BooksChatter: ☀ In The Garden Room

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for In The Garden Room, a Gothic Historical Suspense by Tanya Eby (18 July 2016, Blunder Woman Productions, 252 pages).

Don't miss our interview with author Tanya Eby.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below. Read the first three chapters with Amazon Look Inside.

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Synopsis

It is Chicago. 1910. Eleven-year-old Lillian March looks over her mother’s dead body with a sense of relief.

As a poor woman, her mother, Cora, never had any real choices or happiness with her life. Cora and Lillian flee to the bustling city of Chicago, where she is certain she will have the life of opulence she deserves.

Cora and Lillian face deep hardships in turn-of-the-century Chicago as Cora’s mind continues its downward spiral. With no money and no hope for income, Cora sells Lillian to The Garden Room, a brothel, where young girls and desperate women are kept like flowers in a jar.

John March comes looking for his daughter and his wife in an attempt to rescue them, but even if he finds them alive, is rescue really possible?

IN THE GARDEN ROOM is an exploration of madness, desire and two women’s choices in a time when they weren’t really allowed to choose.

Teaser: Excerpt

AFTER

Chicago

December

1910
LILLIAN
     Papa says we have to move the body and come up with a story before anyone finds out. I find that very odd. Not the story part, I am used to stories, but the part about the body. Just an hour ago, that body was Mother, but now she’s gone. Her soul hissed out like steam from a kettle. I cross to the object that was Mother but now is The Body. Father says hurry, and I do. “The police will be here soon, and we must be ready,” he says. He does not know that the police only come to the Packinghouse District to drink and to open their trousers.
     There isn’t time for me to see the room through my father’s eyes, but I do anyway. It is easier to see the room than it is to look at the deep red staining my hands and dress. The drops on the floor that start small and blossom, like crimson fireworks. I don’t look at her boots with the many small buttons. At her torn stockings and too-short skirt. At her sad, exposed bosoms, like white dough gone too long to rise. I don’t look at her face and her open eyes, and the red blooming along her front. I look at the room while Papa scrubs my hands with a stiff brush and cold water.
     There is my blanket in the corner. The corner where I would curl up and read and stare at the postcard of home and the cherry trees in bloom. There is the iron bed with the mattress that smelled of damp earth and the lake. The wallpaper is curling in the upper right corner as if it’s a snake shedding its skin. There are playbills nailed to the walls. The places Mother went to, maybe, in the beginning. The places she dreamed of going later.The places she’ll never go to now.
     My hands burn.
     “Let’s get you changed and then I’ll take you out of here.There’s nothing left to do now. Don’t you have anything here to change into?” he says. His words are thick and slow in my head.
     I cannot speak. I am metamorphosing like the bugs in the biology book I used to read. My words are stones in my throat. I shake my head.
     “Is this all you have here?” he asks and I can hear the sorrow clinging to him. This is an empty room. There is nothing of me here, not even Mother. “She left home for…” Now, Papa has no words. Maybe he is metamorphosing, too.
     He squeezes my hands in his. He has fisherman hands. Firm and rough and warm, but I am not afraid of his hands. He is not like the other men. Even now, he still thinks I am just a girl.
     I point to the dresses she has hanging on the door. There are two. One looks like a costume, and I suppose it is; it is meant to be taken off quickly. He grabs the light blue one, the summer dress. This was the dress she wore when she took me from him. It is stained and torn, the hem thick with mud and horse dung.Once, it was the color of the Michigan sky over the bay, its ruffles like whitecaps surfacing. The blue is more grey now, and it smells of loss.
     “Put this on,” he says. “I will tend to…” He turns away from me, for propriety, I guess, and I try to stop the giggle from bubbling. He thinks there are still things left for me to hide.
     I dress. What I’m wearing now is no better than a sack, and it pools at my feet. I step out of it, and into the dress that once clung to my mother’s curves. The bustle is long gone now, and the back of the dress floats on me. I breathe with relief. It does not fit me. Her curves are in the wrong places, so maybe there is hope that I will not grow into her shape.
     “Come on, my Lil,” Papa whispers. “It’s over, now. It’s over.It’s time for us to go.”
     Mother and I have lived here for two seasons, nearly three. I was a child when we first arrived and I am leaving transformed.Worse than becoming a woman, I have become a monster. I know it is worse because I am glad of it. In the blue stained dress, I am a demon, and I am smiling because we are free of her.

In The Garden Room
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About the Author

Tanya Eby is a writer and an award-winning audiobook narrator. She has published a variety of novels from romantic comedies to mysteries to dark historical pieces. While her writing crosses genres they all share quirky characters and complicated relationships.

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