Selfies of Success presents Author Janet Oakley with her book "Timber Rose."

Selfies of Success for Authors is delighted to present Janet Oakley with her book "Timber Rose"

                                                                            

BIOGRAPHY

Janet Oakley grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, and steadily worked her way west after college in Kalamazoo, Mich. After meeting her husband in Honolulu, she moved to Bellingham, WA where they raised three sons. After his sudden death, her love of writing took hold not only as a passion, but also as a release.

She has been published in various magazines, anthologies, and other media including the Cup of Comfort series and Historylink.org, a “cyperpedia of Washington State history.”  She writes social studies curricula for schools and historical organizations and demonstrates 19^th century folkways. Her historical novels, The Tree Soldier set in 1930s Pacific NW and The Jossing Affair set in WW II Norway were Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest finalists. A memoir essay won top prize at Surrey International Writers.

She was project coordinator for a History Channel grant. She led high school students through 1850 territorial court case files and taught how to take research and create essays for a professional historical

About the book

1907. Women climbing mountains in skirts. Loggers fighting for the eight hour day. The forests and mountains of the North Cascades are alive with  progress, but not everyone is on board.

Caroline Symington comes from a prominent family in Portland, Oregon. Much to her family’s dismay, she’s more interested in hiking outdoors and exploring the freedoms of a 1907’s New Woman than fancy parties and money. She plans to marry on her own terms, not her parents. When she falls in love with Bob Alford, an enterprising working-class man who loves the outdoors as much as she, little does she know how sorely her theories will be tested. Betrayed by her jealous sister, Caroline elopes, a decision that causes her father to disown her.

The young couple moves to a rugged village in the North Cascade Mountains where Caroline begins a new life as the wife of a forest ranger. Though she loves her life in the mountains as a wife and mother, her isolation and the loss of her family is a challenge. As she searches for meaning among nature, she’s ushered along by a group of like-minded women and a mysterious, mountain man with a tragic past.

Eventually, her relationship with her mother and sister improves and things seem to be taking a turn for the better. That relationship is tested again when her uncle and her sister's ruthless ex-husband muscle their way into the national forest, threatening the nature she loves, and more importantly, the man she loves. Though Caroline desires to reconcile with her family, she knows she must take a stand. 

TIMBER ROSE is about gilded society, thugs and big timber meeting the newly formed Forest Service, mountaineering clubs and a young woman's desire to make her own way in a changing world.

TIMBER ROSE is the prequel to the award-winning TREE SOLDIER.

Most dangerous animal in the Jungle  A failed writer.

Book REVIEW  

J.L. Oakley’s Timber Rose is set in the earliest years of the 20th century and follows the life and adventures of Caroline Symington, the daughter of a prominent family in Portland, Oregon. The year is 1907, and Caroline is unapologetically unconventional, preferring tramping and hiking in the wilderness to her family’s ideas of more ‘proper’ pursuits for a well-born young lady. Both her fondness for the outdoors and her complicated family relationships entwine with her adult life: she elopes with Bob Alford, a forest ranger in the North Cascade Mountains, and her malevolent uncle eventually darkens her life again, trying to make inroads into the national forest that has become her home.

Oakley does a skillful and confident job of weaving a good deal of historical material into her story of married life, from mountain-climbing to the women’s suffrage movement to the early days of ecological conservation. All of it is presented in an appealingly earthy, unpretentious prose style laced with wry humor and some memorable insights into human nature. Timber Rose is at times an openly sentimental tale, and it’s portrayal of Caroline’s slow awakening to love and happiness is genuinely memorable.

Highly recommended.

 TIMBER ROSE
http://www.amazon.com/Timber-Rose-JL-Oakley/dp/149370981X

TREE SOLDIER
http://www.amazon.com/Tree-Soldier-J-L-Oakley/dp/1453896473/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
ABNA 2014 Quarter Finalist; Chanticleer Grand Prize winner 2013; 2012 EPIC ebook Award winner
Blog: http://historyweaver.wordpress.com