The Button Legacy: Emily's Inheritance

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. 

To leave a comment, please use this Rafflecopter link: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e434260/

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.

www.GingerMarcinkowski.com

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/writer.Ginger.Marcinkowski

AMAZON Author Page - http://www.amazon.com/Ginger-Marcinkowski/e/B008S1BFYI

Twitter - https://twitter.com/Grm55Grm

Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18088798-the-button-legacy?ac=1

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!