With Launch Day being only a week away now, I wanted to give an inside look at how I came to write this novel. It is the story of my grandmother, a grandmother I never knew, but whose life shaped mine. One thing I did know with absolute certainty is that she was greatly beloved by her four children. In my search to discover her, I uncovered my own history, one shaped by faith and family.

Over the years, we heard stories about our relatives—some likely true, others mere rumors. These tales sparked my curiosity to dig deeper, not just into my grandmother’s life, but into the world of those who came before us. I spent hours searching digitized images of birth, marriage, and death records, uncovering not only the ages of my grandparents and great-grandparents but also where they lived and their occupations.

Immigration documents showed me their journey to America and that they did not all arrive at the same time. I imagined what that must have been like, to have half your family across the ocean for years before being reunited.

NYC’s online vital records offered further revelations. There I discovered that nearly all of the women in my family had more children than we knew about, children who died in infancy. Sharing their pain, it didn’t take any imagination to know how they felt about those losses.

All these discoveries became the heart of my novel. I gathered up all the facts I knew and all the stories we were told as children, weaving them all together to create Emerging From Etna’s Shadow. It is a story about how faith and family endure across generations.