by Kathryn Shay
Kathy Shay
A PRICE WORTH PAYING, originally titled THE FATHER FACTOR is close to my heart. It my first published work, and Harlequin printed one million copies, and translated it into many languages. This version has been revised and updated so it’s better written than the original book.
The publication of this book combined my two loves, teaching and writing. I was a high school English teacher for many years and, like Amanda, the heroine of my story, I’ve worked with many suicidal teenagers. (Once a student showed up at my home at midnight because he was contemplating suicide.) I also shared Amanda's dedication to the profession and to my students. Education was a vocation for me and I spent decades helping to form young minds.
Nick is very special to me, too, because, like him, I grew up in an Italian family in upstate New York. Like Nick, I also had supportive friends and sisters who helped me cope with life's ups and downs. His flaws are understandable, given what he’s endured. Yet his love for his kids helps him overcome his determination to make it in the legal world and be the man his Italian background taught him to be.
The two children in the book are the same age as my own were when I wrote the book. Though their lives and attitudes are different, their general psyches mirror those of the kids in the story. My son supplied many of the corny puns in the novel, and my daughter, along with my students, has given me a deep understanding of teenage angst.
I've also been married for decades and have always been a believer in true love. I think A PRICE WORTH PAYING reveals both the absolute joy of caring about someone, and the difficulty of forging a good relationship. But with perseverance and caring two people in love can bear any burden.
I like strong heroines who can live without a man, but prefer not to. My idea of a hero is someone who struggles with his own needs, but can put them aside to pull through for the woman he loves. I dislike it when the characters in a novel don't tell each other what they really think and feel. Readers and reviewers have commented that my characters are honest, or try to be, and the conflicts arising between them seem like they could happen to anyone. Though I'm a sucker for a happy ending, I believe it's important to show that the problems between men and women are never easily resolved.
I hope you loved Amanda, Nick, Heather and Jason as much as I do, and can relate to their hopes, struggles and search for true happiness.
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Visit or Contact Kathryn at www.kathrynshay.com www.facebook.com/kathrynshay www.twitter.com/KShayAuthor http://pinterest.com/kathrynshay/
If you liked this book, you might want to post a review of it at Smashwords.
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To browse Kathryn’s impressive list of titles go to http://www.kathrynshay.com/books/.
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About Kathryn Shay
A NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author, Kathryn Shay has been a lifelong writer and teacher. She has written dozens of self-published original romance titles, print books with the Berkley Publishing Group and Harlequin Enterprises and mainstream women’s fiction with Bold Strokes Books. She has won five RT Book Reviews awards, four Golden Quills, four Holt Medallions, the Bookseller’s Best Award, Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year and several “Starred Reviews.” Her novels have been serialized in COSMOPOLITAN magazine and featured in USA TODAY, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL and PEOPLE magazine. There are over five million copies of her books in print, along with hundreds of thousands downloaded online. Reviewers have call her work “emotional and heart-wrenching.”