AWW Feature & Giveaway: Elise K. Ackers and her reputation

I’m happy to welcome Elise K. Ackers back to Book’d Out today to introduce you to her new Homeland series being published by Destiny Romance.

Elise K. Ackers is from Melbourne, Australia and is an animal foster carer, a magnet for unusual accidents and an enthusiastic couch commentator. She writes contemporary romance and romantic suspense and is published with Destiny Romance and Escape Publishing. Late last year I reviewed The Man Plan, warm, lighthearted, contemporary romance, and Elise shared a post about subconcious inspiration.

Ask Me To Stay: A Homeland Book is her fourth book, an engaging novella I have reviewed HERE. Here is the blurb:

“When family tragedy brings bad boy Ethan Foster home, he doesn’t expect a warm welcome. In the small town of Hinterdown reputation is everything – and Ethan’s was ruined long ago. Nobody wants him around, particularly not Sam O’Hara, the girl he left behind. There’s still a powerful spark between them, but Sam is afraid to risk her heart again. And Ethan is hiding a secret that will have repercussions for his whole family. Will the townspeople ever forgive him? More importantly, will those he loves the most find it in their hearts to take him back?”

The second title in the Homeland series will be available in July 2013. To learn more about the series and how you can win a copy of Ask Me To Stay, read on…

Reputation as a currency

Ask Me To Stay: A Homeland Book is the first in my novella series with Destiny Romance, and it introduces the common theme across the series: reputation.

Ethan Foster, enigma, run-away and all-round contradiction, has just returned to his home town with an undeserved reputation and a whopping great secret. Over a decade ago, he fled the small country town of Hinterdown in New South Wales, Australia. He left behind a brother, a lover, a best friend, and a life interrupted by untimely death.

People made their own assumptions about his reasons for leaving, and as the years passed, assumptions became fact, and fact became legend.

By the time Ethan returns home, people’s misconceptions are inflexible and damning, and their opinions are getting in the way of salvaging a relationship with his brother, Dean. Because Ethan rarely kept in touch, and because Dean has built a life for himself that Ethan’s had almost no part in – their estrangement is only fuelled by inaccurate gossip.

Both experience and research had told me that a person’s reputation in a small town is like a kind of currency. It’s either tracking well against the baseline, or it’s underperforming. You only get one reputation – and no one is likely to forget what you choose to do with it.Your reputation represents your worth. It determines if people are likely to trust you, rely on you or even like you.

But one wrong move – one mistake – can cancel out years of good behaviour. Ethan’s only mistake was to leave. Prior to that he was a well-liked teenager who was afforded a lot of patience because of his parents’ untimely deaths. Everything changed the day he stopped deciding to put on a brave face. When he left, he was condemned for abandoning his brother, for breaking his then-girlfriend’s heart, and basically for daring to start again.

Ethan quickly learns that rebuilding a reputation takes a lot longer than it takes to lose it, and that taking on someone else’s mistake – and thereby adopting their bad reputation – has heart breaking, far-reaching consequences.
Maybe it’s time to set things straight. But to restore his reputation, he must ruin another’s. Is the price of acceptance too high?

In the second and third Homeland books, which explore the lives and loves of Ethan’s brother, Dean, and Ethan’s childhood best friend, Caleb; reputation is similarly explored. Without spoilers, Cal reignites a friendship with an ex-local with a bad girl reputation, and Dean must battle against people’s perception of him, since his loss in Ask Me To Stay. Both men will challenge their reputations, and the reputations of those they love.