Everyone knows that long before trends are established enough to be noticed,
someone always goes first.
Four sisters—variations on Eleanor Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, Jane Addams, and Oscar Wilde—they're teachers, sponsors, fairy godmothers, referees, nannies, midwives, coaches, besties, double-darers, and the aunties every single one of us wished we'd always had. The Subversive Lovelies seed change, passion, healing, and power wherever they go. The Subversive Lovelies are historical fiction with a speculative twist.
Jezebel Rising—
someone always goes first
Four sisters. Four buildings. Four visions of what women can—and need—to be, do, and have.
Jezebel is the youngest of the Bailey sisters. Yes, that Bailey of Barnum &— fame. Heiresses to multimillions of their father's nouveau riche wealth, the four have been raised in direct antithesis to the fainting flowers of womanhood to be found in the notoriously fickle, corrupt Gilded Age Society in which they live.
These women think for themselves, dream big, speak up, and take no prisoners. Four towering yellow-brick buildings on Chelsea's 23rd Street across from turn-of-the-century Manhattan's Millionaire's Row inspire Jezebel to propose that the four go eyes-wide-open into the business of vice to mask their real purposes, their true callings, their nefarious agendas, their mystical imaginings—to answer and fulfill the four real greatest needs of women in their generation.
Their journey takes them deep into The Tenderloin, that vice-iest of downtown neighborhoods. There they navigate the machinations of Tammany Hall, the dreaded slums of Five Points, the gangsters of the Lower West Side, the relentless tide of ongoing, daily despair in their charges, and a greater emergency than they've ever faced in their lives as they pull together to dream, create, inspire, and train their team to profit from who they're really meant to be.
Will Jezebel's faith in herself, her sisters, and their visions be justified or will all four and their team be vanquished by the social forces ranged against them because of who they are?
