The Fortress

Today we welcome Madeleine Romeyer Dherby. Madeleine is the author of The Fortress, a WWII historical available as of May 15th from Freedom Forge Press. She's doing a virtual name before the masses tour which will run for 20 weeks starting on June 4th.

Madeleine will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes & Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during this tour. Please use the following link to place your comment:
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f2691

I asked Madeleine why she chose World War II as the period for her book? Here's her answer:

I was born in a small village nestled under the Vercors cliffs, an area that saw a lot of action during WWII. It was where a couple of dreamers envisioned a plan to build an army of resistants that would support Anvil, the Allied landing on the French Mediterranean coast. 
I grew up there long after the liberation, on the wrong side of glory. Three of my uncles were condemned to death for collaborating with the Vichy government and betraying C2, a Resistance camp located at Malleval, to the Nazis. Their sentences were later commuted to forced labor, but the national disgrace verdict stood, and they had to leave the area to avoid being murdered. Despite the death threats, my father— who had fought with honor during the war—decided to stay. The legacy, hard to overcome in a community mauled by four years of occupation and violence, is my first personal connection to this story. 

Then, there is the Vercors itself. Breathtakingly beautiful, dangerous, a natural playground for all extreme sport lovers. Rock climbing, canyoning, spelunking, skiing, it’s all there. But for me, it’s home. It’s where my ancestors have lived and are buried, under those same cliffs. 

It is a battle well-known to Historians and military strategists that got surprisingly little artistic treatment. The Fortress is a dream of freedom, a heroic battle, a military disaster, but also redemptive last stand. Many books have been written on the subject, but no fiction, and in fact, I was frustrated by the dryness of the accounts which I felt did not reflect the human dimension of that battle.
There are also small things, like a Sten machine gun I found in the mud of a summer creek, with this inscription, Pour ma Suzon Cherie, June 12, 1944; or the story of a fifteen-year old boy, a resistant fighter whose name is forgotten, who was tortured and murdered by the Nazis in the summer of 1944.
I wanted to do justice to the conflicting truths of men, women, families, rivals, religions, collaborators, communists, nationalists and simple French patriots during the Nazi occupation of my beloved Alp mountains. The plot is simply a way to let them speak for themselves. 
But there in the middle of my noble historical mission, a love story was born, and once it took roots, it drove the narrative. Marc has pledged his life to defend the Vercors, and he is a man of his word. It is with genuine distress that he discovers his growing attraction to Alix, and he fights it. The tension that builds between them, driven by irrepressible feelings and conflict, is shaped by the violence that unfolds around them, rather than superficial sexual drama. That love story made the writing almost hypnotic for me.  

Blurb

The war has not made much of difference in Alix’s life. Her father has seen to it that she grows up unaware, unworried, but safe in her tiny village under the cliffs of the Vercors. All around her he has built a fortress whose walls are impregnable—until the 27th of April, 1944. That day he makes a stupid mistake up on the cliff, and the walls of the Fortress start crashing down. Reality breaks into Alix’s life with unrelenting violence, unforeseen possibilities. From now on, every decision she makes will mean life or death.

Excerpt

Six weeks before D-Day, a thousand kilometers from the beaches of Normandy.

There are no generals in the French Vercors, just a handful of men and women against the Nazi war machine. They come from Bretagne, Paris, and Slovenia, and the villages up on the cliff. They are the Fortress. 

When she looked up, the cart had rounded the curve, and the way ahead was wide open. In a minute they would leave the cliff Madeleine Romeyer Dherbey 14 behind. She stopped the horses and turned around, expecting to see her father on top of the log pile. “Papa?” she called. There was no response. Her eyes darted from one place to another. On the wall against the
blue sky, behind the cart, down the road, as far as it went along the rock face. “Papa?” she called again. He was there a second ago…right there, he was standing right there…. “Papa,” she cried. “Where are you?” Then she saw Mikko, two paws on the wall, sniffing. And her hands started to shake. “Papa,” she said, but no sound came out. “Papa, come back.” 

Author bio and links


Madeleine Romeyer Dherbey was born in the French Alps, moved to the United States twenty-five years later, and currently lives in the mountains of Virginia with her husband, two daughters, and Mikko.

Website:  WWW.MadeleineRomeyerDherbey.com
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/Madeleine-Romeyer-Dherbey-2067077286871927/?modal=admin_todo_tour