June 28, 2007 issue
Regional Author Marian Coe Wins National Award
Marian Coe was honored at the Independent Publisher’s Awards in June with an IPPY, a bronze medal for historical fiction, for her novel, Rachel’s Story. Coe is a longtime resident of Banner Elk, author of eight books and recipient of a number of awards.
Rachel’s Story: A Southern Girl in Pre-Civil War Boston was inspired by Coe’s research on the works of the Transcendentalists authors of the mid-1800s. Her heroine vividly portrays the awe Coe felt in the presence of the works of these great thinkers. Rachel grew up in a plantation cabin in the Carolinas. Her mother’s death, when she is fifteen, thrusts her into an unfamiliar world, forced to adjust to the life of a Boston family her mother fled years ago. Rachel's search for understanding of the world, both inside and outside herself, and for acceptance of the gifts her Cherokee grandmother prophesied for her, propels her into the political and intellectual vortex of the age. Her guides include Elizabeth Peabody, Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Coe says of her work, "This is a novel, an imagined adventure, not a scholarly work. I hope to introduce the characters as living human beings that the reader can embrace and enjoy, with glimpses into in this pivotal time and place and into the lives of these people who shaped modern American thought.”
Rachel’s Story is another in a series of award-winning novels that evoke a special sense of place. Once Upon a Different Time, fiction award winner from the North Carolina Society of Historians, brings romance to the horseback adventure recounted by Charles Dudley Warner’s 1884 series in Atlantic Monthly. Key to a Cottage takes Coe’s heroine from the deep South to California and back in a new age search for meaning. Eve’s Mountain and Legacy both involve murder mysteries, one set on the Florida Gulf Coast, the other in the N.C. Mountains. And Marvelous Secrets collects a rich variety of Coe’s short stories, characterized by Publishers Weekly: "In these stories fate and choice enjoy a serendipitous synergy.”
Coe’s latest book, Between Us, an illustrated collection of poems and vignettes for women, is a departure from the straightforward fiction format of her novels. In the author’s note for Rachel’s Story, Coe tells of her battle with cancer and how the focus of writing that book helped her cope with its challenges. Between Us broadens that focus to the challenges, earned wisdom and victories of any woman’s life.
Coe’s books are available from Ingalls Publishing Group in bookstores and online retailers.
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