Lee Passarella ~ guest post 2 ~ and his novel Cold Comfort, Ill Wind

TITLE: Cold Comfort, Ill Wind
RELEASE DATE: January 20, 2016
AUTHOR: Lee Passarella
KEYWORDS: YA fiction, historical fiction, Civil War fiction, military fiction, new adult, military, history
CATEGORIES: Historical Fiction/Young Adult/New Adult
PAGE COUNT: 196
ISBN: 978-1523323258 & 1523323256
IMPRINT: White Stag
BOOK PAGE: http://ravenswoodpublishing.com/bookpages/coldcomfortillwind.html

SYNOPSIS:
Two Virginia brothers, Townsend and John Tyler Philips, are separated by the great war that breaks the Union apart. While Towns serves as a musician in the 51st Virginia Infantry, John Tyler attends Virginia Military Institute, hoping one day to fight for his country and be reunited with his brave younger brother. Neither could guess they would meet again on a bloody battlefield of that war, or that John Tyler would be injured and again separated from his brother Towns.

Now, recovered from his wounds, John Tyler joins General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, defending Petersburg against overwhelming Union forces, while Towns marches with Confederate General Jubal Early to the gates of Washington, then, hounded by the Union Army, back to Virginia, where the Rebels meet a tough new adversary, Union General Philip Sheridan. Confederate victories are soon followed by defeat after defeat, and for young Townsend Philips, a deepening crisis of conscience and will.



ONE LINER: Two Virginia brothers, separated by war, were once reunited on a deadly battleground of that war. Now, separated again, they continue the fight, hoping for final reunion.

AUTHOR BIO:
Lee Passarella acts as senior literary editor for Atlanta Review magazine and served as editor-in-chief of Coreopsis Books, a poetry-book publisher. He also writes classical music reviews for Audiophile Audition and acts as associate editor for Kentucky Review.

Passarella’s poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, Louisville Review, The Formalist, Antietam Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Literary Review, Edge City Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Snake Nation Review, Umbrella, Slant, Cortland Review, and many other periodicals and online journals.

Swallowed up in Victory, Passarella’s long narrative poem based on the American Civil War, was published by White Mane Books in 2002. It has been praised by poet Andrew Hudgins as a work that is “compelling and engrossing as a novel.” While researching the history behind Swallowed up in Victory, Passarella decided that Civil War reenacting would give him a special insight into the conflict. As a re-enactor, he’s worn both the blue and the gray, as a private in the 125th Ohio Infantry and 42nd Georgia Infantry Regiments.

EMAIL: leepassarella@comcast.net
AUTHOR LINKS:
http://leepassarella.net/
https://www.facebook.com/lee.passarella
https://www.facebook.com/storminthevalley/

Cold Comfort, Ill Wind: A Sequel with a Past

The American Civil War has been an on-again, off-again (mostly on-again!) interest of mine since I was around the age of, Townsend Philips, one of the two heroes of my tale. Fifty years ago, the U.S. celebrated the Civil War centennial, and there was a flood of newspaper and magazine articles as well as books about the war, plus the first wave of Civil War reenactments, one of which took place on the athletic field at my high school.

Now, my high school was built a long time after the war, so it couldn’t have been the scene of any Civil War battle or even skirmish. But in those days reenactments took place just about anywhere crowds were sure to form, including stadiums big and small—in other words, far away from the original battle sites. And reenactors were just as casual about the equipment and attire they brought to their ersatz battlegrounds. Blue jeans and work boots were often standard issue, and the weaponry included shotguns and .22 rifles (unloaded, of course).

Since then, Civil War reenacting has grown up; the modern-day reenactor can buy period-authentic uniforms, accoutrements, and rifle muskets that look just like they were made back in the 1860s. I know this because I’ve been reenacting for almost twenty years now. I belong to a Confederate unit, Company A of the 42^nd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment. We also “galvanize,” which means we sometimes put on federal blue and fight as Company B of the 125^th Ohio. And when we reenact battles such as Chickamauga, Shiloh, or Atlanta, we do so in terrain near the original battlegrounds. Today, authenticity is the name of the reenactment game.

My interest in the Civil War was one of my motivations for reenacting, but I also wanted to do some first-hand research for a book I was writing titled Swallowed Up in Victory, a fictionalized account of the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in the last two years of the war. My inspiration for that book went all the way back to my first encounter with the Civil War in eighth grade, when my class learned about the ingenious plan to tunnel under and blow a hole in the Confederate lines that encircled Petersburg. The tunneling and blowing up went according to plan, but the Union attack that followed was a fiasco. General Ulysses S. Grant called it “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war. . . .” However, it made for a great story, and I tried to tell it from the angle of those on both sides who fought what came to be called the Battle of the Crater.

In my first Civil War novel, Storm in the Valley, I went back to the beginning, to the first year of the war, 1861, and told the story of two Virginia brothers separated by the war. The older of my two brothers, John Tyler Philips, headed off to Virginia Military Institute, where he hoped to learn soldiering, which runs in his family’s blood. John Tyler’s younger brother, Townsend Philips, too young to fight but fired up to serve his country, joined the 51st Virginia Infantry Regiment as a drummer boy. Despite their separation, the brothers constantly hoped for reunion; they could hardly imagine they would be reunited on a bloody battlefield of the war or that Towns would be called on to save his older brother.

The action continues in Cold Comfort, Ill Wind, as does the brothers’ separation. After he recovers, John Tyler joins General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Petersburg, experiencing the horrors of the Battle of the Crater. Meantime, Towns marches with a tough old Confederate general named Jubal Early all the way to the gates of Washington, D.C., the high point of Confederate military actions in the summer of 1864. But soon, General Early meets a determined new adversary, General Philip Sheridan, and Confederate victory turns into one defeat after another. At the end of my story, Townsend Philips is left to wonder if the Confederate cause is evaporating before his very eyes.

Of course, the story doesn’t end here, either at Petersburg, where John Tyler fights General Grant, or in western Virginia, where Townsend Philips sees General Early’s little army swept away at the Battle of Fishers Hill. The Confederacy would live on, and continue to fight for its life. It is my hope that my tale of these two Virginia brothers might stimulate a reader’s continuing interest in the War Between the States, including a curiosity about how the story of that war finally played out. Maybe someday I’ll get around to following the story right up to the end!

Buy Links:
AMAZON US: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AP1APBM

AMAZON UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01AP1APBM

BARNES & NOBLE: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cold-comfort-ill-wind-lee-passarella/1123271934;jsessionid=A49CECBA721A760B295C642DDD471B15.prodny_store01-atgap07?ean=2940152774009

KOBO: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/cold-comfort-ill-wind

GOOGLE PLAY: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Lee_Passarella_Cold_Wind_Ill_Comfort?id=5ytkCwAAQBAJ&hl=en

iBOOKS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1076069791

CREATESPACE: https://www.createspace.com/5988321

PAPERBACK: http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Comfort-Ill-Wind-Passarella/dp/1523323256/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453099242&sr=8-1&keywords=Lee+Passarella

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