Book Your Lunch with Rose Senehi

Rose Senehi

Thurs., March 8th, 2012 from 12-2pm
@ The Lazy Goat, $25 per person
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South Carolina author Rose Senehi brings us the third “standalone” novel in her Blue Ridge moutain series, Render Unto the Valley (KIM Publishing, paperback, $15.95, on sale 3/1/12). The novel tells the story of Karen Godwell, a curator for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, who must make peace with her past when her family’s Blue Ridge farm is threatened.

Rose Senehi’s latest romantic thriller, Render Unto the Valley, is a contemporary novel cloaked in the rich history of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains, and tells of a woman’s struggle to bridge the divide between the staunchly independent mountain culture she comes from and the sophisticated world she has become a part of—all while concealing the ugly secret that drove her away.  

Karen Godwell reinvents herself at college and doesn’t look back till her clan’s historic farm is threatened. The gutsy curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum returns to the mountains only to come face to face with who she was and what she did.

Descendants of the early settlers still have a grip on the farmlands deep in the folds of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains, but the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Cousin Bruce, the town historian, sees life through the family’s colorful two-hundred-year past; Tom Gibbons, a local conservationist, keeps one eye on the mountains and the other on Karen; and Karen’s nine-year-old daughter, Hali, is in the throes of the mission her dying father sent her on.

Render Unto the Valley is the third “stand alone” novel in Senehi’s Blue Ridge series, and takes place in the mountain farming community of Fairview, North Carolina, just outside Asheville. Senehi, who is noted for weaving environmental issues into her historically accurate thrillers, has successfully imbued the characters in her story with the independent nature and indelible sense of place that the early settlers of this mountain valley passed on to the generations that followed them.

About the author:
Rose Senehi is originally from Michigan, but landed in Syracuse, New York, after attending Syracuse University. She worked as a reporter for several years before becoming the corporate marketing director of The Pyramid Companies for whom she opened shopping malls
throughout the Northeast. She drew from this highly charged environment to write her 2nd novel, WINDFALL.

The whole time she was racing from town to town opening malls, she lived on a hundred-acre farm outside the small village of Cazenovia, NY, where she raised her two children, Jessica and David. She tried to inject the unique and wonderful flavor of the people of this small farming community into the characters in SHADOWS IN THE GRASS, her first novel.

One cold, hard winter’s day in 1996, a headhunter called Rose. It was ten degrees in Upstate, NY, and she was overspent on her mall snow removal budget and it was only January. She glanced at the USA Today map and saw it was seventy degrees in Myrtle Beach and jumped at the offer to manage the Myrtle Beach Factory Stores. Her third novel, Pelican Watch, reflects her warm feelings for the South and the wonderful people she’s come to know in Pawleys Island and Murrells Inlet. She is a very active real estate agent specializing in oceanfront condominiums and homes, which is a profession that goes well with writing. She wakes every morning at four and writes until eight when she heads for the office.

Rose has owned a place in the mountains since 2004 and has centered my fourth, fifth and sixth
novels: IN THE SHADOWS OF CHIMNEY ROCK, THE WIND IN THE WOODS and RENDER UNTO THE VALLEY around Western North Carolina’s Hickory Nut Gorge and the Southern Blue Ridge
Mountains. They are the first in her Blue Ridge Series. She has tried to write with empathy about the universal desire to hold onto one’s land and heritage against the forces that are changing the places we love. It is her hope that this series will not only entertain people and create a fascinating mosaic of the history of  the area, but paint a broad picture of the pressures on the Southern Blue Ridge and those who are working to preserve it.