2021 The Christy Award Finalists (and a Giveaway!): Roseanna M. White & A Portrait of Loyalty

Happy Thursday! Has this week flown by for anyone else?? Continuing until October 28th (culminating with a list of winners), I have the privilege of featuring all of the 2021 The Christy Award Finalists! Today I’m featuring Roseanna M. White and her historical romance Christy Award finalist book A Portrait of Loyalty! You can check out a list of all the finalists HERE.

A PORTRAIT OF LOYALTY
SERIES: The Codebreakers #3
GENRE: Inspirational Historical Romance
PUBLISHER: Bethany House
RELEASE DATE: September 8, 2020
PAGES: 384

He sees patterns in what she deems chaos.
She sees beauty in a world he thought destroyed.

Zivon Marin was one of Russia’s top cryptographers until the October Revolution tore apart his world. Forced to flee to England after speaking out against Lenin, Zivon is driven by a growing anger and determined to offer his services to the Brits. But never far from his mind is his brother, whom Zivon fears died in the train crash that separated them.

Lily Blackwell sees the world best through the lens of a camera and possesses unsurpassed skill when it comes to retouching and re-creating photographs. With her father’s connections in propaganda, she’s recruited to the intelligence division, even though her mother would disapprove if she ever found out.

After Captain Blackwell invites Zivon to dinner one evening, a friendship blooms between him and Lily that soon takes over their hearts. But both have secrets they’re unwilling to share, and neither is entirely sure they can trust the other. When Zivon’s loyalties are called into question, proving him honest is about more than one couple’s future dreams–it becomes a matter of ending the war.

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I asked the author…

What do you most want your readers to take away from a portrait of loyalty?

As I was writing (and rewriting) A Portrait of Loyalty, one of the lessons that God really spoke to my heart was that sometimes forgiveness isn’t just a matter of how we do it when a friend or neighbor or family member has hurt us–sometimes it’s a whole people group that has stirred up bitterness or hatred or resentment in our hearts…but that doesn’t give us a pass. If anything, it calls us to a higher level of grace.

At the time I was writing this story, I was also reading Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, and he addresses this brilliantly in a time when people were facing Naziism. And it’s something I think our polarized world faces a lot today too. How do we keep from falling into that quagmire of hating our enemies when we view them as an evil force in the world? This is something my hero, Zivon, has to ask after the Bolsheviks take everything from him. And it’s something we, too, have to ask as political powers shift. What is our role as Christians? Is it to speak out against these earthly powers and authorities? Is it to be continually enraged by what they do…or is it to view them as God does–as individuals that He loves so much He gave His Son for each one?

My prayer is that as readers live through political revolution with Zivon and the impact of a terrible global pandemic with Lily (totally didn’t know how relevant THAT would be when I wrote this in the summer of 2019!), they learn as I did that the bigger the evils we face, the bigger our love must be. That’s the only way to ever combat such conflict.

Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award nominated author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. You can learn more about her and her stories at www.RoseannaMWhite.com.

Roseanna White is offering a print copy of A Portrait of Loyalty to one of my readers! (signed if US winner; unsigned from Book Depository if international winner. Void where prohibited by law or logistics.) This giveaway is subject to Reading Is My SuperPower’s giveaway policies which can be found here. Enter via the Rafflecopter form below.

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What about you? What makes you want to read the historical romance Christy Award finalist A Portrait of Loyalty by Roseanna M. White? Or, if you’ve read it already, what did you love about it?