Remember when you were a kid and people were always asking what you wanted to be when you grew up? I never had a good answer. As much as I loved history and devoured books, I hadn’t ever given a thought to becoming an author.
Fast forward a couple decades and I was looking to transition from full-time mom of four to part-time employee when our youngest started second grade. Having been blessed with a keen eye for proofreading, I found the ideal job as a proofreader for a major newspaper chain in our state. After proofreading thousands of articles from staff writers—who all had degrees related to that field—I figured out the formula for writing articles and threw my name in the hat when the paper was looking for stringers (freelance journalists).
Our newspapers were shut down after 9/11 and shortly after I jumped completely into freelance proofreading and writing. I came to realize after a few years that nearly every journalist harbors a desire to write a book. After four years and countless rewrites, my first book, A World Such as Heaven Intended, was published. One and done. My life was complete. Or so I thought.
Within a week of its publication, readers were asking when the sequel would be coming out, so I got to work creating the next book. I streamlined the process and began writing Catholic historic fiction—sweet romances—in earnest, while still doing freelance writing on the side. Nine years later books number eight and nine are in the publishing process.
This career has allowed me—thanks in part to being a member of the Catholic Writers Guild—to have some of the most amazing experiences, including meeting remarkable Catholics from all walks of life. One person in particular is Eduard Habsburg, the archduke of Austria and Hungary’s Ambassador to the Holy See. I had the pleasure of working with Eduard on his children’s book Dubbie: The Double-Headed Eagle, and my husband and I visited him at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, D.C., enjoyed a nice private lunch together in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol building, and attended one of his presentations on Blessed Karl, a relative who he’s praying will be canonized as a saint in the not-too-distant future.
It was an honor when Eduard reached out to me earlier this year asking if I would read his latest book, The Habsburg Way: 7 Rules for Turbulent Times, and endorse it if I felt inclined to do so. Of course, I was more than happy to do that and spent time during a recent four-day silent Ignatian retreat reading his work. As a Catholic, as a parent, as a history buff, the book drew me in the moment I opened it. My five-star review is below:
As a lover of history and all-things royal, I thoroughly enjoyed The Habsburg Way: 7 Rules for Turbulent Times. Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria and Hungary’s Ambassador to the Holy See, has a clever way of writing that makes learning of his storied family’s history so interesting yet quite entertaining. He has no issuing poking a bit of fun at his ancestors (everything from the fabled Habsburg jaw to the inbreeding between cousins in centuries long past). Talk about name dropping, the archduke has a myriad of historical figures in his family tree from Holy Roman Emperors, Frederick III and Rudolph I to name a couple, to Queen Marie Antoinette, to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination is said to have sparked the start of WWI.
All that aside, the book itself offers an in-depth presentation on seven rules that the Habsburg family has lived by essentially since their first historical mention from the year 950. These rules are simple enough and still guide the family all these years later: Get Married, Be Catholic, Believe in the Empire, Stand for Law and Justice, Know Who You Are, Be Brave in Battle, Die Well. If every family had a set of standards like this that they lived by, what a different world this would be. As for myself, it’s an honor to be friends with Archduke Eduard Habsburg, who is a shining example of leadership with grace, not only as the head of his family, but in his public role as well.