Blog Tour, Exclusive Author Post, Excerpt and Giveaway: The Flowers of Time by A. L. Lester

29 February of 2020 by ButtonsMom2003

The Flowers of Time By A. L. Lester

Genre: Contemporary Romance, GLBTQ, FF, Nonbinary

Released: February 22, 2020

Publisher: JMS Books LLC

Series: Lost in Time, Book 3

Length: 50,500 words

Jones is determined to find out what caused the unexpected death of her father whilst they were exploring ancient ruins in the Himalayas. She’s never been interested in the idea of the marriage bed, but along with a stack of books and coded journals he’s left her with the promise she’ll travel back to England for the first time since childhood and try being the lady she’s never been.

Edie and her brother are leaving soon on a journey to the Himalayas to document and collect plants for the new Kew Gardens when she befriends Miss Jones in London. She’s never left England before and is delighted to learn that the lady will be returning to the mountains she calls home at the same time they are planning their travels. When they meet again in Srinagar, Edie is surprised to find that here the Miss Jones of the London salons is ‘just Jones’ the explorer, clad in breeches and boots and unconcerned with the proprieties Edie has been brought up to respect.

A non-binary explorer and a determined botanist make the long journey over the high mountain passes to Little Tibet, collecting flowers and exploring ruins on the way. Will Jones discover the root of the mysterious deaths of her parents? Will she confide in Edie and allow her to help in the quest? It’s a trip fraught with dangers for both of them, not least those of the heart.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/vPUtMG_oSCc

Add to your TBR on Goodreads.

Exclusive Author Post:

Hello there, thank you so much for having me visit today as part of The Flowers of Time blogtour! I’ve written about Edie and Jones’ journey over the mountains today. And yaks!

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The Journey Over the Mountains

Before the two hundred and fifty mile Srinagar-Leh Highway was built in 1962, the journey between the two cities took about three weeks on two or four feet. The Highway was pre-dated by a track named the Treaty Road from about 1870. The Treaty Road in turn followed the path of the old Central Asian trade route north to Yarkand and in to China. People talk about The Silk Road as if it’s a single route…actually, there are a lot of different Silk Roads winding all over the area that have been used for thousands of years.

You can click through and see the rough route on Google Maps with this link – https://bit.ly/2SoOWNY – there are also satellite photos and some Street Views, which give you a really good idea of the landscape. The modern highway is closed for a significant period of each year because of snowfall.

Edie and Jones’ journey over the mountains is loosely based on that of Isabella Bird, a British woman who followed the same route a hundred and ten years after my story is set, in 1889. She wrote about her travels in a book called Among the Tibetans, which I drew on heavily. The route would not have changed all that much between Edie’s day and hers.

Whilst in one sense Isabella was firmly rooted in her time and her British Empire background she was also unusual in that she traveled a lot, often without the requisite-at-the-time white male company. The biography I have of her describes her as ‘the foremost travel writer of her day’. She began her travels in the 1850s as a young woman, when her doctor recommended it for her health. Between then and her death in 1904, she wrote books about her travels in the Americas, Hawaii, India, Japan, China and Persia. She has a really good turn of descriptive phrase and I’d recommend her books if you can stomach her paternalistic attitude to her servants and the people she meets. It’s a fascinating insight in to how simultaneously closed and open minded people can be.

The route Edie and Jones follow was only accessible on foot and it wasn’t always possible to ride. It was sometimes so narrow that if you met someone the other way, one of you would have to get off the track out of the way, if there was room. If there wasn’t room, sometimes people lay down so the pack animals coming from the other direction could jump over them.

Traders and travelers used mules, ponies, yaks and even sheep as pack animals. I found some really interesting descriptions of salt being brought down to Srinagar from Tibet on the backs of sheep.
There are three high passes on the trip, the tallest of which is the Zoji La, at 11,500 feet. You can start to feel odd with altitude sickness at about 4,500ft and become seriously unwell at 8,000. I wanted to talk about the potential for that and did some looking around for historical account. The earliest I could find for the Himalayas was a cautionary tale by some Chinese traders who traveled between Xian and Kabul in about 35BC, who wrote about the Great and Little Headache Mountains.

“On passing the Great Headache Mountain, the Little Headache Mountain, the Red Land, and the Fever Slope, men’s bodies become feverish, they lose color and are attacked with headache and vomiting; the asses and cattle being all in like condition.”

Jones knows all about this, obviously, so she’s watching out for it.

Edie’s snowlotus obsession encompasses about three hundred species. The one she’s particularly interested in is the Saussurea Lappae or Costus. Like all its family it likes high altitude and low temperature. I don’t know whether Edie was successful in bringing any live plants home. It seems unlikely they would have survived the journey at sea-level very well. That part of Edie’s character is loosely based on my mother, who is a very skilled plantswoman and at the time of writing this still runs her own horticultural nursery, in her eighties. She was also drawn heavily from Marianne North, a botanical illustrator of the same period of Isabella Bird, who traveled all over the world painting both plants and the landscape around her.

The most challenging thing I found to write about the journey itself was the camping kit! I couldn’t get the feel of what the characters were up to settled in my head unless I could visualize what they were drinking from or sleeping on, or using to cook with. I started off with the TV adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels (Sean Bean was just a bonus) and spiraled out in to the many and varied webpages by immensely skilled re-enactors out there as well as museum inventories and lists of what soldiers on the march might carry.

Finally, I also learned a lot about yaks. Yaks only have to eat 1% of their bodyweight daily, as opposed to cows, who have to consume 3%. And they get heat exhaustion if it’s warmer than 59f. They are extremely cool creatures and I wish Mr AL was more amenable to me keeping a small herd in the garden.

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Thank you so much for hosting me here today! If readers would like to catch up with the other stops on the tour you can find a list on my own blog, here: http://allester.co.uk/flowersoftime-blogtour.