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Award-winning author Victoria Saccenti picked up pencil and paper the moment her childhood book heroes started conversing with her. Sounds a little crazy, but there’s no rhyme or reason for inspiration. Back then, she wrote one-act plays and short fairy tales for simple amusement. Today—many…many moons later—her playful stories have grown into family sagas and retro and contemporary romances with an edge. An avid people watcher, she explores in her novels the twists and turns of human interaction, the many facets of love, and all possible happy endings.
Victoria lived overseas and traveled the world for thirty years, and she brings that experience and sense of adventure to her stories. She enjoys taking her reader on a private journey from America to Europe to Southeast Asia and back around.
Central Florida is home. She splits her busy schedule between family and her active muse at Essence Publishing. But if she could convince her husband to sell their home, she would pack up her computer and move to Scotland, a land she adores.
Reviewed by Grant Leishman for Readers' Favorite
When Richard Winters points his Harley away from New York and heads south, looking for peace and a release from the memories of a devastating love affair, he wants nothing more than solitude and an opportunity to find himself again. The small town of Summitville in North Carolina where nobody knows him seems a great place to start again. What he doesn’t count on, though, is meeting the beautiful and desirable young Creole woman by the name of Noémie, whose desirability he must fight if he truly is to fulfill his promise to himself of no romantic entanglements. Set in the mid-sixties, against the background of the Civil Rights Movement, Noémie’s Journey by Victoria Saccenti explores the reality of life for a beautiful coloured woman in the South. Laws may have changed, but attitudes will take generations to change. Richard, a Yankee from up north, has no perception of what an interracial relationship will entail in North Carolina in the sixties, but Noémie knows well the ingrained racism of her fellow residents that she deals with every single day of her life.
Noémie’s Journey serves to remind us just how far we have come in the forty years in race relations, but equally it also makes us examine our feelings toward people who are different to us, today a touchstone for American society as much now as it ever has been. Author Victoria Saccenti does a superb job of highlighting the institutional and deep racism that was just below the surface of civil society, especially in the South, in those turbulent years of the mid to late sixties. At its heart this book is a love story and a beautiful one at that. I particularly loved the author’s ability to convey the depth of love and the power of their passion in her words without ever having to resort to crudity or erotica. As a reader, I felt the build-up of sexual tension and reveled in the “when will they”, just as much as the participants. This is a real fillip to the author and it is what makes this book so very readable and one of the best of its genre. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can highly recommend it to all readers who like a true romance, but also enjoy a bit of action and thoughtful social comment.
