JOANNE MARKEY – ANOINTED TO SERVE

“Persuade Me” by Joanne Markey is the poignant story of a second chance for two heartbroken people who had a horrible misunderstanding seven years ago. Anne Elliot of Kellynch Station quietly mourned the loss of her first love, Fred Wentworth, until her sister offers the perfect escape: Uppercross. This move offers new friends, responsibilities, possibilities and a chance to escape her domineering father. It looks like the sky is the limit. It is certainly the perfect place for helicopter pilot Fred Wentworth to spend his days flying to his heart’s content. After the devastating breakup with Anne, he has put the past behind him. He only thinks about Anne a couple dozen times a day. Life is good until he literally runs into Anne, the one person he hoped to never see again. After that, he rethinks every lie he had managed to convince himself was the plain truth. Although they both admit they were wrong all those years ago, when things take a bad turn, Anne really wonders if it is too late for a reconciliation. “Persuade Me,” set in the rugged Australian bush, has a well-paced plot and interesting characters. Anne relies firmly on her faith to guide her through her difficulties. This is an engaging and thought provoking novel with a strong message of faith and forgiveness. Joanne Markey layers several stories together, still maintaining the overall flow. Anne’s resilient character and fervent faith develop through this heartwarming story. “Persuasion” by Jane Austen is one of my favorite classics. It is interesting to see how Joanne Markey rewrites the classic into a modern version and sets it in the rugged Australian bush, complete with dingoes. I highly recommend this inspiring book for all readers who love to read classics in a modern version, which will certainly appeal to the youth of today’s fast-moving world.

About the Book

Author: Joanne Markey

Genre: Women’s Christian Fiction/Romance

Release date: April 5, 2022

Click here to get your copy!

About the Author

Originally from Australia, Joanne Markey now lives in Ohio with her husband and seven children. When she’s not reading or writing, you might find her wandering the property with her kids in search of whatever seasonal treasure they’re trying to find.

More from Joanne
Can a book be partially autobiographical without actually being an autobiography?
Probably not. Persuade Me comes close though. Not in it’s entirety, but I did draw heavily on my own life when I wrote this book. Many of the situations that occur in the book were things that happened to me back in the late ‘90s when I worked on a cattle station as station cook. I also set the book in places where we lived—stations we lived or worked on. The autobiographical part ends there though.
As a retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the family situation in Persuade Me is patterned on the Elliot family, not my own. I was easily able to imagine a family like this living in Australia though. The family pride, boasting of being descended from free settlers, knowing how long the family has been in the country to the exact generation—were all things I ran into as a kid.
Not every Australian knows how many generations of the family have lived over there (or cares to know), but in high school there was this one girl… She knew exactly how long her family had been there, and anyone who couldn’t count as many generations of Australians as she could wasn’t as Australian as her. Other people have quite plainly offered the information that their family descended from free settlers, without a single convict in the lineage. Still others can tell the exact year their first ancestor moved to Australia. All I needed was to package all of those things into one prideful being—Mr. Elliot. He doesn’t play a huge role in the story, but his influence can be felt throughout the pages.
From there it was easy to imagine him as a grazier—a station owner—who’d run into hard times. His daughter, Anne, is the heroine who has a hidden past, a broken relationship she’d rather not remember. The hero of the story can’t exactly be a ship’s captain, but there is one occupation in the bush that does bring in a lot of money—helicopter mustering—and having gotten into that line of work his personal finances have taken a drastic change for the better. I won’t spoil the story, but the rest followed in like manner.
And then came the writing… To craft a uniquely Australian book one has to use Australian terms, phrases, and spellings. And when the author has been living outside the country for 21 years, sometimes it’s hard to remember what words go with what country! We worked it all out in the end though, and if you come across a word that looks like it’s been spelled wrong—it’s the Aussie spelling, which is correct for the setting.
I hope you enjoy this contemporary retelling of Persuasion set in the Australian bush. Happy reading!

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