tumultuous time in American history that includes the inventions of airplanes, automobiles, telephones and movies midst decades of lynchings and economic turmoil. It is the Spanish-American War and World War I. Racial biases complicate lives and relationships as newly arrived immigrants vie with white and Negro workers all trying to gain a piece of the American dream. Winds of Change is a soaring historic fiction novel that stands alone but follows the next generation from those we came to know in When Stars Align into the 20th century. It is a socially relevant, historically accurate, saga of decades often overlooked in American history.

Read an excerpt!

There is a dance that accompanies the rhythm of our lives. It has a logic…a pattern…a beat. Different sections of the orchestra blending into a single melody that defines who we are. I’m a man; you’re a woman. I’m white. I’m tall. I’m a Christian. And then… wait a minute. It seems I’m not white. I have some Negro blood coursing through my veins that I’d never known about. The beat of the music suddenly changes as one section, maybe the woodwinds, puts their instruments away. The new rhythm is discordant…a rhythm with which I’m unfamiliar. It’s a different tune, a genre I don’t know how to play. I’ve lost the beat. The other orchestra members are staring at me in a different way. I’m not sure what it all means. This isn’t the South. It’s already 1883. Slavery’s been gone for nearly twenty years and the country has moved forward. I had a baby sister who was born colored. I’d never known and it’s interesting, but it happened too long ago for me to feel sad. She died, my parents are both dead, and I’m still me. But that’s the problem. In my head I suddenly feel like a different me.

Read the reviews!

"This book is truly a masterpiece. The language used is exquisite, the characters well drawn and believable."

--Nicole Sorkin, Pacific Book Review

PURCHASE WINDS OF CHANGE AT AMAZON!

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Giveaways, Contests & Prizes!

In celebration of Carole Eglash-Kosoff’s new release, she will be appearing at Pump Up Your Book’s 1st Annual Holiday Extravaganza Facebook Party on December 16. More than 50 books, gifts and cash awards will be given away including a paperback copy of Winds of Change! Visit the official party page here!

Carole Eglash-Kosoff lives and writes in Valley Village, California. She graduated from UCLA and spent her career in business, teaching, and traveling. She has visited more than seventy countries. An avid student of history, she researched the decades preceding and following the Civil War for nearly three years, including time in Louisiana, the setting for Winds of Change and her earlier novel, When Stars Align. It is a story of bi-racial love. It is a story of war, reconstruction, and racism, but primarily, it is a story of hope.

This is her third book. In 2006, following the death of her husband, she volunteered to teach in South Africa. Her first book, The Human Spirit – Apartheid’s Unheralded Heroes, tells the true life stories of an amazing array of men and women who have devoted their lives during the worst years of apartheid to help the children, the elderly, and the disabled of the townships. These people cared when no one else did and their efforts continue to this day.

Her second book, When Stars Align, chronicles the Civil War and Reconstruction through the love affair of Amy, a white girl, and Thaddeus, a colored man born of the rape of an eleven year old slave girl and the teen heir to Moss Grove.

You can visit her website at www.windsofchange-thebook.com or connect with her at Facebook at www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=553077163.