What is Amy Scheibe reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Amy Scheibe, author of A Fireproof Home for the Bride.

Her entry begins:

I try to juggle multiple books, typically one for pleasure, one for parenting, and one for research. Since I am currently digging into history for the next novel, I’m traveling back in time to Mein Kampf by you-know-who. The writing is dull as dirt, but in order for me to better understand what led up to the de-personification of an entire race/religion, I need to crack inside the creepy little mind of Mr. Hitler. I have just finished Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts, which is required reading about 1933 Nazi Germany, especially if you want to understand what is happening in the center of Iraq...[read on]

About A Fireproof Home for the Bride, from the publisher:

Emmaline Nelson and her sister Birdie grow up in the hard, cold rural Lutheran world of strict parents, strict milking times, and strict morals. Marriage is preordained, the groom practically predestined. Though it's 1958, southern Minnesota did not see changing roles for women on the horizon. Caught in a time bubble between a world war and the ferment of the 1960's, Emmy doesn't see that she has any say in her life, any choices at all. Only when Emmy's fiancé shows his true colors and forces himself on her does she find the courage to act--falling instead for a forbidden Catholic boy, a boy whose family seems warm and encouraging after the sere Nelson farm life. Not only moving to town and breaking free from her engagement but getting a job on the local newspaper begins to open Emmy's eyes. She discovers that the KKK is not only active in the Midwest but that her family is involved, and her sense of the firm rules she grew up under--and their effect--changes completely. Amy Scheibe's A FIREPROOF HOME FOR THE BRIDE has the charm of detail that will drop readers into its time and place: the home economics class lecture on cuts of meat, the group date to the diner, the small-town movie theater popcorn for a penny. It also has a love story--the wrong love giving way to the right--and most of all the pull of a great main character whose self-discovery sweeps the plot forward.

Visit Amy Scheibe's website and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: A Fireproof Home for the Bride.

Writers Read: Amy Scheibe.

--Marshal Zeringue