Subversive Lovelies
What if there were women in 1897 who didn't follow the social conventions of their time? What if women spoke up? What if women insisted they be heard? Jezebel is the youngest of the four what-if women who make life a whole lot different than it actually was at the turn of the century.
Predicated on the notion that recorded history, always written in hindsight, is actually made by individual or small-group local change first, the novel is a combination of historical fiction and speculative fiction.
Everyone knows that long before trends are established enough to be noticed, someone always goes first. Four sisters—variations on Eleanor Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, Jane Addams, and Oscar Wilde—they’re teachers, sponsors, fairy godmothers, referees, nannies, midwives, coaches, besties, double-darers, and the aunties every single one of us wished we’d always had.
The Subversive Lovelies seed change, passion, healing, and power wherever they go. The Subversive Lovelies are historical fiction with a speculative twist.
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Jezebel Rising
Four sisters. Four buildings. Four visions of what women can—and need—to be, do, and have.
Jezebel is the youngest of the Bailey sisters. Yes, that Bailey of Barnum &— fame. Heiresses to multimillions of their father’s nouveau riche wealth, the four have been raised in direct antithesis to the fainting flowers of womanhood to be found in the notoriously fickle, corrupt Gilded Age Society in which they live.
These women think for themselves, dream big, speak up, and take no prisoners. Four towering yellow-brick buildings on Chelsea’s 23rd Street across from turn-of-the-century Manhattan’s Millionaire’s Row inspire Jezebel to propose that the four go eyes-wide-open into the business of vice to mask their real purposes, their true callings, their nefarious agendas, their mystical imaginings—to answer and fulfill the four real greatest needs of women in their generation.
Their journey takes them deep into The Tenderloin, that vice-iest of downtown neighborhoods. There they navigate the machinations of Tammany Hall, the dreaded slums of Five Points, the gangsters of the Lower West Side, the relentless tide of ongoing, daily despair in their charges, and a greater emergency than they’ve ever faced in their lives as they pull together to dream, create, inspire, and train their team to profit from who they’re really meant to be.
Will Jezebel’s faith in herself, her sisters, and their visions be justified or will all four and their team be vanquished by the social forces ranged against them because of who they are?ed on the premise (as I suppose most novels are) of what if?
If you’ve enjoyed Jezebel Rising and would like to recommend it to a friend, email me directly. I’ll send you a reply message with information and links you can forward on to your friend .
Jasmine Increscent
A wedding. Increasing. And it’s time to start her vicety … it’s a three-ring circus—oh, my.
Jasmine Bailey is the second eldest of the Bailey siblings, yes, those Baileys. Known for being much more in the present than the future, years earlier she’d begun a one-woman mission to serve mothers who’d been abandoned by their spouses in the worst slum ever to darken New York City: Five Points. Universally recognized by her honorific, Lady Jasmine, throughout Gilded Age society, the wealthy take their checkbooks in hand whenever they see her strawberry blonde braid and her lissome figure coming.
Now it’s time for Jasmine’s vicety—the second of four the sibs had planned upon the death of their beloved father four years earlier. Since then, Jezebel’s pair of viceties—The Obstreperous Trumpet, a saloon, and The Salacious Sundae, an ice cream parlor—were going great guns. Jasmine had originally intended to create a high-end gambling hell. Except ... her wedding is scheduled in less than a month, and she’s increasing. There’s, uh, a lot on her plate.
Jasmine’s research takes her from the lowest of the low policy shops in Mulberry Bend to an outré visit to the most elite gambling institution in town. Still, she’s struggling with what is in her heart about starting this vicety. A chance sentence, if you believe in that sort of thing, overheard whilst at breakfast one morning changes everything.
Will her struggle with gambling resolve to her satisfaction, or will Jasmine have to scrap every idea she ever had about it to start over again? Sure, no doubt she could, but does she want to, and how will that affect her siblings and their nefariously well-meant agenda in Chelsea Towers?
If you’ve enjoyed Jasmine Increscent and would like to recommend it to a friend, email me directly. I’ll send you a reply message with information and links you can forward on to your friend .
