Blind Speed Dating #57

Title: DISCOVERING THE REAL MILLIE

Genre: YA Contemporary/Historical

Word Count: 55,000

Query:

All dolled up in her vintage garb, Millie Sinclair attends the most talked-about charity event in Newport High Society - the Roaring Twenties Gala. But when she puts on her great-grandmother’s headpiece and is transported back to 1925, she doesn’t only step into her great grandmother’s t-strap shoes, she steps into the worst night of her life.

Mistaken for her great-grandmother, Millie discovers the conflicting emotions she feels in the present are what her great-grandmother lived in the past. A past she took to the grave. Millie meets her great-grandmother’s secret lover, discovers her soon to be fiancé is a silent partner to one of the top bootleggers in Rhode Island and is bribing a crooked sheriff.

In an attempt to change the past and give her great-grandmother the true love she was denied, Millie runs out on her marriage proposal, badmouths the sheriff and stands up to the KKK.

When Millie returns to the present unable to change the past, she has a choice of her own to make. Should she be with Jimmy, the Harvard accepted, Rolex wearing charmer. Or Shane, a brash, abrasive construction worker with a big mouth and an even bigger heart.

The past was not what she expected, but it might just hold the answers to her future.

First 250:

1925

The blaring jazz music from the grand dining room faded as she ran from the cottage she’d spent every summer at since she was born. The house, while she loved it, had a habit of making her feel as if she were suffocating.

Summers were supposed to be relaxing and fun, but when your parents wanted to pawn you off on one of the most eligible bachelors of Newport’s high society, it was exhausting. Richard Hollingsworth, eldest son to tobacco magnate John Hollingsworth and his socialite wife Helen, was everything her parents wanted for her. But, if Millie had to spend one more second listening to Richard and her father discuss their investments and the stock market, she was going to scream.

Instead of screaming she chose to sneak away. After all, she didn’t want to make a spectacle of herself. As she rounded the gardens, the beaded dress her mother insisted she wear to the dinner party, weighed heavy on its delicate straps. A shock to Millie since her mother was usually against anything ‘flapper like’. Her mother, unlike Millie, still preferred the elegance of the early part of the century.

“Darling it’s Coco Chanel,” her mother had said as she hung it in her dressing room as if it being designer made it okay.

Millie couldn’t deny its beauty. The white beads shimmered in the light of the setting sun and the black beads, strategically placed in an abstract design, appealed to her taste.