The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Sunflower Sisters: A Novel by Martha Hall Kelly

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Sunflower Sisters: A Novel by Martha Hall Kelly Martha Hall Kelly’s million-copy bestseller Lilac Girls introduced readers to Caroline Ferriday. Now, in Sunflower Sisters, Kelly tells the story of Ferriday’s ancestor Georgeanna Woolsey, a Union nurse during the Civil War whose calling leads her to cross paths with Jemma, a young enslaved girl who is sold off and conscripted into the army, and Anne-May Wilson, a Southern plantation mistress whose husband enlists. “An exquisite tapestry of women determined to defy the molds the world has for them.”—Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours Georgeanna “Georgey” Woolsey isn’t meant for the world of lavish parties and the demure attitudes of women of her stature. So when war ignites the nation, Georgey follows her passion for nursing during a time when doctors considered women on the battlefront a bother. In proving them wrong, she and her sister Eliza venture from New York to Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg and witness the unparalleled horrors of slavery as they become involved in the war effort. In the South, Jemma is enslaved on the Peeler Plantation in Maryland, where she lives with her mother and father. Her sister, Patience, is enslaved on the plantation next door, and both live in fear of LeBaron, an abusive overseer who tracks their every move. When Jemma is sold by the cruel plantation mistress Anne-May at the same time the Union army comes through, she sees a chance to finally escape—but only by abandoning the family she loves. Anne-May is left behind to run Peeler Plantation when her husband joins the Union army and her cherished brother enlists with the Confederates. In charge of the household, she uses the opportunity to follow her own ambitions and is drawn into a secret Southern network of spies, finally exposing herself to the fate she deserves. Inspired by true accounts, Sunflower Sisters provides a vivid, detailed look at the Civil War experience, from the barbaric and inhumane plantations, to a war-torn New York City, to the horrors of the battlefield. It’s a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and unthinkable racial cruelty, a story still so relevant today. About Martha Hall Kelly Martha is a native New Englander who lives in Litchfield County Connecticut. She worked as an advertising copywriter for many years, and raised three wonderful children who are now mostly out of the nest. Her debut novel Lilac Girls, about Connecticut socialite Caroline Ferriday who championed a group of Ravensbruck Concentration Camp survivors known as The Rabbits who survived WWII Nazi experiments, was her first novel and an instant New York Times bestseller. The prequel to Lilac Girls, Lost Roses, was also an instant NYTimes bestseller. It features Caroline's mother Eliza Ferriday and her fight to save a group of Russian women, former aristocrats who lost everything in the Russian Revolution. The Lost Roses paperback published March 3rd, 2020 and the third book in the series, a Civil War novel about Caroline's great grandmother's family, arrives spring 2021. You'll find more info about both books on Martha's website: www.marthahallkelly.com and on Pinterest.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss i'm oaks as voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com we're having so much fun here i can't even stop laughing through the intro that's how much fun this show is and is going to be. So you definitely want to check out the video version.

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goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Follow us over there for the books we're reading and reviewing. Also, go to all the different groups we have on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all that stuff. Today, we have a brilliant, brilliant, she's amazing, multi-book author. She's written three books and more on the way from what I hear. We'll find out more about that during the show. But she's written a new book, and this book is hot off the almost presses. It comes out tomorrow, March 30th. And when it does, it's going to be just like lava flowing into your ears

and into your hands as you read this book. And, of course, you can listen to the audio book, and then lava will be pouring in your ears. But you'll be able to check out her wonderful book. It's up now for preorder March 30th, Sunflower Sisters by Martha Hall Kelly. And we've got a chance to bring her on the show. All we do is we just Google all the best authors into the Google machine,

and they list all their names, and she was one of them. So we invite her on the show. Martha Hall Kelly is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, her debut novel, international blockbuster, Lilac Girls, and the prequels, Lost Roses and Sunflower Sisters. Never an enthusiastic history student in school, Martha developed a passion for it when she discovered the long-buried story of how Carolyn Faraday, a New York socialite and philanthropist who championed the cause of a group of Polish women, nicknamed the Rabbits, and experimented upon Nazi doctors

at the all-female Ravensbrook concentration camp. She's a former copywriter and lives on a hay farm in Litchfield County, Connecticut, with her husband, Michael, and their practically human dog, Oliver, two beavers, and several muskrats. Boy, this just got more interesting. She has journalism degrees from Syracuse and Northwestern universities, and her books have been published in 49 languages. We're just waiting for that 50th to come out. Welcome to the show, Martha. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thank you. 49 languages. I know. It's crazy. You're right. I just need one more for 50.

One more language. We've got to round that baby off. So give us your plugs, Martha, real quick, and then we've got to find out what these beavers and muskrats are doing in your house. Now, by plugs, I don't know what you mean by plugs. I've never. I'm sorry. Your dot coms. Oh, I'm at MarthaHallKelly.com.

That's my website. And I'm on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, all at Martha Hall Kelly. Yeah, we just call them plugs. It confuses people and puts them on the spot. So that's what we do. It's just funner that way. How's the lava supposed to flow if I'm confused? Exactly.

Note to self, somebody rewrite this show better next time. Oh, wait, that's me. So anyway, Martha, I do want to get into the Beavers and Muskrats because I was a big Muskrat America fan. But we need to talk about the book first because we need to move some books. What motivated you to want to write this book as part of your series? I had never written anything before in terms of novels or creatively. I was an advertising copywriter, wrote TV commercials and print ads. And then one day visited this museum, the home of the former Caroline Faraday. She passed away in

the nineties, but I visited her house because she had lilacs there and I love lilacs. And on her desk in the Bellamy Faraday house, which is now a museum, she had a small photograph of women lined up in rows. And I asked the docent, who are those women? And she said, oh, those are the rabbits they were experimented on by, that was their nickname because they were experimented on by the Nazi doctors at Ravensburg concentration camp, the only all-female camp in Hitler's Third Reich. And after that, I just got really interested in it. The archives are at the house, so I just started learning all about Caroline as much as I could, but I didn't intend on writing a book at all.

So this was a real person. These were events that really happened that you based the book on. Yes. Caroline was a real person and everything in the book is based on real things that she did. There's three women in it. So there's Caroline and then one of his rabbits. She's a composite character. And then the third character is Herta Oberhauser, who was the only female doctor at the all-female

camp. And there were a hundred doctors at Ravensbrück, which seems so weird, but there were only, actually there were three female doctors, but Herta was the one that was there for the longest. And I just thought, how could a woman operate on these young women? The rabbits were between the ages of 14 and 25. They were picked up for being in the underground. They were Girl Scouts. So I just thought, what is going on in the head of someone that would do that? Yeah, it's quite the journey people go on when they dehumanize other human beings and the horrors that we go down the road. So can you give us a bit or arc of the whole book and how it pans out? Is this part of the prequel? Do I understand that correctly?

This was Lilac Rose. This was the first book, which it just became this crazy sensation. But when I wrote it, I didn't know that anyone would read it. In a way, that was good because I just wrote whatever I wanted to. I didn't censor myself. But yeah, the book starts with Caroline. She worked for, she was a Francophile, a beautiful friend. She worked for the, helping the children of French resistance fighters, the orphans. And she just got involved with these women. She was very good friends with Charles de Gaulle's niece, Genevieve. And Genevieve had been imprisoned at Ravensbrück and knew these Polish women. And once the camp was liberated, these Polish women went

back, the ones that survived, only 50 of them survived, but they went back to Poland and they were in really bad shape. Their legs had been opened up and bacterial cultures were introduced in order to test self-drugs for Hitler. Really sick. And so Caroline brought them to the U.S. for treatment and the trip of a lifetime. They went all over. They went to Las Vegas. And that's really, it's also the story of Hertha told from her point of view. And I wrote this back in, I started it in 2000 before the whole rise of national socialism in our country and really around the world. And I feel like, I don't know, it was just good timing in a way because writing from Herd's point of view really showed what it was like to be indoctrinated like that and brainwashed.

We've had different authors who've talked about the history of the rise of fascism and authoritarianism. And largely it comes after the rise of women's rights and lgbtq communities and other marginalized disability people and stuff like that and there's always that hierarchy blowback that comes and then the atrocities like this happened nazi germany was an example of that blowback of taking back the the power from what had gone on and i think some of these different acts that took place you can correct me if I'm wrong, because you've probably researched them more than I have, were ways of dehumanizing, destroying value in those communities and just being as horrific as you possibly could. You're absolutely right. And Berlin at the time, as it was just party city, everything was going on.

Gay men and women were having a wonderful life. And I think that bothered a lot of people. And those were the, some of the first people that Hitler targeted. So you're exactly right. That's, it's really interesting to think about and scary when you think about what could happen still. I don't feel like we've learned that much from World War II or even the Civil War. The blowback from Obama years and the rise of women rights and everything that was what happened next and now we're on the as he used to say we're democracies and zags but it is dangerous it is scary we had someone on the show who talked about the historical natures of that duterte pinache all those different uh regimes over the years even hungary recently

but actually your bookat Girls was a huge seller. And there's some different stories that are in the book that are set in different places. Give us some idea of some of the geographical context of the books and how they interact with the story. In Lylat Girls? Whichever, Sunshine Sisters? Lylat Girls goes all over the world. I had to go from Poland to Germany to France to research it, which was really interesting. Yeah, it starts in Poland, where these rabbits are in the underground. And then they go to Ravensbrück, which is about an hour north of Berlin. And then of course, the women come to the United States. So it's all over the world, really. And the same thing was true with my second book, Lost Roses, that takes place in Russia, that's the Bolshevik Revolution. And then of course, Sunflower Sisters, it takes place in Maryland on a plantation in New York City during the Civil War, and on the Gettysburg battlefield. So I spent a lot of time, one particular plantation,

former plantation, now museum down in Maryland and at Gettysburg for that book. What was that like going down there and studying that? Because Maryland was very different. I think I heard you talk about it in one of the other interviews you did and how it was kind of a strategic piece in the Civil War and different things of that nature. Yeah, when I first started writing it, I always knew I wanted to write about this family, the Wolseley women, because when I first went into Caroline's archives for the other books, I knew she had a whole wall of Civil War letters, these amazing.

So, I mean, that I knew right there, that was gold in terms of writing a book. But in terms of where I would set it, I thought Maryland would be perfect because it is a border state or was a border state in the Civil War. So they had those two factions right there in the same state that were warring against each other. And it was very different writing that book because Lilac Girls and Lost Roses were in other countries. This was us and way more emotional for me. I didn't think it would be, but yeah, especially being on the Gettysburg battlefield now, it's just so emotional. And to go back to the plantation, I use Sodderley Plantation as my inspiration to base my fictitious peeler plantation on.

And walking around there, they've kept it so beautifully. They have one of the cabins where the enslaved men and women were, and they've really done a good job of restoring it. So it was really interesting just to walk around there and to see how the main house was so beautiful and decked out. And then this slave cabin down below was so different. house was so beautiful and decked out. And then this slave cabin down below was so different. It was really, really an eye-opener. But those two places, Gettysburg and then Hollywood, Maryland, were my main inspiration. Well, I can imagine being in those different places and realizing what this battle was fought for in Gettysburg and the massive amount of people that died there and suffered and the

whole context of it all. I bet that was a pretty interesting parallel to experience. Yeah, it's like a holy experience. Have you been to Gettysburg? I haven't. Oh, it really, it's, I was, as my bio says, never a history student in high school, but I just appreciated it so much walking around there. And it feels like a holy place when you

feel like people, their remains in some cases are probably still there. So it was really inspiring for the book and a big part of it takes place there. And I can't tell you too much because it's a little bit of a tease, but one of my characters ends up in Pickett's Charge, the famous battle of Pickett's Charge. And I think that's why Kirk has said that this book was, it likened it to a Ken Burns documentary. Oh, wow. But it was such a, it was so nice, but because it takes place at Pickett's Charge. Yeah. And maybe that character is a woman that ends up there.

So readers will want to pick up that book to find out that tidbit alone. The, the, this is really interesting because I like things that are built into history because I think maybe they give them a little bit more foundation. Do you think then just complete fiction that you make up? Oh, absolutely. I think it gives it that readers are so incredible. They pick up every little thing. If you're not into what you're writing about, they know it. And I feel if it's based on something real, they feel that veracity. So it's really, I love writing about real things, but it's tough. You have to do a whole outline. It has to obviously line up with reality, especially with the civil war and world war two and world war one. There are a lot of history buffs out there.

And I would get a lot of letters if I wasn't really, I got a letter once from somebody, an email about a stink bug that I had, I put in lilac girls and it was an, a bug person wrote to me and said, there were no stink bugs in the United States until 1958. And this was 1957 in the book. I have to be careful. It is a novel. It's in the, it's in the United States until 1958. And this was 1957 in the book. I have to be careful. It is a novel. It's in the, it's in the first section. I think that's just funny. But these

are pretty cool. When I was a kid, I had a, we had a neighbor and he'd gone down to Gettysburg and I guess, I don't know if you can still do this, but he got in like the bullets from Gettysburg. An actual bullet? Yeah. He was getting the bullets from down at Gettysburg. An actual bullet? Yeah, he was getting the bullets from down at Gettysburg and some of them were intact and then some of them had passed through someone and if they'd hit something, they smashed. And so he had both sets of bullets. He had the original shooting bullets and then what they look like when they had hit something, maybe a person or maybe a tree or something or just the ground. But he would show how they were designed to hit in a way of penetration and

then blow up or mass out. I'm not sure. The mini balls. Yeah. Yeah. And they would literally turn in this little projectile to this. And it was like a, like a little piece of clay if you can

imagine hardened i think it was just pure lead but or something like that but you would see how it expand and he said to us as kids or us being kids he said now imagine getting hit by six of those passing through your body and when you know one's going to take out your liver and you're going to have really big holes out the other side of you if you get shot by these. Yeah. That's why they had so many amputations, really. Because at that point, that was the only way to save someone's life. Yeah. In fact, that was one of the other stories he had fun horrifying us kids with nightmares. He's one of those guys. But he would tell the story about how if you got shot in the leg, you just went, well, that's getting cut off.

And I guess there was a story of a guy who I guess had his, his intestines were out and he'd looked at him and, and went, oh, they're going to cut me in half probably. Cause you know, that's what they do. So yeah, it was an interesting time. And the horrors of that war were not fun in any way, shape or form. And they're not, they weren't sometimes as well. War never is fully, fully pretty, but the horrors of that war were just something else. Like you said, cutting people's legs off and parts off. And that's why it's really good to show the story from the point of view of a woman who is a nurse and she was a nurse on the Gettysburg battlefield.

This was Caroline's great aunt, Georgiana Woolsey. And I have all of her letters. She wrote a little book, Three Weeks in Pittsburgh, which came from Amazon and it was like this tiny, but it was super helpful. And what she saw was, it was great to be able to just put that right into the book. So it's a really, it was tough. And she was on the hospital ships as well. So you can imagine what she saw on the hospital ships, a lot of amputations, a lot of disease and things like smallpox. They weren't

vaccinated, all of them for that. So it was a tough job. Her parents and her mom and her sisters did not want her to be a nurse. And she, she lied about her age. You had to be 30 and not attractive. And she was under very beautiful, but she wormed her way in there. And so it's fun to see the civil war. Often you see it from a male perspective, but it's fun to see it from the point of view of a woman. I think so. Plus women will look at it. Men love starting wars. This is why I want more women in Congress. It's because they're more concerned about babies and kids and the future of our country. Men are just like, let's start a war. Why is that?

We're just, we're broken. We'll keep it at that. We got issues. But I think I love this aspect of it. Can you tell us why you chose the title Sunflower Sisters or without giving anything away? chose the title Sunflower Sisters or without giving anything away or? Yeah. Lilac Girls. I didn't title that. My random house did. I had called it the Rabbits of Ravensbrück. And so I figured with my second book, Lost Roses, I had to do like another flower. I wanted to. And then for this, I kept trying to figure out, and it is a little bit of a spoiler to tell you why it's the sunflower, but the sunflower had a really interesting meaning in the underground railroad. To the enslaved, it was a special signal that they would use if they put a sunflower on a gate. There we go. Another tease. So people should find out what that means.

Trying to keep the lava. Missed on the book. Sadly, with novels, we can't give away too much or the ending. But what have we missed that maybe you want to touch on and tell readers? I think that, again, there are three women. So it's not just about Georgie, who's this wealthy New Yorker. But it is interesting to see New York during the Civil War. They had wild pigs roaming on the street. And it was a really interesting place. And I always thought, oh, probably New York was very union. But there were a lot of Confederate sympathizers there because it was a place of industry,

and they supported cotton. And so that part of it, I touched on a little bit. I think the draft riots are really interesting, what happened. And that I think is very germane to what's going on today. Even though I wrote this book three years ago, basically, and I had no idea what was going to happen at the Capitol. The draft riots are basically that come to life again. So I have a scene in the book at what they called the colored orphan asylum where the Woolsey women would go to work. And there were 200 children of color living there and it was burned to the ground during the draft riots.

And so I think that is very, it's very current. I think people will see that as something that's happening again today. It was a mostly Irish mob and they were pissed that Black people were taking their jobs. Basically, the longshoremen were angry. They were also angry about the draft. That was the initial problem because you could pay $300 if you were rich and get out of having to go fight. But it turned into a race riot. And at least four Black men were lynched, hung from trees in New York City, and a child, a seven-year-old boy. So it was crazy. So not only Georgie, there's Gemma, who is enslaved on this fictitious pure plantation that's based on Solery. And she's a house slave, but she knows how to read a, which is important to the story.

And she, because the former plantation mistress taught her so that she could read to her for her own benefit. So she has, in terms of being enslaved, she has her own family there, her mother and father. And so she, I think, feels lucky, but she's very worried about her family unit being sold. Even though at the end of the war in Maryland, you could still own slaves. I was surprised by that. And then there is the plantation mistress, Anne May, who is a piece of work. She's just the worst. As one reviewer said, no redeeming qualities. Wow. Sounds like me. Sorry, I had to get that in there.

True. Yeah, she does, actually. You didn't have to agree with me. You just said true. But Anne May is awful. And she just does horrible things to this poor Gemma and goes, and again, I can't really tell you too much, but they get caught up in this spy operation thing. And so she has to go find Gemma once Gemma's sold off. Again, I can't really tell you too much, but they get caught up in the spy operation thing.

And so she has to go find Gemma once Gemma's sold off. And so, yeah, those are the three characters. Do you feel like it's a pretty standalone book if people jump into this book first, as opposed to knowing the layout of the others? Yeah, a lot of people ask me that because I wrote them going back in time. So you can absolutely read this one first and then go forward in time and end with Caroline Faraday or they're all standalone. Yeah. That's good. So was there anything that any epiphanies you had while you're writing, whether it was in terms of how you wrote this book as opposed to the others, or maybe surprising stories that stuck out? We talked a

little bit about the Gettysburg and the plantation, but is there anything that really surprised you or any epiphanies you had about your writing and doing it a different way in this book or anything of that nature? Mostly just that I could do it again. Because every time you look at that blank page, you go, am I going to be able to do this? So that was one. I had just started doing these giant outlines. And do you want to see one? sure yeah we'd love to audio visual i had just started doing these giant outlines and um this is one i don't know if you can see it but oh yeah yeah one of those one of the characters has their own like little timeline but i'd have to say the thing that surprised me most was what we've just been talking about was how this is such a

timely thing. I kept, I always think of the civil war as, oh, that's, that's over, but it really isn't. I feel like we're so divided still. And everything I read about it, I just kept saying, that's Fox news and that's CNN. You can just feel the similarities today. They had their own insurrection and attacked the New York Times, who went after them with Gatling guns, the founder of the New York Times. And there's some dispute about whether or not this is true. But it seems to me, I've read many accounts that say it really is true. And so it was a violent, that's what surprised me most that it was such a violent time and so similar to today. Which is, yeah, which is interesting seeing the Confederate flag in the Capitol. I think I'm still fried over that. I'm just like, they didn't even get that far in the

original war. So that just makes me even more pissed about that whole thing. Exactly. That's what I was thinking while I was watching in January. I still don't believe that actually happened, but it is a blast from the past for sure. sending money to the what's the joke i'm trying to get i'll just keep sending money to the cafeteria funds of the really big large guys in the prisons that those other guys are held in i'm just kidding so anyway but i think this is great it's a it's beautiful it's told from the story of women we need of course women to like like i say take more charge of our governments have less wars bring back empathetics future and stuff Could you look at the money we spend on some of these wars between Gettysburg and everything else? We're always at war doing stuff. The horrors of it all. Do you think that's part of it though, that they want war in order to keep that military complex going? Yeah, we've talked about that historically on the show. The oligarchies of

the South were one of the reasons that we went to war in the Civil War show the oligarchies of the south were one of the reasons that we went to war in the civil war the oligarchies they had their big systems their big money slavery was money and they didn't want to give it up and they're the ones who made the decision actually to go yeah we're going to war with you guys we're going our well i think the main decision go the other way but then they're willing to war of it but yeah it was all about money power and and machinery and everything else i think when we talked with Ellis Cole when he was on the show, a famous historian, great author, he talked about how the cotton gin was one of the things that helped change the dynamics of those oligarchies to that we could finally do that it's really sad that that's really the undoing of slavery is that we had to wait for these machines to come about to replace them we were just being good humanitarians going this is really bad we shouldn't do it anymore this is horrific we're just like oh we figured out a way to make more money with

machines and you're just like really seriously well they would have kept going if not for exactly or absolutely yeah or if no one had invented the cotton gin that's the horror of it you're just like seriously it's whatever it's a complicated history with us americans it is yeah there's some sort of playbook that just keeps happening again but hopefully we'll figure it out and i think what's great about books like yours is they document this stuff they'll help give a context the history the the struggle the horrors the challenges and hopefully we just study this and learn from our history there's a famous it's not famous but it's the saying i always i think i coined this actually that's what i'm trying to say is the one thing man can learn from his history

is the man never learns from his history wow that was a good one that you coined. That's how we keep going around, baby. I'm going to quote you. Go ahead. I think I modified it from someone else's quote, but that one's mine. The man never learns from his history, but that's the one thing he can learn, but he'll never learn it. And so therefore he's redundant in the recycling of it. Hopefully not. Without people like yourselves that write positive books and teach us and lift us and people like me that try and do social justice interviews and stuff like that. We're trying to lifting all we can. Yeah, I'm optimistic, though. I think that I think it's going to work out.

It's just painful, just like it was in the Civil War. There were people that were fighting against each other. That's the cliche. But even in like sewing circles, the women couldn't speak to each other because they were on opposite sides. And it's the same thing. I talk to people all the time that talk about on Facebook, they had to defriend someone because they just are, there's that gulf between them is so wide. I stabbed someone in my croquet group. I just had to do it. You stabbed someone? No'm just kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding the joke the joke is that i would be in a croquet group okay i might

expand my horizons learn some new skills yeah yeah yeah i'm up here in utah visiting right now and they and they quilt a lot up here you go in the wall yeah you go in the walmart so they have like whole sections for quilting and stuff like that. Things I would be amiss at letting you get out of not explaining. You have two beavers and several muskrats. What the hell is going on over there? I live in Litchfield County, way up in Connecticut, almost in Massachusetts. And one night we came home and there was this gigantic beaver walking across. And we realized we have this whole menagerie down in our cattle pond.

Yeah, it's really cool. So are these things in the house? No. Oh, you thought they were our pets? I don't know. I'm just asking the questions. No. This is just in your bio.

I don't know the context. They live in the pond. Okay. And when you go down there, they get alarmed and they slap their tails on the water yeah see i was curious there's this gal that i follow on tiktok and she literally has a beaver as a pet in her house no yes yes yes what is her really wait i'd have to find her you met you you probably search for it by the thing but if you want i'll try and find her in my follows but she literally has a beaver in a house and this thing is it's fun to watch but you also watch it and go i don't know the authorities of animal control so this this

beaver will take she evidently what she does she fills the tub kind of partially so he can go you know feel like a beaver that's horrible yeah but this beaver is funny he like takes everything and puts it in the tub so he's like the toilet plunger he'll have in the he'll have a whole tub filled with all the stuff from the house especially wood products because he's he'll take the rug and drag it and he's trying to build a dam because that's he's trying to do beaver stuff instinct yeah so it's it's interesting to watch i'm always like challenged by i'm like i don't know if this is completely appropriate but it's like george the monkey have you seen him no oh

tiktok yes tiktok is full of interesting things my daughter actually just blew up on TikTok. Oh, did she? Congratulations. She's a huge star on TikTok now. Yeah. She's Markel and she does mouth acting. Oh, wow. Yeah. You have to check it out.

I'll have to check it out. I don't even know what that is. TikTok is so fun. I've got a few moms that they just got a TikTok account so they could watch their kids. I'll make sure they didn't get in any trouble or any weirdos started hitting on them. And they're now bigger than their kids and their kids are pissed at them. The parents are the parents are the mom is more engaging and more followers. They're just killing it. Their kids like, Hey mom, it's hard on Tik TOK. It's really hard. You have to hit it and then you're golden but yeah it's good to know these aren't wandering around your house so the muskrats and the two

beavers are down at the lake of the pond and they're yes so walking around with leashes on these babies and then you've got your human dog oliver now this is a dog is that correct he's a mini golden doodle yeah Yeah. But he came out bigger. He's a boy. So he's bigger. There you go. That's awesome. I've been referred to as a human dog, but that's on Tinder.

Now we know. So now all we need to do for the rest of your bio is get that 50th language in there. Martha, it's been wonderful to spend time with you today. Give us your plugs and whatever out you want to do for us on the book to get people to buy it. I just started a TikTok channel. I have one post and I have seven followers. So anything we could do there, let's plug it. What's the, uh, at on there, whatever it's called. It's Martha, Martha Kelly author. Um, it's just one

sad post. It's a good post. My daughter did it for me, but, and then I'm on Instagram, Martha Hall Kelly, also Facebook and Twitter, pretty much everything. So I'm out there. There you go. Martha, it's been wonderful to have you spend time with us today. Thanks for coming by. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. And to my audience, be sure to check it out.

We've left some teasers for you. Going to pick this book up, get this baby. It comes out, released tomorrow, March 30th, 2021. Grab, pre-order the book if you want. You'll be the first in your book club to read it and you get to tell everybody what really happens in the story. If you're one of those

spoilers, I'm one of those guys who told my younger brother there wasn't a Santa or a tooth fairy when I found out because I'm that kind of guy. But maybe you don't spoil the book for your friends, but I'll leave that up to you guys. But order the book up so you can be the first on your block to say you read it sounds like an awesome stuff of course you can check out the other books in the series as well go to youtube.com for just chris boss to see the video version that you can also go to goodreads.com for just chris foss and all the different groups we have on instagram

linkedin facebook there's a whole bunch over there just search for him and all that good stuff wear your mask stay safe and we'll see you guys next time