Jan Cox Speas (November 5, 1925 - October 31, 1971)
Jan Cox Speas was born November 5, 1925 in Raleigh, North Carolina. She attended the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina (women could not go to UNC-Chapel Hill until junior year) from 1942-46, where she studied creative writing under Hiram Hayden. UNC had a special association with Jan's family: her mother, Francis Howard Cox, who had studied as a high schooler at home in tiny Richlands, NC, was the first in the family to come to the college, taking the train in 1914 to Greensboro to study to be a teacher, and years later Jan’s daughter, Cindy, attended UNC-Chapel Hill in the first year freshmen women were allowed to enrol.Near the end of the war Jan met and married John Speas on his return from the European theatre. Their first child, Cindy, was born in 1948, right after John graduated from Colorado State University.
After several years of travelling, the Speas family settled back in Greensboro in 1954 to be near Jan’s mother, who suffered from chronic ill health. During that time Jan wrote multiple short stories for the widely read “slick” magazine market, including The Post, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s and others.
Cindy Speas recalls, “Mom learned to write from reading—and that's what we did as a family every night.” Jan's favourite authors included Daphne DuMaurier, Mary Stewart, Nevil Shute, Elswyth Thane, Inglis Fletcher, Helen MacInnis, Elisabeth Ogilvie, Elizabeth Goudge, Dorothy Sayer and Josephine Tey. “But the most fun Mom and I had,” Cindy confesses, “was with Georgette Heyer's Regency romances—we collected all of the original hardbacks.”
Following Jan Cox Speas death from a heart attack in 1971, Avon Publications brought out paperback editions of her romances. By 1978 there were more than a million copies of her books in print.
Jan Cos Speas's Books on Amazon: Jan Cox Speas
Source: http://www.susannakearsley.com/jan_cox_speas.html
Jan Cox Speas was born November 5, 1925 in Raleigh, North Carolina. She attended the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina (women could not go to UNC-Chapel Hill until junior year) from 1942-46, where she studied creative writing under Hiram Hayden. UNC had a special association with Jan's family: her mother, Francis Howard Cox, who had studied as a high schooler at home in tiny Richlands, NC, was the first in the family to come to the college, taking the train in 1914 to Greensboro to study to be a teacher, and years later Jan’s daughter, Cindy, attended UNC-Chapel Hill in the first year freshmen women were allowed to enrol.
This novel by Adam Fitzroy has written “UK” all over; in the setting, that is easy, but also in the mood and the feeling, bittersweet humor, comfortable romance, fire under the ashes sex, all bundled together in more than 500 pages, all of them perfectly timed in a slow paced rhythm.
This novel by Adam Fitzroy has written “UK” all over; in the setting, that is easy, but also in the mood and the feeling, bittersweet humor, comfortable romance, fire under the ashes sex, all bundled together in more than 500 pages, all of them perfectly timed in a slow paced rhythm.
To all account Calico by Dorien Grey can easily being classified as a Young Adult novel with a Coming of Age story. What sex, or better reference to sex, you will find in it is so light weighted and generic that for sure this is not an erotic romance but I will not arrive to say that it’s not a romance. If you are familiar with the western novels (a la Louis L'Amour style), you know that the love story in that novels, if existing, was not the main theme, and the fierce cowboy was mainly concentrated in reaching a target, whatever target it was; for this reason, the cowboy could be old, sometime even “grandfatherly”, taking care of the young kids in the plot like a substitute father or uncle. This is not the case of Calico, who is 27 years old; sure he is all the same stoic like those cowboys, and sure he takes care of 17 years old twin brother-and-sister Josh and Sarah, but he is not at all fatherly. First of all since, at 27 years old, he cannot be really the father of 17 years old boys and second since he more or less “silently” falls in love for Josh at first sight. And if you are thinking that he is taking advantage of an underage kid, first of all consider what I said above, no sex at all, and second it’s Josh that makes his moves on Calico, and Calico will be the perfect gentleman.
Upon finishing this novel, if someone is wondering like me why it was so short, well you can console yourself with that “first transmission” in the title, meaning that I think the author has more in storage for these “grown men” of his.