Dear Reader,

Today’s guest author, Roseanna M. White,  is a bestselling, award-winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. Having successfully launched two homeschool grads into the unsuspecting world, she now spends her time writing fiction, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.

Roseanna’s new release, ‘The Spy Keeper of Marseille’ is her second foray into WWII-fiction, focusing on a fictionalized version of the historical female head of France’s largest intelligence agency during the war.

You could win one of three copies of ‘The Spy Keeper of Marseille’ To enter the drawing, send an email to zoejethani@tyndale.com Please include your shipping address in case you’re a winner.

You can reach out to Roseanna via her website:

https://www.roseannamwhite.com/contact-me

Welcome to the book club Roseanna M. White…

I homeschooled both of my kids from kindergarten through graduation, and some of my favorite memories over those fifteen years were when the kids surprised me by taking their education in both hands and running with it. With my son, one of those moments came in grade school, when he was learning binary in math.

He came to me one day with my e-ink tablet in hand, a grin on his face, and told me he’d made a code for me to decipher. I took the tablet and stylus from him and quickly realized he was using binary—which did my educator’s heart proud. But when I decoded that first line, I had to frown. The result was nonsense.

Cue my eight-year-old laughing maniacally. And telling me that for this part of the code, I needed something else. With my son laughing the whole time, I took his codes through Roman numerals, back into binary, and through an alphanumeric code as well, until finally I had an English message. Which was, naturally, “Hi, Mama.”

As a homeschool mom, I was delighted with his cleverness. And as a novelist who seems to include espionage and intelligence gathering in my stories more often than not, I was also reminded of how what was a fun game for us in my living room was so much more serious for so many people throughout history, who relied on codes and ciphers to keep them safe when trying to get intelligence to allies across enemy lines.

One of my favorite heroes of intelligence is Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, head of France’s largest intelligence network in World War II, Alliance. She was a mother too, and one who knew the value of those safeties. But she was also the kind of mom who knew it was important to help her kids understand her work. She took her son on an intelligence-gathering trip once, using his enthusiasm for aircraft to gain an invitation onto a Nazi air base. Having my own cipher-loving, too-clever kiddo slipping me coded messages in the living room, I can imagine that little boy’s delight.

And I can feel for the mother trying to balance the desire to protect her kids with the need to fight for freedom. She was frequently in hiding, unable to contact her children for long stretches of time lest she brought danger to them. Meanwhile, I sit in the safety of my home, breaking codes for fun…and remember the stories of those who made a way for us all.

— Roseanna M. White

https://www.roseannamwhite.com/contact-me

Thanks for reading with me. It’s so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com