Serabelle: Where the Wealthy Come to Play
by Tavi Taylor Black
Black Coffee Book Tours
July 23-26
An island sheltered from modern progress. Strict lines between servants
and masters. Will crossing them leave her fatally exposed?
Bar
Harbor, Maine. 1913. Mabel Rae is smart, reckless, and naïve. So when the
ambitious seventeen-year-old joins the staff at a rocky cliffside cottage,
she willingly lets the boisterous estate owner's improper advances sweep
her off her feet. And the slender young woman dismisses the vulnerability
of her position when she discovers she's pregnant with his unacknowledged
child.
Brought harshly down to earth after she's caught up in
the machinations of a family feud, Mabel decides it's time to take matters
into her own hands. But with no money and few rights, she fears a forced
marriage to the brutish gardener is her only socially acceptable
option.
Is her future forever stunted, or can she become a
beacon of change?
In a classic upstairs-downstairs tale,
award-winning author Tavi Taylor Black spins an intricate web of
idealism's battle against harsh reality. Set at a time when suffrage was
at its height, temperance was gaining momentum, and war loomed in Europe,
this spellbinding novel shines a light on inequities we still face
today.
Serabelle is a darkly humorous work of historical
fiction. If you like intricate relationships, lyrical prose, and stories
that tackle serious issues, then you'll love Tavi Taylor Black's vivid
portrait of the Gilded Age.
Buy Serabelle to test the limits of
freedom today!
Universal link for the book on Amazon
About the Author
Tavi Taylor Black earned an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University
in Cambridge. In the years following her graduation, Tavi created a
collection of short stories, Crazy Happy. Several stories from the
collection were shortlisted for prizes, including the Fish One Page Prize,
Aesthetica Magazine’s Creative Works Competition and the Donald Barthelme
Prize for Short Prose. Other stories have appeared in Alligator Juniper
and Opium Magazine online.
Tavi’s debut novel Where Are We
Tomorrow? was awarded the 2022 Nancy Pearl Book Award, was a finalist in
the 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the 2021 National Indie
Excellence Awards, and a finalist in the Nicholas Schaffner Award for
Music in Literature. Tavi lives on Vashon Island where she is finishing up
the second in a series of middle-grade fantasy novels. She is currently in
graduate school at the University of Washington, studying Library Science.
Mabel liked reading, had enjoyed her studies when she was a girl. She made a better student, she knew, than she did a maid. Though her body was sturdy and taut, she was often distracted by an errant thought, one that would lead her down a winding path of ideas and images and take her mind off her work. She found herself staring into space, halting a mundane task. Mabel thought of those women in town at the suffrage meeting. Those women seemed worldly and smart. They wanted things for themselves. They read and thought and organized. Maybe, there was a way for Mabel to be like them.The writing had an easy flow, clear and to the point. The plotline was easy to follow, and each chapter played an integral part of the story. Line upon line, you are drawn into the intricate web of lies, fraud, and deceit to find truth as they navigated life. A great story that I will recommend. Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. Goodreads / LibraryThing / Reedsy
