Goddess Fish Promotions is organizing a Virtual Book Tour for
The Button Legacy: Emily’s Inheritance by Ginger Marcinkowski, a Women’s
Christian Fiction book available now from Booktrope/Vox-Dei (Christian
Division).
The tour will run July 21, 2014 to August 1, 2014 and Ginger will be awarding a $10 Starbucks Card + eBook copy of
The Button Legacy: Emily’s Inheritance to a randomly drawn winner via
rafflecopter during the tour.
What is this book about?
Blurb
Based on the true story of one family’s spiritual saga revealed
through buttons that have been secreted away in an antique box, and that
ultimately hold the key to each generation’s salvation.
Ginger Marcinkowski’s first novel, Run, River Currents featured
Emily Evans, who as a girl shared a special understanding with her grandfather,
John Polk. Despite the scars of her father's abuse John taught her to look to
the future in faith, promising Emily God's grace can be seen even in the
simplest thing—a button.
Years after her grandfather John's death, the unexpected delivery
of a decorated tin, still brimming with odd-colored buttons is delivered to
Emily. The reappearance of the family buttons unlocks joyous memories and
guides Emily to realize a secret her grandfather promised lay within the
stories of that worn button box; the healing power of prayer. In The Button
Legacy: Emily’s Inheritance each button connects one generation to the next as
their interrelated stories unfold across the timeless landscape of their
spiritual journey.
Excerpt
She
shook her head and tugged at the paper. In moments the unwrapped package
revealed a cardboard box. She tore at the box until it gave way. It took Emily
only a second to recognize the faded tin box tucked inside. She drew in a deep
breath.
“Em?
What is it?” Aaron asked, placing his hands on hers.
She
turned to look at him, her eyes wide and dancing. “It’s the button box!” she
whispered, her voice a singsong of joy.
“The
what?”
“The
button box. Gram and Grampy’s button box!”
Her
hands shook as she pulled the container from the cardboard and dropped it onto
her lap. The colors were just as she’d remembered them, a faded pastoral scene
once alive with vivid tints of blue, green, yellow, and red. She gazed at the
tin, taking in its beauty as she brushed her hands gently over the top of its
raised design. She felt her eyes welling with tears.
“Honey,
where did it come from?” Aaron asked, his face etched with questions.
She
shook her head from side to side in tiny bursts and reached to open the box.
The sound of the familiar creak as it opened took her breath away, and the
light from the room slowly revealed the treasure inside. There were hundreds of
buttons, all shapes and sizes, piled inside the rectangular container. A
handwritten note was wrapped around a small, discolored envelope and taped inside
the lid. Emily glanced at her husband, half afraid to pull the note and
envelope from its place.
Author bio and links
Ginger
Marcinkowski was born as one of eight siblings in northern Maine along the
Canadian border, a setting that plays a prominent role in her novels, Run,
River Currents and The Button Legacy-Emily’s Inheritance.
Her
debut novel, Run, River Currents, was published in August 2012, was a 2012
semi-finalist in the ACFW Genesis Awards and a 2013 Kindle Book Award Finalist.
The Button Legacy-Emily's Inheritance, will be released in July 2014. An
interesting fact about Ginger is that she is a million-mile flier with United
Airlines and had been a multi-million dollar travel agent in the past. Her
travel experience will be the catalyst for a new series of mysteries whose main
characters are travel agents.
Finally, here's an interview with Ginger:
You say you are following your
dream now. What brought about the change?
It’s the same story you hear from a lot
of women. I wanted to support my husband and my son during the years they went
to school. It was never a priority for me to have an education, and we both
worked toward his career. The choices we made together in our youth included
traveling. It was how I learned about the world and was my education. But
writing was always in me, and the desire for a formal education to help me
learn the craft of writing was something I really had wanted from a young age.
Now I’m more mature and realize that the support I gave was not always the
support I got in return. Not on purpose, mind you, but no one expected that I
would ever, at this late age, even want to start college. Getting to this point
was difficult. I had given up a piece of me to everyone but me. I just
wanted it enough. It sounds a bit selfish, but now, at this point in my life, I
wanted to treat “me” as well as I’ve treated others. I’m off on a new part of
my life!
Your book, The Button Legacy:
Emily’s Inheritance, caught my attention from the first sentence in the
description. Tell the readers about it.
I’ll give you the “back cover story” and
then fill in a bit for you.
From the back cover of The
Button Legacy-Emily’s Inheritance:
"My Dearest Emily...
When you were a little girl, a change
occurred in you. You lost a piece of yourself somewhere....But when you were
here in Plaster Rock, you bloomed. The stories we told with these buttons made
you smile. With your smile came hope.
Repeat the stories you've been told to
your own children, never forgetting that God was there in every situation, in
every story held inside this button box..."
Growing up, Emily Evans of Run,
River Currents had always shared a special understanding with her
grandfather, John Polk, even when she couldn't fully see beyond the darkness of
her father's abuse. Yet John looked to the future in faith to what his God
could do.
Years after her grandfather's death, the
unexpected delivery of the decorated tin, still brimming with odd-colored
buttons, unlocks the joyous memories and lets Emily realize she has finally
discovered the secret her grandfather promised lay within the stories of the
worn button box.
Told through the eyes of a godly
grandfather, The Button Box-Emily’s Inheritance laces together a
godly heritage and the power of one man's prayers, offering a lesson of how
God's grace can be seen even in the simplest thing—a button.
First, Plaster Rock, New Brunswick is
real and was the home of my grandparents and really was the only place I’ve
ever called “home.” The times I spent in that small town are as alive and vivid
to me as if I were there right now. When I smell the scent of pine or see the
flow of any river, I think of that place, how I ran the logs on that river with
my siblings, taking our lives in our hands and not caring a lick!
The beauty of this tender story is that
throughout everything that went on in Emily’s life, she had a place of solace,
and even at a young age understood a “sense of place.” That place is where the
setting of this book takes place, Plaster Rock, New Brunswick. I hope people
see my love for the Tobique River and the power it held in giving life and
death. I hope they understand the gentle people of this small town and
see the influence that one person, Emily’s grandfather, John Polk, had on her
life. The love of just one person can be such a powerful influence, even
if that influence occurred years earlier.
This story is how one man’s faith was
passed on to other generations in the form of stories told through the use of
buttons. The rich and beautiful setting has a lesson of hope and forgiveness.
It’s a story that once you start reading, you won’t be able to put it down
until you’re done, and by the time you do, you’ll have felt a range of emotions
you won’t soon forget.
You say it’s based on a true story.
How did you come across this story and why tell it?
The story is based on some true events
from my own life and from stories that were shared with me by various people
from the town of Plaster Rock. I did take great liberties with characters and
settings, but the main events were true. Why tell the story? People often tell
new writers that everyone has a story inside of them that MUST be told before
they can ever really write what they want to. I found that to be true. My first
book, Run River Currents started out to be a humorous biography about my
mother, a serial wife and mother to eight children. Everyone loved her.
But our house, like every home, had secrets. My mentor, Sara Pritchard, author
of New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Crackpots, pulled
that story out of me. She saw the pain in me that I had long ago distanced
myself from. With her prodding, I ended up telling the story that I had
to tell. But The Button Legacy: Emily’s Inheritance was a labor of love and a
tribute to the witness of my godly grandfather. It was much easier to write.
What authors do you love to read?
Well, besides Sarah’s hysterically funny
books, Lately and Crackpots, I love Jeff Talarigo’s books, The
Pearl Diver and The Ginsing Hunter, both beautiful stories that were
poetically written. I laugh my head off with Gail Martin’s humor with her
novels, Who Killed Tom Jones?, Grace Unexpected and Don Juan
in Hankey, PA. I also enjoy Laura Hillenbrand’s powerful character-driven
books, Seabiscuit and Unbroken, any of Maeve Binchy’s
Irish tales, Lenore Hart’s books—she does a fantastic job with historical
characters in Becky and The Raven’s Bride—and a host of
classic writers.
What can readers expect from you in
the future?
I am working on the first book of a
series whose main character’s are travel agents. They are humorous cozy
mysteries in a genre I am eager to explore!
