I  published  14 pre teen and YA novels  at Random House, Holiday House, and Simon and Schuster, but a novel for adult readers,  the story of Ada Wentworth, a young Bostonian hatmaker transplanted to southern Appalachia,  kept swirling in my head. I first envisioned the story as The Sunday Hat Society, centering on the friendship of a group of women in the country church in Hickory Ridge, but the more I delved into it, the more I realized it was really about Ada’s struggle to forgive the two men in her life who had wronged her, and trust God with her future and her heart.

As I worked on this book, the voices of two supporting characters, Carrie Daly and Sophie, a mixed race orphan with no last name, became so strong that they needed stories of their own. Carrie’s story, A Measure of Grace is due to my editor Feb 1, and Sophie’s, The Measure of a Man, is due in November, for publication in 2012. What I love about writing is the way stories and characters speak to me. It’s such a joy translating them onto the page.