BooksChatter: ☀☄ Mamma's Moon: Peckerwood Finch [2]

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for Mamma's Moon, a Literary Fiction novel by Jerome Mark Antil (7 May 2019, Little York Books, 270 pages).

This is the second book in the Peckerwood Finch series.

Don't miss our interview with author Jerome Mark Antil.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and the Kindle Cloud Reader Preview below, as well as full details of the series.

Author Jerome Mark Antil will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour. Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), and guest blog posts (✉).

|| Synopsis || Trailer || Teaser: Excerpt || The Series || Author Q&A || About the Author || Giveaway & Tour Stops ||

Synopsis

A bond that can only happen on a dance floor happened in a cafe off Frenchman Street among four unlikely characters: a man who was about to die; his friend, an illiterate Cajun French yardman; and two of the most successful women in New Orleans.

Aging Captain Gabriel Jordan, retired, was given two months to live, three months before he met "Peck"--Boudreau Clemont Finch--a groundskeeper on the back lawn of his hospice on Bayou Carencro, Louisiana. It was at the hospice that Gabe told Peck his dream of seeing the Newport Jazz Festival before he died. They became friends, and Peck offered to help grant his wish by taking him there.

And they began their journey.

It quickly became a journey with complications and setbacks. They saved each other many times, but they were in turn saved by two extraordinary women: Sasha (Michelle Lissette), a real estate agent in New Orleans's posh Garden District, and her best friend, Lily Cup (Lily Cup Lorelei Tarleton), a criminal attorney.

Less than a year before the events in Mamma's Moon, Gabe and Peck wandered into Charlie's Blue Note, a small jazz bar in a side alley just off Frenchman Street, where the music was live and mellow and the dancing warm and sensual.

Here they encountered Sasha and Lily Cup, and amid the music, the dancing, the food, the flirting, and the cigar smoke, the four formed an unusual and lasting friendship that would see them each through a series of crises, disappointments, life-threatening situations, and moments of great joy and satisfaction.

Teaser: Excerpt

“That girl loves New Orleans. It’s a completely different world for her from the strict Baptist home life in Tennessee and Baylor University. But hell, the girl would love Milwaukee if Peck were there. Her mom and dad love Peck. I’m not certain Millie’s had a good look at the house the few times she’s come on her school breaks. She hits the door, pauses just long enough to hug ole Gabe here a genuine hello and a kiss on the cheek, then she’ll grab Peck’s arm like it’s an empty egg basket handle, close his bedroom door behind them and climb his bones until he comes out peaked, steps on the porch for some air and goes back in for another round.”
     “Whoa, now that takes me back,” Lily Cup said. “I can remember those wild younger days of reckless abandon.”
     She sipped her coffee, smiling.
     “Innocent times,” Gabe said.
     “They weren’t so innocent,” Lily Cup said.
     “Oh?”
     “I remember after school sometimes; Sasha and I’d be feeling randy and we’d corner us a couple of momma’s boys we thought showed promise. We’d sneak into one of those back storage rooms on Magazine Street and wear them out.”
     “Lord help ’em,” Gabe said. “Impetuous youth.”
     “We had perfect lures. Sasha was the first in our grade to wear a D cup bra,” Lily Cup said.
     “Her girls,” Gabe said.
     “They were magnets for high school bad boys dying for a peek,” Lily Cup said. “The bigger her girls, the ‘badder’ the boys.”
     “Youth,” Gabe said.
     “We developed our fancies,” Lily Cup said. “Hers was arousing a dude and putting his condom on him. She’d ride it like a sailor on a rowboat—the boy gawking up at her girls in her Victoria Secret bra she saved her allowance for. She’d never take it off. She’d say a boy appreciates a cleavage—why spoil the fantasy?”
     “And you?”
     “Let’s just say I developed a liking for the feel of a firm cigar.”
     “Ha!” Gabe guffawed. “Is that why you smoke those short Panatelas?”
     “Over the years I’ve learned to keep my expectations low.”
     “Youth is uncouth,” Gabe said. “At least you’re sophisticated and couth now, little lady.”
     “Too couth. I like to get mussed up on occasion.”
     “You’re an attractive woman. It’ll happen.”
     “She’s talking about the wedding reception maybe being at Charlie’s Blue Note,” Lily Cup said.
     “If that’s true, I’m surprised James hasn’t put up a scuff,” Gabe said. “A jazz joint in an alley off Frenchmen Street isn’t what I’d call his cup of tea.”
     “I think the house would be best for the engagement party, fixed up a little. I’ll help,” Lily Cup said.
     “It would be more personal here,” Gabe said.
     “I think so,” Lily Cup said. “This is like home to her.”
     “I’ll have Peck paint the porch ceiling,” Gabe said.
     Lily Cup stood, coffee cup in hand. She walked to the door looking out at the porch’s ceiling.
     “Why?” she asked.
     “I’m changing the sky–blue to another color, maybe a white.”
     “It looks freshly painted.”
     “It’s a tradition thing,” Gabe said.
     “What tradition?”
     “A lady at the library told me a sky–blue ceiling on a front porch signals an available woman–of–age living in the house.”
     “That’s phooey,” Lily Cup said. “I heard that one and three others like it. Like sky–blue wards off spiders and attracts bees away from people sitting on porch swings. I wouldn’t bother painting it.”
     “I’m a Chicago boy—what would I know from superstitions?”

Mamma's Moon
Available to Pre-Oder, Out 7 May 2019!

The Series: Peckerwood Finch

All books in the series can be read as stand-alone novels.

Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.

One More Last Dance [1]

One More Last Dance is a compelling story about the power of friendship, one that develops between two men through an unlikely road trip.

Peckerwood Finch has a lot going against him. The 25-year-old Cajun man was abandoned at birth by his parents, endured abusive foster parents, is illiterate, and there’s his name—an unflattering term for a rural white Southerner. Fortunately, he’s affectionately known as Peck (his given name is Boudreaux Clement Finch). Peck is a fisherman and mows the grass at a small hospice on a Louisiana bayou. There he meets Gabriel “Gabe” Jordan, an elderly African American man dying of cancer whose final wish is to attend the Newport Jazz Festival. Despite his own shortcomings, Peck is determined to make Gabe’s dream come true.

The new friends hit the road only to be stymied by, among other things, a lack of funds and Peck’s poor sense of direction. At times, guardian angels come to their rescue, including a wealthy real estate broker who offers to buy airline tickets, among many other generosities. But Peck has no form of identification and must travel by bus while Gabe flies. The bulk of the story then concerns Peck’s adventures en route.

[Published 25 December 2017, 282 pages]

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About the Author

Jerome Mark Antil writes in several genres. He has been called a “greatest generation’s Mark Twain,” a “write what you know Ernest Hemingway,” and “a sensitive Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” It’s been said his work reads like a Norman Rockwell painting. Among his writing accomplishments, several titles in his The Pompey Hollow Book Club historical fiction series about growing up in the shadows of WWII have been honored. An ‘Authors and Writers’ Book of the Year Award and ‘Writer of the Year’ at Syracuse University for The Pompey Hollow Book Club novel; Hemingway, Three Angels, and Me, won SILVER in the UK as second-best novel.

Foreword’s Book of the Year Finalist for The Book of Charlie – historical fiction and The Long Stem is in the Lobby – nonfiction humor. Library Journal selected Hemingway, Three Angels and Me for best reads during Black History Month.

Before picking up the pen, Antil spent his professional career writing and marketing for the business world. In this role, he lectured at universities - Cornell, St. Edward’s, and Southern Methodist. His inspirations have been John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway.

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