The Fox Cities Book Festival went the route of mainly local authors and a book fair versus more National authors with in person speaking events. I will be honest, I am not a fan of the new format. I want to hear authors speak about their books in a room and not just do meet and greets.
They did offer a few author speaking events and one of them was Jennifer Chiaverini. Her latest book, Switchboard Soldiers, is on my to read list. As much as I wanted to see her speak, I was not a fan of the venue, The Brigade in Neenah mainly due to lack of parking. Thanks to the Book Festival letting us know where to park, I decided to go. It was free after all.
Jennifer Chiaverini lives in Madison and is originally from Pennsylvania. She told the story of how she met her husband, went from a really hard to pronounce German name to an even harder to pronounce Italian name, and moving to Wisconsin where we all would have been able to pronounce the German name.
Switchboard Soldiers is about the women that were recruited to be switchboard operators in Europe during WWI. She discovered this little, relatively unknown piece of history while researching another book and kept it in her back pocket. I love when authors get an idea when they go down a research rabbit hole.
The hour long conversation was filled with laughter as well. Jennifer is a great storyteller and she probably could have entertained us for hours but there was another author in the auditorium later in the day.
Afterwards, I waited in line to have her sign my copy of Switchboard Soldiers that I bought before going in to the presentation. I did it right as you had to buy the book first and then wait in line to have it signed. I could skip the first line and had to wait in the second line. This was especially important since there was not a lot of space upstairs for author signings and book selling.
I am glad I went. Hopefully in the future, the book festival will go back to author events at various locations throughout the Fox Valley so I can spend my Saturday author hopping.
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