By Karen Tuft, Author of Lady Anna’s Favor

I’m the youngest of four children, and my only brother Gordon was the eldest. There were thirteen years between us, and my earliest memory of Gordon was of him as the “mean” babysitter, getting cross when I wouldn’t go get ready for bed after having already been told, oh, twelve or twenty times. But, really, how many sixteen-year-old brothers want to babysit, let alone repeatedly tell a stubborn three-year-old to mind? (And in all fairness, I should probably add that I hated going to bed, I was a champion temper tantrum thrower, and I could wrap myself around a hall closet door like a pro wrestler to avoid getting hauled off to my bedroom.)

At any rate, I was a toddler trying to figure out my world, and he was a high schooler, dating and doing homework and hanging out with friends and not all that interested in what his younger sisters were up to—undoubtedly typical of many teenage brothers.

When Gordon graduated from high school, I was five. I was six when he left on his two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and eight when he returned. I hardly knew him, and when he arrived home, he was very much an adult—and I was still very much a kid.

It was 1965, the Beach Boys were making way for the “those long-haired” Beatles, and the Vietnam War was new and highly unpopular. Hippies wanted to make love, not war, and protests occurred all over the country. A national draft was put in place, meaning all young men of a certain age were required to sign up to serve in the military. My parents were worried about Gordon being sent overseas to war—they themselves had lived through World War II. During that war, while my dad had been stationed stateside, he and my mother had experienced the deaths of too many friends and other family members as a result of that horrible war. So, with parental urging, Gordon signed up for the US Army Reserve, and, once again, left us for training camp in California. It was only for a few months and it was stateside, but that feeling of him being gone again so soon after returning from his mission stung in ways I didn’t entirely understand.

And then he was home again, and we prayed his unit wouldn’t be called up to go overseas. The real threat hung over our family. Thankfully, during his two years in the reserve, his unit was not called up to go to Vietnam, which was a blessing our family experienced that many other families did not.

Gordon was a fine pianist and during the times he was home when I was young, I’d listen to him perform music by Beethoven and Mendelssohn and others. They were special and motivating memories, as I’d begun taking piano lessons, too. And then a sort of miracle occurred—I began studying piano with a teacher who lived several miles away from our home, and my brother was assigned to be my weekly chauffeur, as Mom had never learned to drive and Dad was working long hours. It truly ended up being a way to connect with my big brother for the first time, and those weekly drives, that time spent together in the car and at the piano lessons, finally brought us close together as siblings in a way our age difference hadn’t allowed before. 

I didn’t lose my dad or my brother in war, but I knew what it felt like to not have my brother at home for long periods of time and missing his presence, and wondering at the stories my parents shared of family tragedies and deaths during the World War and what it must have felt like to lose a parent or a sibling. It was a difficult thing to ponder, having only my imagination to go by, but those stories, combined with my brother’s long absences, impacted me deeply—even as a child.

I know what it feels like to experience the loss of loved ones now. I’m not so young as I was back then. I know what it’s like to sit and hear a doctor gently tell us that my dad’s cancer is terminal, to lose my mom from a years’ long, malingering illness, and—last December—to lose my sweet brother. We celebrated his life the day before Christmas Eve, which only made the holidays more meaningful and poignant.

So when I asked my character, Lady Anna Clifton, to lose her father and her brother, after already having lost her mother—only to learn that her last sibling, Avery, serving in the military in France and fighting against Napoleon, had been reported missing and was presumed dead, I understood her agony and her denial at accepting his death as a given. I would have done anything to give my dad more time and prove the doctor wrong or know better how to ease my sweet mom in her passing from this world to the next. I would give anything for a chance to hold my brother’s talented, musical hands in mine one more time or hear him laugh at a bad joke.

And so, I gave Lady Anna what I could not have—I allowed her to experience her grief and rise in a heroic way to the challenge that mortality had presented to her, and then I rewarded her for her courage.

NEW! Lady Anna’s Favor: Lady Anna Clifton will stop at nothing to find her missing brother—even if it means working alongside the dashingly handsome but sometimes infuriating Mr. Jennings, who just might steal her heart.

Karen Tuft was born with a healthy dose of curiosity about pretty much everything, so as a child she taught herself to read and play the piano. She studied music composition and graduated in music theory, both of which came in surprisingly handy when she began writing fiction. She has written three contemporary romances and several Regency romances, including the popular Jennings series, as well as short stories and articles. Among her varied interests, she likes to figure out what makes people tick, wander through museums, and travel—whether it’s by car, plane, or paperback.