About the Author, Elizabeth Millane
Betsy grew up along the shores of Lake Michigan, reading, swimming, sailing, singing, and skiing. She was educated at Boston College, earning a Bachelor of Art in English literature, and at the University of Lancaster, Lancaster, England, where she completed a Junior Year Abroad program. It was during that year that she travelled extensively on the continent, visiting her Dutch relatives several times and learning their tales of heroism and sacrifice which formed the basis for The Blades of Grass.
She resides in Needham, Massachusetts, where she markets houses. She has two children, one who lives in Chicago, the other in Hawaii. She loves making cross country trips in her trusty hybrid car, apple picking, gardening, biking, walking, baking, and reading. She is currently at work on two novels.
Sixty Blades of Grass
It all started when…
I was lured by the romance of doing something bold and brave, something no one else could do for the resistance. At first, the cell asked me only to fetch refreshments for our small meetings. I brought what I could buy with their meager funds; apples, bread, tea, beer filched from home. Once served, they let me stay, sitting on the floor, listening to them speak in passionate bursts about plans. In the dim light, I knew their voices more than their features. People came and went, bringing in documents, departing with others, no words of goodbye or farewell. No one used a name, and I didn’t offer mine. I sat and thought, soon, there will be a job for me.
And then, there was. We need intelligence on the transports. You, you are an artist. You paint! Put everything in code. Numbers, everything.
What if I am caught? I said. You’re an artist! Make something up! All they will see is a flower, or a sky. Lie!
“Sixty Blades of Grass is a darkly lyrical homage to bravery and love in occupied Holland during WW2, a story grounded by its roots in the author’s family saga. In a vigorous first person narrative and in diary pages, the young painter heroine and her best friend come up hard against the evil forces of destruction around them. Through her work for the Resistance, the painter comes to have dire suspicions of her collaborator father until they too are separated. An action filled plot keeps pages turning from Amsterdam and the Hague to the death camps. A fine addition to Holocaust and World War 2 literature.”
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Book signing at Wellesley Books. Wonderful audience, wonderful bookstore! Signing books is so very much fun!