Romance Book Author of the Month: Robyn Carr

Romance Book Author of the Month Robyn Carr

I’m thrilled to announce that our romance book author of the month for January 2012 is none other than the amazing Robyn Carr! We’re certainly starting the New Year off with a bang on this blog.

Robyn has had a string of successful novels, but is best known for her highly-acclaimed Virgin River series. In fact, Virgin River, the first book in the series, was named by Booklist magazine as one of 2007’s Top Ten Romances! The series is set in Virgin River, a small town in Northwest California with a population of just 600. Virgin River is home to a number of retired Marines, and each story in the series features a Marine and the woman he falls in love with. Robyn’s portrayals of veterans and military personnel are amazingly realistic, and draw on Robyn’s real-life experience as a military wife.

Fans of the series will be delighted to hear that Robyn will have not one, not two, but three Virgin River books out in the first half of 2012. Woohoo! The three books are Hidden Summit (Dec 27, 2011), Redwood Bend (Feb 28, 2012) and Sunrise Point (Apr 24, 2012).

Robyn has been writing for more than thirty years, and has had incredible success as an author. It therefore comes as a surprise that she seems to have fallen into writing almost by accident. Although Robyn trained to be a nurse, she never had the opportunity to practice. Instead, she married her high school sweetheart just four weeks before he shipped out to Officers Training School to become a helicopter pilot in the US Air Force. It was then the height of the Vietnam War.

Robyn accompanied her husband, Jim, as he was posted to different bases around the country. In fact, it was at a Florida air force base where Robyn first started reading romance novels. Confined to bed because of a difficult pregnancy, Robyn turned to romance novels to keep herself entertained. She read voraciously, going through more than one novel a day.

Robyn eventually decided to try her hand at writing her own romance stories, and her first novel was published in 1980, when she was just 27. Thank goodness Robyn didn’t take the advice of a novelist who critiqued the manuscript for her first novel! (Apparently, the novelist told Robyn to go home and find something to do for which she had talent. That very manuscript was eventually sold to Little, Brown and Co., and published in hardcover.)

Robyn and Jim now live in Las Vegas, and have two adult children. Robyn’s son and daughter are ardent readers of her books, and often tease Robyn for putting their family scenarios into her novels. Robyn says her husband is the love of her life, and counts her children as her greatest achievement. (Awwww…)

We’ll be posting a new article about Robyn every Tuesday this month as part of our Romance Book Author of the Month series. Among the articles you can look forward to are an in-depth interview with Robyn, and a guest post by Robyn herself, so please keep coming back to Best Romance Stories for more!

Available on Dec 27, 2011

Available on Feb 28, 2012

Available on Apr 24, 2012