After a six year break from songwriting and recording, multi platinum country singer Sara Evans is back and enjoying the success of her latest album “Stronger” and #1 hit song by the same name, earning a 2011 CMT Music Award nomination for Female Video of the Year for her “Stronger” video performance.
Later this month, Sara will hit the road with Rascal Flatts in one of the biggest tours of the summer called “Flatts Fest.” The tour starts June 18th and is slated to run through September with Sara, Easton Corbin, Justin Moore and Rascal Flatts all sharing the bill.
A wife and mother of seven children, in a blended family with husband Jay Barker; Sara is a self-professed avid reader and a member of The American Red Cross 2011 National Celebrity Cabinet, donating her time and talent to support Red Cross initiatives, most recently the deadly southern tornadoes response effort.
With all of these accomplishments, how did she ever find time to add novelist to such an impressive list?
In 2009, Sara released her first novel “The Ties That Bind,” collaborating with Christian romance writer Rachel Hauck. The sequel and second novel in the Songbird trilogy called “Softly and Tenderly” was released last fall.
The books incorporate Christian scriptures and values to help the heroine navigate life’s unexpected imperfections and failures. The main themes are love, hope, destiny, forgiveness and redemption.
“Book two is…even more of an emotional rollercoaster,” Sara explains in a YouTube interview about the book.
If you are a long time Sara Evans fan then you know some of the personal challenges she has faced in her own life. In a cathartic manner, she uses these experiences as fodder when writing her novels. She explains, “The character Jade is very closely related to me. We have a lot of similarities; our personalities are very much alike…She’s a very brave girl who’s been through a lot in her life.”
“Softly and Tenderly” is a continuation of the romantic story of a strong, southern woman named Jade Fitzgerald Benson who finds love, marries into a wealthy family and struggles to overcome infertility, infidelity, a failing business and a dying mother.
Sara talks about the main character, “[Jade] has a hard time trusting, men in particular. She has a hard time believing that God really loves her and that she’s good enough.”
Sara assures readers that not all of the book’s plot events actually happened to her, but she is drawing from some of her own trials and those of people around her to create a fictional reality. She says, “Not every part of the book is totally based on me.”
Explaining her motivation for writing the books, Sara tells her fans, “at the end of reading this book, I think that all women will walk away feeling a little bit stronger and like they are not alone. Because so many women have the same kind[s] of issues that Jade has.”
You can help Sara chose the cover art for the third and final book in the Songbird Series, “Love Lifted Me,” due out winter 2012. Go online now and vote here http://saraevans.com/news/help-sara-choose-cover-her-next-book-love-lifted-me.
