Blog Tour & Excerpt: What Passes As Love by Trisha R. Thomas – with link to #BookGiveaway

Today, I’m so happy to be a tour stop on the blog tour for What Passes as Love by Trisha R. Thomas. Thank you @OTRPR for inviting me to participate. As part of the book tour, there is a giveaway…but the giveaway is happening on my Instagram page!!!

Enjoy this spotlight and the excerpt and then you can find out where to enter the giveaway below!

 

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing

Published: September 1, 2021

Source: ARC Paperback via Over The River Public Relations

 

Summary:

A young woman pays a devastating price for freedom in this heartrending and breathtaking novel of the nineteenth-century South.

1850. I was six years old the day Lewis Holt came to take me away.

Born into slavery, Dahlia never knew her mother—or what happened to her. When Dahlia’s father, the owner of Vesterville plantation, takes her to work in his home as a servant, she’s desperately lonely. Forced to leave behind her best friend, Bo, she lives in a world between black and white, belonging to neither.

Ten years later, Dahlia meets Timothy Ross, an Englishman in need of a wife. Reinventing herself as Lily Dove, Dahlia allows Timothy to believe she’s white, with no family to speak of, and agrees to marry him. She knows the danger of being found out. She also knows she’ll never have this chance at freedom again.

Ensconced in the Ross mansion, Dahlia soon finds herself held captive in a different way—as the dutiful wife of a young man who has set his sights on a political future. But when Bo arrives on the estate in shackles, Dahlia decides to risk everything to save his life. With suspicions of her true identity growing and a bounty hunter not far behind, Dahlia must act fast or pay a devastating price.

 

 

Excerpt:

PROLOGUE

VESTERVILLE QUARTERS

1850

The cabin is dark, way past resting hour. I stand in my bedgown listening to the heavy wagon roll against the gravel outside and come to a stop. I’m supposed to be asleep, resting for daybreak when I’ll feed the chickens, grab the eggs, and run like crazy before those pink thorny feet chase me out the coop. I always sneak a few extra for Oleen, carefully tucking the eggs under the hay for later. The rest of the basket goes to the Holt house. I feed the hogs too, while Papa Sap stands close by, watching with a keen eye, his good eye. He lost the other when he was a boy.

Oleen tightens her grip. She gives me a jolt. “Get ya’self together, ya hear? This yo’ chance. You goin’ with him, Lewis Holt, Masta Holt, and that’s that. This a good thing,” she whispers.

Tears roll and catch in the back of my throat. I try to reach for Papa Sap’s hand. He’ll know what to do. He’ll save me. Instead, I get another jolt from Oleen. “You stop it right now.”

“Please, don’t make me go. Who gon’ feed the chickens? Who gon’ fetch the eggs? I promise, Mama, I’ll do better?”

Her face tightens. Oleen hates when I call her Mama. Her own children, her real children, died, or were taken away, something she don’t like to be reminded of. Cruel as it is and likely to break her spirit, I say it anyway. “Mama, I’ll be good. Please.”

Her eye turn to water. Both of us crying, both of us hoping the other will give in. Both of us knowing it’s too late.

The man steps inside, craning his neck, too tall to stand straight in our cabin. This is the first time I see him up close. Usually I see him only from a distance, perched on his horse, kicking up dust, while he marches the edges of the wide fields. He doesn’t look so scary now. He comes forward holding his hat. He kneels on one knee. “Now, girl, don’t you cry. I’m taking you to a better place. I have two little girls just like you. You’ll have Annabelle and Leslie to play with. You’ll have a bed to sleep in. All your worries will be over.”

With the man’s hand resting heavily on my shoulder, I try to swallow back the tears so I don’t drown.

“She is indeed exquisite,” the man confirms to no one but himself.

“Mama, please,” I beg one last time.

Oleen fed and raised me from before I could walk. Now she’s letting me be whisked away like I never existed at all. Oleen, Papa Sap, and me are a family. Our dimly lit cabin barely holds the three of us with our arms linked together, forget about any space while lying down at night, seamless like the accordion Papa Sap plays on the Sabbath. Still, we belong together.

I twist my hand out of Oleen’s grip. I scream. Even to my ears the shrill is as loud as anything my ting body will allow.

“Come along now.” Lewis Holt takes my hand.

I look up, plead one last time. Oleen puts a finger to her lips. Enough. Go quietly.

I’m lifted and plopped onto the back of the wagon. I hear footsteps rushing behind us.

“She can’t go. You can’t take her.” Bo is my friend. He lives in the cabin next to ours. He must’ve heard my cries.

Oleen grabs him, takes ahold of his gangly arms as he struggles.

“Stop it, fore you get beat.” She keeps a firm grip on Bo. Papa Sap comes to help hold him back. It takes the two of them to keep Bo from tearing after me.

“Why she gotta go? It ain’t right.” He wipes at his eyes, finally giving up.

Papa Sap clears his throat before answering. “You can’t ask why if you want any peace. You just gotta let ’em go, son.”

 

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Hope I’ve enticed you to pick this book up with this excerpt…that it gives you a flavor of the book.

And now for the giveaway! Thanks to the publicist, I am able to giveaway one copy of this book to entrants in the US and Canada. To enter, head over to my Instagram page and look for this post. The giveaway ends September 10th and is not affiliated with or by Instagram.