Hello my darling readers!

I am so excited for this book to launch. I’ve been talking about it for years, pretty much since I finished Knightess. It is another story that was just bursting to get out of me, like The Last Farm. In November of 2024 I finally sat down and put the story to paper. It’s been a long process to get to launch, but here is the moment! You can see the cover. You can soon put in your pre-orders. And then please save two very important dates, because this is going to be the coolest launch I’ve ever done. But let’s slow down a minute…you need to know why this story is so close to my heart.

Once upon a time, I wanted to learn more about my dad’s hometown of Mary D. It is a little “patch town” in the middle of Schuylkill County, deep in the heart of coal country. My family has lived there for generations and several relatives still live there today. Well, like all diligent researchers, I checked Wikipedia. There was only a few sentences about the town. Not much to go on. A broader search revealed just one paragraph in a Time Magazine article from 1938. It described an incident where the entire town banded together to blow up the local coal mine.

That little paragraph inspired me. What would drive a town to band together like that? The coal mine was the basis of their livelihoods. Well, as I asked questions and dove into old newspaper articles, the story emerged. The entire town was threatened by the mine in 1938. Their water supply, their backyards, their bootleg coal holes, even their houses, which shook as the company blasted what they had a legal right to take. Legal doesn’t always seem fair though, does it? We can see it happening today, as transmission lines and data centers pop up for “the good of the public” and eminent domain looms like a beast in the shadows. Well, the little town of Mary D didn’t accept it, and they took matters into their own hands in what turned out to be a precedent-setting sequence of events.

Patch Town tells the story of this town, interwoven with my fictional characters and their deep emotional issues. You have a pregnant housewife, struggling to make ends meet after her alcoholic husband leaves her. You have a drifter running from his past. You have temptation, love, questions of loyalty…everything you are used to seeing in my writing that hopefully keeps you on the edge of your seat.

My great-grandfathers were bootleg coal miners in Mary D. The stories laced within the novel have traces of tales that were told to me by my dad, my grandmother, my uncle, my aunts, and other family members. This novel hits me emotionally at a deeper level though. I desperately wanted to get it done and have my grandmother read it. I told her about it before I had ever typed a word, and she said “I want to read that one.” But I didn’t get it done in time. I literally typed the last words of the draft and sent this story to my editor on the day my grandmother passed. I like to think that she can now read it with clearer eyes.

In celebration of the town that inspired so much of this novel, I am in the process of planning the coolest launch party ever. On March 29, the Mary D Fire Company is hosting a spaghetti dinner from 11:30-3, and I will be there to speak and sign my book! I will tell a few tales about the history of this little town, focusing of course on the era surrounding my novel. And you can get your lunch and relax while actually benefitting the town itself by supporting the fire company. How fun is that? And yes, you will be able to buy the book at the event, which is just days before the official launch of April 1. So save the dates! It is going to be so much fun.

Yours,

J.A. Stein