Join us on Wednesday, October 9th at 6PM to meet Diane McPhail, bestselling author of the The Seamstress of New Orleans, with her newest book, Follow the Stars Home.
Follow the Stars Home
In 1811, as the Great Comet blazed overhead, a young mom most people have never heard of braved treacherous waters, violent earthquakes, societal strictures, and hostile attacks to chart the course for westward expansion and redefine a newly formed America in incalculable ways. She would do much of it while 8 months pregnant and all with a toddler in tow.
It’s a journey that most deem an insane impossibility. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol—fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, Lydia is fiercely independent despite her youth. She’s also accustomed to defying convention. Against her father’s wishes, she married his much older business colleague, inventor Nicholas Roosevelt—builder of the New Orleans—and spent her honeymoon on a primitive flatboat. But the stakes for this trip are infinitely higher.
If Nicholas’s untried steamboat reaches New Orleans, it will serve as a profitable packet ship between that city and Natchez, proving the power of steam as it travels up and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Success in this venture would revolutionize travel and trade, open the west to expansion, and secure the Roosevelts’ future. Lydia had used her own architectural training to help design the steamship’s interior and wouldn’t dream of missing its momentous maiden voyage. She believes her family should be together for this journey, that she is ready for all the dangers ahead – growing unrest among native people, disease or injury, and the turbulent Falls of the Ohio.
But there are other challenges in store, impossible to predict as Lydia boards that fall day. Challenges which—if survived—will haunt and transform her, as surely as the journey will alter the course of a nation . . .
Diane McPhail
Diane C. McPhail is an artist, minister, and acclaimed author of Follow the Stars Home, The Abolitionist’s Daughter, and The Seamstress of New Orleans, which was a finalist for the Thomas Wolf Fiction Award and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award. A graduate of Ole Miss, Duke Writers, University of Iowa Distance, and the Yale Writers' Conference, she is a member of NC Writers Network and the Historical Novel Society. She was born in Jackson, MS, raised on the Mississippi Delta only miles from the river, and now lives in Highlands, North Carolina with her husband and dog.
“From the captivating first line, The Seamstress of New Orleans transports the reader to the mystery and sultry magic of New Orleans. With McPhail’s acclaimed and atmospheric prose, The Seamstress of New Orleans is a tale of well-guarded secrets, societal bonds that must be broken, and women’s powerful resilience. A powerful and fascinating story.”