About the book:
Those of you who followed The Apple Creek Dreams series and the first two books of The Paradise Chronicles already know Jenny Hershberger. Many of you may not have realized this, but throughout both series I used a literary device where Jenny was the “author” of all six books, but because Jenny’s Amish church frowned upon adherents gaining notoriety in the secular world, she “gave” me the manuscripts to rewrite and publish under my name.
This of course was a total fiction, but to a large degree, the device worked. Many of my readers actually believed Jenny was areal person who wrote the stories. A friend of mine told her mother, who read Jenny’s Choice that I would be interested in knowing what she thought of the novel. “Why?” her mother asked. “He didn’t write it.”
By the time I finished The Amish Princess, Jenny had assumed a life of her own, and she became as real to readers as she is tome. So now, in The Mennonite Queen, Jenny “takes us back” to the Hershberger family’s early European roots. I surrounded the fictional characters of this tale with real people and places from the 1500s—people like Isabella Jagiellon, the Hungarian queen who issued the first religious tolerance edict.
In this fictional account, Isabella is the matriarch of the Hershberger family. Franz von Waldeck, the historical Bishop of Münster, Germany, and Jan Bockelson, the self-proclaimed king who led the Anabaptist rebels into a terrible defeat at Münster,also play a central part in The Mennonite Queen, but only a support to the story, which is simply the product of my imagination.
On the other hand, in Jenny’s world, the events may have happened as written… but you will have to ask Jenny—she is the only one who knows.
About the author:
Patrick E. Craig is a traditionally published/independent author. In 2013, Harvest House Publishers published his Apple Creek Dreams series, which included A Quilt For Jenna, The Road Home and Jenny’s Choice. His current series is The Paradise Chronicles and the first book, The Amish Heiress was published in 2015. It remained on the Amazon Top 100 best sellers list for seven months. The Amish Princess was released in 2017 and was followed by The Mennonite Queen in April 2019. In 2017 Harlequin purchased the print rights for The Amish Heiress for their Walmart Amish series. That book went into Walmart stores on April 2 2019. Just recently Patrick signed with Elk Lake Publishers to publish his kids’ mystery series, The Adventures of Punkin and Boo. Patrick and his wife, Judy, make their home in Idaho. Patrick is represented by the Steve Laube Agency.
Where can readers find Patrick online?
www.patrickecraig.com Webpage
https://www.facebook.com/PatrickECraig Facebook
https://twitter.com/PatrickECraig Twitter
Where to find the book: Amazon