Critically acclaimed Newton County author Pam Hillman recently released her latest full-length novel and the first that is set in her home state.
“The Promise of Breeze Hill” was released earlier this month and is already getting rave reviews from critics. The story set in the late 18th Century in Natchez involves Irish immigrant Connor O’Shea who has made the choice to become an indentured servant in order to bring his four brothers to America.
He is sold to Isabella Bartholomew, the owner of Breeze Hill Plantation, who has taken control of her family’s estate after the sudden death of her brother and a mysterious fire that left her father injured.
After Connor comes to the plantation to work as a carpenter, the two develop feelings for each other, and Isabella finds herself torn between Connor and a wealthy neighbor.
Born and raised in the southwestern edge of Neshoba County on a farm in the Neville community, Hillman had always had a love for writing and for stories set in the 19th Century, especially the Old West.
After graduating from East Central Community College, Hillman settled with her husband on their farm on Hwy. 492 and starting to pursue writing at 30 years old.
Hillman joined American Christian Fiction Writers, an international writers group that focuses on Christian fiction that has around 2,700 members. With the help of the ACFW, Hillman continued to develop her craft and had her first book published in 2011 through Tyndale House, the publisher behind the blockbuster “Left Behind” series.
Since then, Tillman has been prolific, publishing three full-length novels and seven collections of short stories released by Barbour Publishing, which is based in Uhrichsville, Ohio.
“I wrote four of those in an eight-month period,” Hillman said about the short story collections. “It was a really good learning experience to know that I could write a 20,000-word story every two months and turn around and do it again. So basically, in a four-month period I had written four 20,000 word stories that would be the equivalent of writing one full-length novel. It’s also a good way to get your name out there to a lot of readers that you might not otherwise reach.”
Hillman’s previous two novels, “Claiming Mariah” and “Stealing Jake” were both set in the Old West, but she wanted to tell a story with a different setting in a different time period.
“I ended up setting it in the 1790s in the Natchez territory instead of in Williamsburg or Pennsylvania or Boston or somewhere like that,” Hillmans said. “Of course, Natchez is one of the oldest settlements in the Southeast. It was settled in 1704 by the French and there were a lot of cultures to work with, British, French, Spanish, African Americans and Native Americans. I tried to put as many as I could as characters in the book.
Hillman also wanted to play around with traditional gender roles usually found in romance novels.
“Most of the time your heroine, is the indentured servant, but I decided I was going to flip it on its head and have the guy be the indentured servant,” she said. “But I had to make him real macho and tough. He can’t be this wimpy guy, so I tried to make him strong and in charge of things even though he’s indentured.”
Hillman also said she had to do more research about the Natchez territory in the 1790s to make sure her story had historical accuracy.
“I had done so many Western-type stories that I can do a lot of those without too much research. But I had to do a lot more for this because this is outside of my sweet spot. The 1850s to 1890s had been where I had been setting all of these other books so this series has definitely been a little bit of a challenge.”
“The Promise of Breeze Hill” is the first of what will be a three-book series set in the Natchez Trace and featuring the O’Shea brothers. Hillman said she is currently working on the second book and it should be released around June 2018 and the third book should be released around March 2019.
Hillman is a four-time Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist with “Claiming Mariah” winning the Award for Best Inspirational. Her other awards include the Inspirational Readers Choice Award, International Digital Award, and the EPIC eBook Award.
