The Christmas Clock and A Song For My Mother: A Kat Martin Duo
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Marly and Emily are both mothers who also work outside the home. What are your thoughts about working mothers? Did you hope to portray them in a specific way in the book?
Having been raised by a working mother, I understand the difficulties faced by mothers who work outside the home. Being out in the real world, often being confronted with even greater challenges than their male counterparts, tends to make working women strong and resilient, just as Marly has become and Emily is becoming.
You tackle some tough subject matter such as alcohol abuse, death, and cancer while also sharing some very sweet and tender moments of love and family. What is your objective in showing such diverse life experiences?
As I answer these questions, the clearer it becomes that one of the underlying themes of the story is that life makes us stronger. And I am fairly certain that almost all of us share very diverse and often difficult life experiences. Perhaps reading about other people’s experiences makes our own problems more bearable.
There are three grieving widows or widowers in the book: Reed, Winnie, and Emily. But each character copes with his or her own loss in a different way. What is the message in the book about dealing with painful memories and facing life's challenges?
I hope the message is that whatever helps us get through the tough times is all right. It doesn't matter how we deal with grief as long as it helps us get through it. That is what life is about. Living, dying, and just carrying on in the face of adversity.
Do you think A Song for My Mother would make a good Mother’s Day gift? Why?
I think it would be a very nice gift. The book says what children and parents often can’t find a way to say to each other. It talks about enduring love, the kind that bridges the difficult gaps that sometimes develop between family members over the years. Aside from that, it’s an uplifting, feel-good story. Which, with so many problems in the world today, is always the best kind, I think.
Winnie makes a decision early in the book to protect her daughter from her father’s secret past. Do you think all mothers should do whatever they can to protect their children from adversity, or is it better to confront hardships as they come our way?
It is probably better to confront hardships when they happen, but as Winnie believed about Marly, sometimes a child isn’t ready to deal with difficult truths until she is older and perhaps a little wiser.
If you could sum up the message in A Song for My Mother, what would it be?
Being a parent is a difficult task. There are no maps, no guidelines. Parents have to find their own way, do the best they can. The decisions they make are not always the right ones, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love their children. And it is that bond between parent and child that holds a family together.
A Look at: Tin Angel
In this rollicking western romance, written by New York Times bestselling author Kat Martin, with husband L. J. Martin, Jessica Taggart, fresh out of a Boston finishing school, comes West…to discover the "restaurant" she's inherited from her late father is actually a saloon and bawdy house! And to add to the insult, it's run by a handsome rogue, Jake Weston, who owns 49% of Taggart Enterprises.
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Kat Martin
About the Author
Kat Martin is the New York Times bestselling author of more than fifty-five romantic suspense, historical and contemporary romance novels. To date there are over 15 million copies of her books in print in seventeen countries, including Sweden, France, Russia, Spain, Japan, Argentina, Poland, and Greece. Kat and her husband, author L. J. Martin, live on their ranch outside Missoula, Montana, and spend winters at their beach house in California.