Blog Tour - I Love You Billy Langley
Book Spotlight
I Love You Billy Langley
by Monika Jephcott Thomas
On my blog today I have the pleasure of sharing with you.....
I Love You Billy Langley
I would like to thank Faye at Authoright and Monika Jephcott Thomas for inviting me on the blog tour.
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Book Information
Release Date: 2nd April 2019
Genre: Historical Fiction
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Twenty-year-old Netta can’t wait to leave Germany and teach in Brighton, England. It’s the height of the swinging 60s, but Netta hasn’t bargained for the prejudice she’ll receive in a country full of anti-German sentiment just twenty years after the war. She finds solace in Billy, the school caretaker, with whom she falls in love. But when she takes him back to Germany at Christmas it’s Billy’s turn to be on the receiving end of a frosty welcome.
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Author Guest Post
From Draft to Finished Copy - how I Love You Billy Langley was created
Twenty-year-old Netta can’t wait to leave Germany and teach in Brighton, England. It’s the height of the swinging 60s, but Netta hasn’t bargained for the prejudice she’ll receive in a country full of anti-German sentiment just twenty years after the war. She finds solace in Billy, the school caretaker, with whom she falls in love. But when she takes him back to Germany at Christmas it’s Billy’s turn to be on the receiving end of a frosty welcome.
I Love You, Billy Langley is the third book in a trilogy, so in many ways it was easier than the previous two books to create in the sense that many of the characters had already had a life in either or both of the previous novels. However, it was always my desire to make it possible for each novel in the trilogy to be read as a standalone book too, so the main difficulty here in the third book was to give the reader enough clues to the past if they hadn’t read the other books without boring those who had.
The introduction of new characters is always a good opportunity to keep a trilogy fresh and since this would be the first book to be set partly in England, it allowed me to indulge in the creation of characters and their dialogue from various points on the British social spectrum. One such character is Rita. She is one of my favourites. In the book, the protagonist Netta can’t wait to leave Germany, but her excitement and optimism soon come crashing down to earth when she tries to adjust to the huge differences in British life – from the grotesque gastronomic staples of mutton and lard to her struggles with the southern English slang which was never in her text books. However, this young English motormouth called Rita, comes to her rescue and the two form a strong bond. Rita is a ‘salt of the earth’ Southern English working class woman. She says exactly what’s on her mind and loves taking those that need it down a peg or two. But as well as being a sidekick to Netta, she has her own story in the novel, one that becomes quite dark at times, as she, for once, struggles to say what’s on her mind when it comes to her abusive boyfriend.
Most of the research for this book could be done from mining my own memories, as it is based very much on my own experience of leaving Germany in 1966, bound for England as a teacher, where I met with all sorts of prejudice in a country still reeling from the devastation of the Second World War. Even though it was over twenty years before, some scars, particularly the emotional ones, were understandably still far from healed. However, it seemed to me that a story with these themes is as relevant today as ever, as Brexit looms and Europe deals with immigration and refugees on a scale not seen since the Second World War.
I did need some help, however, when it came to remembering life in Brighton in the late 60s, which was fifty years ago. The internet, as ever, was there to offer up photographic evidence of certain places, which was invaluable, but talking to English people who lived there at the time was priceless, especially when creating the characters like Rita who were probably further from my own experience than any characters I have created so far in terms of the idioms they use and the backgrounds that formed them.
When it came to the romantic element of the book I knew it would be best to deviate from the autobiographical, mainly because my first romance with an Englishman did not end so well. Fiction gives us the chance to replay some scenarios in life and change the outcome – perhaps our characters do something we wished we would have done, or they do the things we would never want to do giving us particularly comedic or emotional results – role play for the soul. So it was important that Netta’s love interest in the book, Billy, comes from a different class to her as well as a different country – this gave me the opportunity to show Netta’s imperfections and prejudices as much as we are aware of those of her detractors during the book.
Netta grows and learns on this journey in ways that I did in real life and ways that I wish I had. She struggles with the idea of love, having watched her own parents’ relationship splinter after the war, but ultimately this a light-hearted romance and so the ending, for her, is a happy one.
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Author Bio
Monika Jephcott Thomas grew up in Dortmund Mengede, north-west Germany. In 1966 she moved to the UK and, after a thirty-year career in education, delved into the therapeutic world where she has over twenty years experience as a counsellor and psychotherapist, gained with a wide variety of clients and presenting conditions.
By 1998, she and her partner Jeff established the Academy of Play & Child Psychotherapy (APAC). This has grown to become the largest provider world wide of post graduate training for Play Therapists and Practitioners in Therapeutic Play Skills, in partnership with several universities and colleges.
Monika and Jeff became founder members of Play Therapy UK. Monika was elected President of Play Therapy International in 2002. Their work culminated in the official recognition of the play therapy profession in 2013, an endorsement of their devotion to help the twenty per cent of children in the world who have emotional, behavioural, social and mental health problems by using play and the creative Arts.
Her professional background has given her insight into the effect of traumatic events not only on those directly experiencing them but also on their families and the generational impact.
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