Patricia Furstenberg, Writer of Historical Fiction, Children's Books
Travel via Stories
“I trust scars more than smiles.” At first, it sounds like the kind of sentence one should not agree with: “I trust scars more than smiles. Yours told me more than any oath ever could.” (When Secrets Bloom)
Continue reading ““I trust scars more than smiles.” #BookQuote When Secrets Bloom”
Long before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula there was Vlad the Impaler: voivode of Wallachia, enemy of the Ottomans, ruler feared as much for his punishments as for his political cunning.
This is the Vlad who moves through the pages of When Secrets Bloom and Kate’s Letter, included in the Courage Anthology out 17 JUNE. Vlad the man, consumed by passions and hidden fears—not as a figure of legend already swallowed by bats and myth. A man still anchored in the hard geography of his own century.
Continue reading “Vlad the Impaler and How Dracula’s Epic Shadow Was Made”
“I step where I am needed… even when the ground burns beneath me.” I like this quote because it represents Kate Webber, the main character from When Secrets Bloom. Kate does not act because she believes she will win. She acts because not acting is unthinkable.
And her choice sets the course of everything that follows.
Continue reading “I step where I am needed, even when the ground burns beneath me – When Secrets Bloom”
There are cities in Transylvania that do not simply sit on the map, they remember. They carry the sediment of centuries like bark around an old trunk. Brașov, know as Corona or Kronstadt in medieval times, is one of those places. In When Secrets Bloom Brașov does appear only as a backdrop. It breathes. It resists. It watches.
Because to write about a place is to write against forgetting.
Readers will discover Brașov as a setting in my story Kate’s Letter featured in our historical fiction anthology Courage: Tales of History, Mystery and Hope.
Continue reading “Real Places in Historical Fiction: Brașov in When Secrets Bloom”
There are truths history rarely writes plainly about. Skill, in the wrong hands — or rather in the wrong body — becomes suspicion. And knowledge, instead of opening doors, invites them to close.
Continue reading “Yet for all my knowledge I was still only a woman. And that was my crime. #bookquote”