28 Jun Renee Yancy More Precious Than Gold Coffee Pot Book Club Blog Tour #HistoricalFiction #HistoricalRomance #BlogTour #CoffeePotBookClub @YancyRenee @maryanneyarde

FEATURED AUTHOR: RENEE YANCY

It is my pleasure to welcome Renee Yancy again as the featured author in The Coffee Pot Book Club Blog Tour being held June 27th — July 8th, 2022. She is the author of the Historical Romance, More Precious Than Gold (The Hearts of Gold Trilogy, Book 2), which was released by Vinspire Publishing on 28th June 2022 (345 pages).

Below are highlights of More Precious Than Gold,  Renee Yancy’s author bio, and a fascinating post about the historical aspects of her novel—in particular, the pandemic flu of 1918.

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HIGHLIGHTS: MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD

More Precious Than Gold

(The Hearts of Gold Trilogy, Book 2)

By Renee Yancy

Blurb

A young woman refuses to become a pawn in her grandmother’s revenge scheme and forgoes a life of wealth and royalty to pursue a nursing career as America enters WWI and the Pandemic Flu of 1918 wreaks havoc in New York City.

Buy Links:

Universal Link  ♥  Amazon UK   ♥   Amazon US   ♥   Amazon CA    ♥   Barnes and Noble    ♥   Kobo    ♥   Apple Books

AUTHOR BIO: RENEE YANCY

Renee Yancy is a history and archaeology nut who works as an RN when she isn’t writing historical fiction or traveling the world to see the exotic places her characters have lived.

A voracious reader as a young girl, she now writes the kind of books she loves to read—stories filled with historical and archaeological detail interwoven with strong characters facing big conflicts. Her goal is to take you on a journey into the past so fascinating that you can’t put the story down.

When she isn’t writing, Renee can be found in the wilds of Kentucky with her husband and a rescue mutt named Ellie. She loves flea markets and collecting pottery and glass and most anything mid-century modern.

Social Media Links:

Website  ♥   Twitter  ♥   Facebook  ♥   Instagram  ♥   Pinterest  ♥  BookBub  ♥  Amazon Author Page  ♥  Goodreads

GUEST POST: HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD

Hi there, and thanks for the opportunity to share some historical aspects of my new novel More Precious Than Gold.

I love doing the research for a historical novel. I have spent hours and fallen down many rabbit holes trying to discover, for example, how many gold sovereigns a young woman could carry hidden in the bottom of her portmanteau.

For More Precious Than Gold, I researched WWI and the Pandemic Flu of 1918 for two years before I started to write. I spent hours scouring through old newspapers of the time. I finished the manuscript in 2017, two years before COVID hit. Never in a million years did I ever think I would experience a pandemic in my own lifetime.

Everyone knows someone who has had COVID or has had it themselves. I know several nurses that have had it twice. Today, though, we have vaccinations, antibiotics, and antivirals. We have oxygen and ventilators, breathing treatments, and monoclonal antibodies. We have access to clean water and health care and almost instantaneous communication.

In 1918, all they had was aspirin powder and morphine.

It causes me to have even more respect for the student nurses of Bellevue Hospital in 1918, none of whom left their positions to go home, but instead stayed to care for their patients, some of whom lost their lives as a result. For this reason, I included them in my dedication.

There are some similarities between COVID and the 1918 flu. But the 1918 flu killed more than 100 million people around the world and still stands as the most deadly single incident in world history. Usually flu affects the very young and the elderly the most.

But this flu disproportionately affected people in the 20 to 40 age group―people in the prime of their lives. In New York City alone, over 100,000 children were left orphans. Because of the profound cyanosis that people experienced with this flu, unless you had known their nationality before their deaths, you wouldn’t be able to tell what it was, because the bodies were so dark from oxygen deprivation.

There actually were three waves of the flu. It was the second wave, in the autumn of 1918, that was the most lethal. You could be fine in the morning, sick at noon, and dead at midnight. Horrifying.

The Pandemic Flu of 1918 killed more military men than the actual warfare did. If you have access to your family genealogy, you can check deaths in 1918, and if it is a young person, there’s a very good chance that the 1918 flu was the cause.

The hardest part of writing this book was deciding who would die of the flu. I didn’t want to kill any of my characters, because I had grown attached to them! But I knew that in the real world, the odds were that several people in Kitty’s circle would have died of the 1918 flu.

The most fun I had writing this book was the adventures my character Kitty has as a student nurse. Being a nurse myself, I drew on some of my own experiences and found inspiration in other nurses’ confessions of things that happened when they were student nurses. There are parts that I hope will make you laugh aloud when you read them!

One interesting side note. I think I now understand just why the Roaring 20s were so wild. After the years of war and pandemic flu, all the suffering and pain, the survivors were ready to move on and leave all that behind.

Maybe a story set in the Roaring 20s will be next on my list!

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