In light of her book tour having made a stop in Franklin on May 8, and this also being her second time stopping her tour in Franklin, I decided to have a miniature Q&A with her about her experiences writing this book.
Bestselling author Kristy Woodson Harvey has come out with a brand new book “Summer State of Mind” which is a standalone book from her series Under the Southern Sky.
Q: What is your new book about?
A: So in a nutshell, it is about a burnout NICU nurse who moves to a really sleepy town, and on her first day at work, an abandoned baby comes into the hospital that thrusts her into the path of an injured former baseball star, an eccentric southern aunt, and the heart of this small town life that is kind of put into chaos because of the discovery of this baby. And so they all learned that with a lot of love and a little understanding and a small town production of “Hello Dolly” that sometimes life brings us exactly when we belong.
Q: Is this a standalone book, or is it eventually going to be part of an interconnected series?
A: It is a standalone book, but I had a book come out in 2021, I believe, called “Under the Southern Sky,” and Mason, who is the baseball player protagonist in this book, and then Aunt Tilly, were both in “Under the Southern Sky” as very secondary characters. It’s not a sequel at all. You don’t have to have read “Under the Southern Sky.” You won’t be missing anything. But for people who have read “Under the Southern Sky”: it’s just a real deep dive into these two secondary characters that I really didn’t get to spend a lot of time with in the last book, and they were both really interesting to me. It just felt like a really good time and way to incorporate them into this new story and let them have their own happy ending too.
Q: Was there anything that was different about writing this book compared to when you and I talked just a year ago?
A: I can tell you something that was the same. For both “Beach House Rules” and “Under the Southern Sky,” the initial spark of the idea came from something I read in the newspaper for this book. In particular, I read an article about the NICU nurse who adopted an abandoned baby, and I just thought that was such an interesting story, and it was something that I had never really thought about before. And the same with “Beach House Rules,” it came from a newspaper article. But I will say, something different is that I haven’t ever used any secondary characters from a book and revisited them before. Never in a series. … So this was the first time I’ve ever really done that. So that was something different for me.
Photo contributed by Angela Melamund
Q: What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
A: … I think it’s just that life does not always go according to plan, but sometimes the detour is where the magic happens.
Q: If you could spend the day with a character of yours, who would it be and why?
A: I would love to spend the day with Rebecca St. James from “A Happier Life.” I wrote that book right after my grandmother passed away, and that character reminds me so much of my grandmother, and there’s a lot of my own family story in that book, and I feel like spending the day with her would be like spending the day with my grandmother.
Q: Do you have a sneak peek about your next work that you’re able to give the readers?
A: Oh I do.So I have another book coming out in September called “Falling for Peach Tree Bluff”. It’s the fifth book in my Peach Tree Bluff series, and as the title implies, it is set in pumpkin spice season. So I’m very excited about returning to this favorite beach town and this family that I love to write so much during the coziest season.
Did you miss the chance to see her but want to read her book? Wild Geese Bookshop has signed copies available for purchase. Stay tuned for potential future stops from Harvey in Franklin!
Photo contributed by Angela Melamund