PHOTO PROVIDED BY JAMES V BROWN LIBRARY

Although there was some question if bestselling author Kristin Harmel would be able to join the James V. Brown Library’s Author Spotlight virtually from Florida due to Hurricane Milton, everything came together to give those in attendance a glimpse into Harmel’s inspirations for her historical novels.

‘We were hit by Hurricane Milton last night, which was quite scary,” Harmel shared.

“Even by the time it had hit Orlando, the winds were still about 100 miles an hour.

Our neighbor across the street, their 40-year-old oak tree, was just completely uprooted and flung into another neighbor’s house. But our house is fine, and as you can see, we have power and the internet,” she added.

Harmel’s appearance at the gala was the first time that an author was featured virtually rather than in person as in past years. The increased costs of bringing guest authors to the area was cited as the main reason for the change. By not having to pay as much for the featured speaker, the library was able to realize more from the fundraiser, their largest annually.

In a question and answer format with Dana Brigandi, the library’s development, marketing and public relations director, Harmel, who has written 15 books, shared why she has chosen World War II as the setting for many of her novels.

“Both of my grandfathers did fight in World War II, or did serve in World War II. So I have a little bit of connection through that. And my dad’s side of the family is Jewish and had family in France and in Eastern Europe, most of whom, as far as his recollections go, did get out before World War II. So I don’t have a connection to people who were Holocaust survivors, but I have a connection to people who were very tied to that part of the world and felt very involved in what happened there. And again, like I mentioned, my two grandfathers, who both served in World War II,” Harmel said.

“But the reason I write about World War II, it kind of came about in an interesting way. I started my career writing what we were calling at the time, ‘Chick Lit’, which were kind of in the vein of Sex in the City, Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Devil Wears Prada-those kind of good books, which were very popular 20 years ago when I started my career. Several years after I started my career, I had been living in Paris for a little while, and I had been stunned while living there to realize how much Holocaust history had taken place in Paris that I never knew about, that I never read about, but I still really didn’t understand how much had happened there. And the more I looked into it, the more interested in that history I became,” she said.

She shared that she had first read “The Diary of Anne Frank” in her pre-teens and been obsessed with the biography of a young Jewish girl which took place during World War II in Nazi-occupied Holland.

“I think it’s a book that touched many of us generation after generation. But it wasn’t until I lived in Paris that I came across the story of the Grand Mosque of Paris, which was the Muslim center of Paris, which actually saved more than 1,000 Jewish lives during World War II with the assistance of a Christian organization,” Harmel said.

“That was what led me away in my first World War II book, which was ‘The Sweetness of Forgetting.’ I wrote it in 2010 and it came out in 2012. It was that idea of these three religious groups that were often at odds, coming together at this very specific moment in time, because the things that united them as human beings were more important than the things that divided them. And I thought that lesson felt so important and so meaningful,” she said.

She said she had intended to write that one book about the war and then go back to writing

contemporary fiction as she had done before. The result was “The Life Intended” which was a contemporary novel.

“The whole time I was writing that novel, I was thinking to myself, oh, my goodness, I miss the research. I miss writing about World War II. I miss writing about these people who found themselves in extraordinarily difficult circumstances and found a way to be the light in the darkness. And so the book after that, I returned to World War II…and I haven’t stopped. It is something that I find such deep meaning and such deep inspiration. You know I think there’s a feeling now that, okay, we’ve all been reading about World War II for a decade-you know, there are so many books out there. Why should we keep reading about World War II? I think A, it’s because there are still so many real life stories that we don’t know, that haven’t been told, that haven’t been explored. And two, because that time period still has such deeply meaningful lessons for us, I don’t think we’ve learned everything we need to learn from that time period that is 80 years ago, but still feels so recent and so relevant,” she said.

Harmel’s last novel, “The Paris Daughter,” was published in 2023 and she revealed that her latest novel which will be out in June is called “The Stolen Light of Colette Marceau.”

She also discussed the possibility of one of her novels, “The Life Intended,” being adapted for a television series.

As a breast cancer survivor, Harmel urged all of the women in the audience to keep up-to-date with their mammograms.

“I was only 43 when I was diagnosed,” Harmel shared.

“I didn’t have any warning signs. I didn’t have any relevant family history. I didn’t have any reason to think that I would have breast cancer…I went in for my standard mammogram and they saw something suspicious and that’s how I was diagnosed,” she said.

Having caught it while it was still Stage One underscores the importance of going for mammograms, Harmel said.

“If you are overdue for a mammogram,” she said, “please call your doctor tomorrow to get one scheduled to truly save your life.”