Ada Brownell is our guest today.

She wrote a book called Love’s Delicate Blossom. 

Today, she’s here to share the story behind her story.

Edmund Pritchett III wants to marry Ritah Irene O’Casey, but his intended has just begun her fight for the future. The beautiful redhead stands between Henry Hunter and Tulip, the orphan girl he kidnapped to work in his brothel, and he’s not giving up.

Excited about being one of the few women to go to college in 1917, Ritah hopes to become a teacher who can help widows keep their children. She also wants to enable mothers to know more about prevention and treatment of disease, in an era when few have access to a doctor. Instead, she ends up fighting for the lives of injured soldiers in a WWI Army health clinic, and finds her own life threatened by illness as well as sorrow.

When Ritah takes a teaching job, Joe Nichols, a handsome farmer, edges his way into her heart. But Edmund Pritchett III isn’t giving up, and neither is Henry Hunter.

Will Rita be able to continue to fight for women and families, understand enduring love, decide on the man she loves, and defend herself and her students when Henry Hunter bursts into the school shooting a pistol?

Learn more and purchase a copy.

What inspired you to write this book?

I’d like to start my answer to your question with a narrative. I call it “Love’s Delicate Blossom: Mama Was A Spunky Redhead.”

A couple of men worked on a fence along a Kansas road and turned their heads to watch her. One threw a shiny coin into the air. The two slender men bent, picked it up and stood staring.

One slicked down his hair, lifted his leg, crawled through the barbed wire, and started toward her.

“I’d better run,” she whispered to herself. “Those fellows are bargaining for me, and that’s not good.” She quickened her pace, but realized there would be no running in her Sunday shoes. Her little piggies squealed and the joint on the big toe threatened to make a bunion.

She didn’t look at the man as she walked as quickly as she could trying to put distance between them, her heavy suitcase banging against her side. She dropped her umbrella, purse and lunch bag and quickly grabbed them again.

“Ma’am.”

She kept going.

“Ma’am.”

Then she heard his boots crunching against the gravel and knew he‘d burst into a run. “Ma’am. I just want to help you carry your suitcase. You must be the new schoolteacher.”

I heard about that scene many times in my life.

Mama was one of only a few women able to go to college in 1917. She wanted to be a teacher and believed women should be able to make a living in case something would happen to the husband. She had many things she wanted to learn and as this man smiled into her face, she had a suitor back home in Iowa.

I’d heard this story many times. Mama, born in 1900, was a beautiful redhead and she was spunky. Grandma used to have her, as the oldest child, to kill the rattlesnakes when they showed up at their farm.

Rita carried bees outside on her finger. Not long after she married she took an ax to an illegal still where Daddy was getting liquor, put evidence up the chimney and a gunny sack full of filled bottles in the lake as evidence for the revenuers. Then she preached the bootlegger a sermon when he dropped by the house to complain.

So when I wrote Love’s Delicate Blossom I put Mama, actually Ritah, between a man building a brothel and her 14-year-old friend he kidnapped. I used Mama’s spunk numerous times in the book. Some events happened; others didn’t. It’s all fiction, and a good story.

Wow. Ritah, the heroine of your story, sounds like a strong and capable woman! Thanks for sharing this intriguing story!

Ada Brownell blogs and writes with Stick-to-Your-Soul Encouragement. She is the author of nine books, more than 350 stories and articles in Christian publications, and she spent a large chunk of her life as a journalist, mostly for The Pueblo Chieftain in Colorado.

She and her husband L.C., have five children, one of them in heaven, eight wonderful grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Her book, The Lady Fugitive, the first book in the Peaches and Dreams series was a finalist for the 2015 Laurel Award.

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Ada is giving away a copy of Love’s Delicate Blossom. Follow the directions below to enter.