Jan Lafountain Melnik

Telling Tales: on Merlin's Island Jan Lafountain Melnik

Publisher Marketing: When her happily-ever-after dissolves, a Boston teacher with a penchant for bad boys moves to her family's lakefront cottage in Maine, where she discovers a cache of WWII love letters from an unknown woman to her grandfather. She never suspects the letters could reveal the path to a deeper relationship. * * * * * At 31, Nicole relocates to her family's cottage in Maine where she is able to land a job at the island school. Moving on following the betrayal of her husband, she deals with the heartache of her mother's cancer diagnosis and a few relationship missteps. But she also connects with folks from her childhood summers as well as someone from her grandfather's past. Hidden among the letters he wrote home during the war are those of a different sort: Love letters from a woman not Nicole's grandmother. Mesmerized by a one-sided account of what clearly had been a passionate love, she works to uncover the mystery and unexpectedly discovers something more. Contemporary women's fiction, Telling Tales: On Merlin's Island is in the style of Jan Karon's Mitford series, but with elements of romantic erotica. Two parallel story lines portray a teacher's journey across a school year calendar juxtaposed against flashbacks to her grandfather's military service in Europe during the final year of World War II. Telling Tales: On Merlin's Island was a semi-finalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Contest, advancing from 10,000 entries to the top 100 in genre and earning positive Publishers Weekly feedback.