On today’s episode, we chat with Rebecca Connolly, author of the upcoming book, Hidden Yellow Stars, as well as A Brilliant Night of Stars and Ice, Under the Cover of Mercy, and over 40 romance titles.

Rebecca was born in California, but grew up in the Midwest, specifically in Ohio and Indiana. She considers herself a Midwest girl, with all of the wholesome sweetness and "girl next door" attributes that come along with that. According to home videos, she was always loved to make up stories. There was nothing simple about a game of House, and every game involving imagination had some sort of plot, whether it was fighting off dragons or being a school teacher. Her elementary school had a little book press for stories by students, and she had so many little books printed [but very poorly illustrated!] that she could fill a box at home. She has always been a bookworm, and her grandma would send her books almost every month so she would never run out. Book Fairs were like a carnival to her, and libraries her happy place. Her creative writing professor in college once said, "In order to be a great writer, you must be a great reader." That gave her hope, since she had been reading her entire life! She received her bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, which is where she completed her first novel on the side, and started collecting the ideas for many others. She worked for several years after that, dabbling in writing and reading and other activities, and then went on to get her master's degree from West Virginia University. She came back to the Midwest after all of that, and has no desire to leave it again! She is now a full-time author, and learning how to be her own boss.

Follow her on Instagram at @author.rebecca.connolly and sign up for her newsletter at rebeccaconnolly.com.

Support your local bookstore & this podcast by getting your copy of Hidden Yellow Stars at https://bookshop.org/a/90599/9781639932344

A little about today's host-

Shawna Rodrigues left her award-winning career in the public sector in 2019 to consult and publish her first novel Beyond the Pear Blossoms. Her desire to connect and help others led to the launch of her podcast The Grit Show shortly thereafter. When she learned women host only 27% of podcasts, her skills and passion led to the founding of the Authentic Connections Network. She now helps mission-driven entrepreneurs better connect with their audiences by providing full-service podcast production and through a community for Entrepreneurs & Podcasters – EPAC. Podcasting is her primary focus, so she continues to support the writing community through this podcast, and her writing time is mostly focused on anthologies.

She offers a free 7 Steps to Perfect Your Podcast Title to anyone interested in launching a podcast. You can also follow her on Instagram-@ShawnaPodcasts, and learn more about the network and community at https://linktr.ee/37by27.

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Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us 15 minutes of your time, and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know your new favorite author in a new light. I'm Shawna Rodrigues, one of your hosts, a fellow author, host of The Grit Show, and the founder of Authentic Connections Podcast Network, which makes this podcast possible. Let me tell you a little about today's guest.

Rebecca Connolly is the author of more than 3 dozen novels. She calls herself a Midwest girl, having lived in Ohio and Indiana. She's always been a bookworm, and her grandma would send her books almost every month so she would never run out. Book fairs were carnivals, and libraries were her happy place. She received a master's degree from Western Virginia University. Rebecca's bestselling historical novel, A Brilliant Night of Stars and Ice, was highly recommended by the Historical Novel Society. And today, we get to talk a little more about her book that is coming out shortly. So, let's get started.

How are you doing today, Rebecca?

Doing well. Staying warm in the February snowstorm.

February snowstorm. We got to keep things interesting. Right?

Absolutely. That's the way the Midwest does weather.

One way or the other. You got to have extremes. Nothing west in the middle.

Exactly.

I like it. Well, that brings us to our 1st question of tell us something interesting about where you are from.

I am from Indiana. I've lived in Indiana since I was 12, and I go away for things and then I keep coming back. Indiana just has a hold on me apparently.

It just has that draw.

It just does. And, I mean, it helps that I have family here too. But something interesting is that, quite honestly, you have no idea what the weather is going to do. You know? But there's a joke that I'm sure is a joke in lots of places, but we say it here all the time. If you don't like the weather, just wait around 15 minutes. And that's why it was 50 degrees earlier this week, and now it is snowing 2 to 4 inches.

There you go. Got to keep it interesting, I like that.

There you go. That's Indiana. And it is as flat as you think it is, Indiana.

It's not a rumor. It's a real thing. It's a real thing.

That's true. Kansas is flatter. I have driven through Kansas and I thought I was driving off the edge of the world. But Indiana is pretty flat.

So, how would one of your siblings describe you as a child?

Quirky.

Quirky.

I think I was just quirky, but they would probably also say uncoordinated. I come from a family that was very involved in athletics, and I'm fairly certain I'm the least coordinated of my siblings and the least athletic of my siblings. But I think I can safely say I'm also the most musical of my siblings. That's not saying they're not, because some of them are, but I do have my strengths. They're just not in athletics.

Well, you are an author as well, so creative.

I am an author. I loved reading and imaginary games and things like that. That was what I wanted to do. One summer, my parents had part of our summer chore list was for us to read and to help us all with, like, you know, the library challenges that were going on. Ironically, that wasn't on my chore list. I had to go outside. I think that was part of my chore list was I had to go outside.

Yes.

But my siblings had to read and get paid for it. I'm like,

You’re like, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

You know, the family's got to eat, and so I can't get paid to read, so.

And now it's in a way, you get paid to read and write.

Paid to read and write in theory.

In theory. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So, you got them in the end. In the end, you found out a way to make that work.

I did. It all comes back.

It all comes back. It all works out in the end. So, tell us more about your new book. Can you describe it in 1 sentence for us?

Yeah. So, Hidden Yellow Stars, it's based on the true story of 2 women in World War II who risked everything to save Jewish children from the Gestapo by hiding them throughout Belgium.

Oh, that's very intriguing. How did you first find the story for you to base this off of?

My dad is a history nerd like me, and he was reading, I think it was the USA Today, and he saw a little article that was a pseudo-obituary for one of these women. She had passed away, and she had just turned a hundred a couple of months before. And it gave just a brief little bio of what she had done and, you know, so it was an obituary, but it was also not because she was this figure in history and I'd never heard of her. So, he sends it to me and he says, thought you might like this. I look it up, sure enough, I love it. So, I start doing some digging, and I find this woman, her name is Andre Galen. And I found that she had a partner slash boss, just kind of depending on, you know, spoilers, but had an equally compelling story as part of what they were doing. And I like to write in dual point of view.

And so I went, I've got it. I've got this story. And so, I immediately wrote up a pitch for my publisher and sent it to them and started doing just some little bit of research for me just so that I had enough information to go on. And luckily for me, they loved it too, so I got to deep dive.

Oh, that's so exciting.

So, it started with a pseudo-obituary from the USA Today.

That is amazing. Like, the way you learn and it's exciting because it was something you didn't know about before, so it's not like a well-known part of history as well.

No. And the only thing I went back and read that obituary article thing the other day and it says that she saved over 2,000 children. And I'm like, why have I never heard of her? As I do more digging and research afterwards, it comes closer to almost 3,000 between her and her counterparts. They saved almost 3,000 Jewish children.

What was the most interesting thing you learned about her in your research?

About her specifically is she was funny. I met, virtually, one of the children that she hid. He's still alive. I think he's retired now, but he’s a world-class pediatric neurologist in Tel Aviv. He wrote his own memoir which was vital to my research and so I reached out to him, you know, to ask just a couple of questions and we've been friends ever since. He read a copy of the book for me. He told me all sorts of stories about her because she stayed in touch with a lot of the children. And one of the things that she said was they were at a restaurant, she and him in their older years, and he ordered water or something. And she said, water is for the outside of the body, wine is for inside the body.

I don't drink myself, but I was like, that is hilarious. And she was determined and driven. I mean, she was not a mother by the time she was hiding these children. And she said in interviews later on that she feels like or felt like, if she had been a mother, she would have had a much harder time doing her job because she was pulling these children away from their mothers. But in a way, she became a motherly figure to a lot of these children. So, that's something interesting that I learned about her is that she's funny, but also she's just incredible. She refused to just let this happen and to be quiet and go with the flow.

That's incredible. I love it. I love it. And the title of the book is Hidden Yellow Stars. And how did you come up with the name of the book?

It was between my publisher and I. But as I was writing all of this, all of my notes compiled and things like that, I was thinking about this teacher of children, which was what Andre Galen was, she was a teacher. And just thinking about seeing these children with these yellow stars coming into her classroom. And one day in her classroom, she sees some of these children have stars on and others don't, and these children that have them are trying to hide them because they're embarrassed. And so, she has all of the kids in the class regardless of their star status, go get an apron from the back of the classroom and they all put on aprons so that they would all look the same and none of them would have stars on. And so, stars kind of became a focus for the story. And we're hiding these Jewish children, these little stars, from those that would destroy them. And so, it just kind of became this visual depiction of the idea that we were going with here. So, it just kind of fell into place that way.

Magical hot things that come together. That is so incredible. I love the research that you did and how it matched up.

Some of it was really interesting. Throughout the research, there were a lot of people that were put in an internment camp. Not a concentration camp, but like, almost like a way station. So, they go here to this camp for a couple of weeks or months and then they're transported onwards or you know? And in 3 different reports, different people's reports, there was a guard that they referred to. He was oh, what's it called? I think it was VNV, which is not Nazi. It's, like, a Dutch nationalist group that, like, joined with them, I think. And if I'm wrong with that, please forgive me. But he was somebody who should have been their friend but wasn't, in theory.

Anyway, and they all referred to him by the same name in German because he was talking in German, like, with all the Nazis. And it was Pferdekopf, which translated means horsehead. Three different reports of people in this camp call this guard horsehead. When I found the connection with all of my thought, that was just 1 person. I'm like, oh, snarky. But no, there were other people. They all called him horsehead.

That is so funny.

It just makes me happy. I'm like, snarky people in the camps.

Yes. Exactly. They still had their moments of yep.

I was like, I am so proud of you, snarky people.

So, what has surprised you the most about your writing career?

That I have one.

Well, there you go.

I wasn't supposed to be a writer. I, you know, writing was just kind of a hobby I had. I wrote my 1st full novel in college and just caught the writing bug. I didn't major in anything writing related. I never said, oh, I'm going to grow up and be an author one day. It was just kind of something I did. It was something fun. It was something that distracted the creative side of my brain.

And then, you know, I wound up after years of writing just for myself and a couple of friends, wound up getting published in 2015 with my first romance, which has been what has been fueling the funds for all these years so far. And so, the fact that I even have a career in writing still surprises me, that I got published still surprises me. That I'm still publishing is just incredible. So, the whole thing is a massive surprise to me.

Well, that keeps it interesting. It definitely keeps it interesting. I like it.

It does. It does. And it keeps it fresh, you know? Because I'm like, I'm still doing this. This is amazing.

That's awesome. Yes. It makes it so you can be grateful and savor it. That’s wonderful.

Absolutely. I want my head in the clouds, but my feet on the ground.

There you go. I like it.

Means I'm walking in fog, I guess. I don't know.

Fog, snow, whatever the weather brings. It changes. So, what is the best place for folks to find you and connect with you online or otherwise?

Probably, Facebook or Instagram. I love both of those, and I'm the same in both places. You can search for author Rebecca Connelly, and the accounts' names are the same on Facebook and Instagram. Makes it easy for me.

I love it when that happens. Not always easy.

I know. No. And, you know, it didn't used to be that way, but I've learned and I've streamlined. I love connecting with people. I'm a reader myself. If I could divide my time equally and make money appropriately, I would read as much as I write.

I tell you. That's how, like, you were frustrated when your siblings got paid for it and you didn't. I tell you.

It still frustrates me. Like, can I get paid for writing? Oh, wait. I do, sort of.

Reading would be a nice bonus.

It would be really nice if I could get paid for reading.

Yes. There you go. So, what book or story inspires you the most?

You know, more and more, I am inspired by the book, The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Ortsey. It's one of my favorites growing up. It's still a favorite. This man, who charges into the bowels of the French revolution and saves people from the guillotine, and there's a romance involved, and it's just got all of the goodness and all of the feels and all of the heroism. And it's just, for me, it's my original story in my life of finding the light and the hope and the heroism in the big ugly. And those are the stories I like telling. When I do historical fiction are these little stories that we might not know that are light in the ugly darkness. And so, I can trace it all back to the Scarlet Pimpernel for me.

That's fabulous. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing.

And it's a romance too, and I'm such a romantic.

It's nice that you have that when you have that balance in there. Thank you so much for being here and sharing this, and congratulations on your latest release. I'm sure we're excited to check it out.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for joining us. I hope you take a second to give us stars or a review on your favorite podcasting platform. It really makes a difference in folks being able to find us. We'll be here again next Wednesday. Follow us on Instagram at Author Express Podcast to see who's coming up next. And don't forget, keep it express, but keep it interesting.