Blue Eyed Stranger virtual tour | Spotlight, Excerpt & COMMENT Giveaway {Riptide Publishing}

Billy Wright has a problem: he’s only visible when he’s wearing a mask. That’s fine when he’s performing at country fairs with the rest of his morris dancing troupe. But when he takes the paint off, his life is lonely and empty, and he struggles with crippling depression.

Martin Deng stands out from the crowd. After all, there aren’t that many black Vikings on the living history circuit. But as the founder of a fledgling historical re-enactment society, he’s lonely and harried. His boss doesn’t like his weekend activities, his warriors seem to expect him to run everything single-handedly, and it’s stressful enough being one minority without telling the hard men of his group he’s also gay.

When Billy’s and Martin’s societies are double-booked at a packed county show, they know at once they are kindred spirits, united by a deep feeling of connectedness to their history and culture. But they’re also both hiding in their different ways, and they need each other to be brave enough to take their masks off and still be seen.

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An Excerpt from Blue Eyed Stranger...

“I am Hasheput! Tremble before my mighty sword!”

Martin Deng detached himself from the shelter of the school’s back porch to watch tiny Trisha Nkembe flourishing her badminton racket like a legendary weapon of yore. She had an army of five followers, their scowly-faced seriousness a little belied by the plastic bobbles in their hair. They were facing off the dastardly Ammonites, led by Oscar Peterson in a bucket helmet liberated from the gym equipment storage room.

Martin smiled and walked into the standoff, where he was eyed with resentment and trepidation, and one cry of “I never did nothing!” from Natalie Hoon in the back.

“We don’t mean no harm,” Trisha got out, preempting his teacherly wrath. “We ain’t going to have a real battle. It’s a peace talk, right? Because they know already that Queen Hasheput is gonna smash their heads in if they try anything.”

The combination of defiance and enthusiasm warmed his heart. “Oh, no,” he said, before he could spoil their playtime entirely. “That’s fine. It’s just that her name is Hatshepsut, which is a little harder to say but worth it, don’t you think? And it’s not a sword; it’s a mace.”

“What’s a mace, sir?”

“It’s like a big club.” He gestured. “Like a baseball bat, but made of stone. You really would be able to smash people’s heads in with it.”

“Whoa, cool!”

“Just—” he backed off with a hand gesture that gave the breezy May lunchtime back to them “—checking your historical accuracy. Might as well get it right, right? Carry on, then.”

A real punch-up across the other side of the playground caught his eye, making him turn and stride away to break it up, but he did it with an internal smile. It was great to see the kids responding to history with such enthusiasm. Great to see the way they bloomed when they realized that the world was full of heroes just like them.

He relived the memory of Trisha’s head coming up, her eyes widening, as he told them about the Nubians in Egypt. When he first took over the class, she had been one of those students who laid their heads on their arms, draped over their desks like the dead.

He knew how she felt. The teaching of history in UK schools could so easily be an all-white thing. Not a deliberate glorification of the Anglo-Saxon race, nothing as egregious as that, but simply the underlying assumption that all the important things in world history had been done by white people, whether those people were British or Roman.

Trisha’s astonishment when he began to put up images that proved there had been people of colour in Britain since Roman times, and that people of colour had had a long and glorious history in the world, had been echoed all over the class. Children who’d picked up the modern myth that all black people had once been slaves, and who therefore had rejected history as something they didn’t want to know about, suddenly began to see themselves as kings and prophets and world leaders.

It was Martin’s magic. Once he’d seen the transformation in his black kids, he’d hunted down little-known facts for the children of other ethnicities, and for the girls. Through warrior queens, pioneer aviators, the Night Witches of the Second World War, and the pirate empire of Ching Shih, he had taught his girls that they too could be glorious. Now they came into his class prepared to be amazed and inspired. They came with their heads up and their little faces bright, reassured of their own noble heritage and potential.

And apparently it spilled out onto the playground too.

Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines. Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary fiction.

Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing) Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel,Captain’s Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay romance, Beecroft has appeared in theCharleston City Paper, LA Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association of the UK and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights historical gay fiction.

Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.

She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.

Author links: Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads 

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