ONLY THE BEAUTIFUL by Susan Meissner - Spotlight & Giveaway

@SusanMeisser once again delivers her special brand of historical fiction with her heartbreaking and complicated novel #OnlyTheBeautiful (Berkley).

It's 1938 in California:

Sixteen-year-old, Roxanne has a secret that she's only shared with her mother and promises to keep secret.  Rosie sees colors when she hears words of music.  When her parents and brother are killed, a family she's known all her life takes her in. Soon bad goes to worse. Rosie gets pregnant and is put in a home for unwed women, where she experiences unthinkable horrors.

1947:

A nanny witnesses the results of Hitler's determination to create a pure race without any deformities or disabilities by so-called society's outcasts.  #OnlyTheBeautiful follows two women living in Europe and America during and after the war and how their lives become intertwined when affected by dark ideas and their repercussions.

#OnlyTheBeautiful is about many controversial issues including synthesia, sterilization, eugenics and resistance. Many unspeakable acts were taking place in Europe and it was awful to learn many were happening here in the United States. 

In Susan Meissner's new novel, ONLY THE BEAUTIFUL (Berkley), Meissner illuminates an abhorrent ideology championed by Adolf Hitler during WWII and how it manifested in the United States: the pursuit of hereditary “purity.” Society’s outcasts and those seen as “different” faced a terrifying battle against hatred. ONLY THE BEAUTIFUL follows two women living in America and Europe during and after the war, and how their lives become intertwined when they are affected by these dark ideas and their repercussions.

California, 1938: Sixteen-year-old Rosanne is not like other girls—she has synesthesia, which means that she can see colors when she hears sound. Rosanne has experienced this gift for as long as she can remember, and it makes her daily life more interesting. But she’s promised her mother that she will tell no one, for fear that others won’t understand. When Rosanne’s parents are killed in a car accident, she is sent to live with their employers, the owners of a vineyard. Her sadness becomes too much to bear, and Rosanne confides in the man who took her in, and they become close—to devahstating consequence. It’s not long before Rosanne ends up pregnant—and she is sent to a place where unspeakable things happen to her…

Austria, 1947: The second world war has ended, but Helen Calvert’s grief has yet to abate. As a nanny to a special needs child, she has witnessed firsthand the horrors wrought by Adolf Hitler—and she is ready to return home to the United States, where she can leave the memories of war behind her. But when Helen arrives back in California, she is shocked to learn about what happened to Rosanne, the vinedresser’s young daughter who she knew before the war—and how the tragedies she faced in Europe have reverberated back home….

Susan Meissner is a USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction with more than three-quarters of a million books in readers' hands and translations in eighteen languages. She is an author, speaker and writing workshop leader with a background in community journalism. 

Her novels include The Nature of Fragile Things, which earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly; The Last Year of the War, named to Real Simple magazine’s list of best books for 2019; As Bright as Heaven, which earned a starred review in Library Journal; Secrets of Charmed Life, a Goodreads finalist for Best Historical Fiction 2015; and A Fall of Marigolds, named to Booklist’s Top Ten Women’s Fiction titles for 2014.

She attended Point Loma Nazarene University in California and makes her home with her husband and yellow Lab in the Pacific Northwest.

https://susanMeissner.com