Guest Post | Digging Deeper with Women’s Fiction by Sheridan Lee

I grew up surrounded by Christian Romance novels.

My mum’s a qualified librarian with many overflowing bookshelves, and I’ve been a book nerd for as long as I can recall. However, it’s not until recent years I’ve craved reading about deeper life issues and gravitated toward Women’s Fiction novels.

I filled my teen years with a heavy homework load because of my perfectionist propensities, and hours of lying on my tummy on my bed, legs kicked in the air behind me, flipping through thousands of pages. Reading was my superpower. And many times, an escape from the difficulties I faced with school bullying. At the height of my struggles, I read The Zion Covenant series by Bodie Thoene and drew strength from the characters suffering through the second world war.

Several years later, I married Mr Wonderful and before long traded reading for breeding. My first three daughters arrived within three years of each other, so they filled my time with nappies, giggles and a lot of dirty laundry. When my fifth daughter arrived, my eldest was nine and a half, and I had an epiphany: I could delegate some straightforward tasks to the children and grab half an hour of reading.

When my youngest was two, I discovered the Kindle app.

My “half hour of power” grew to stolen moments of reading on my phone while I folded washing, cooked dinner, home schooled the younger girls and “took a break” from crunching the accounts for our business. I may or may not have washed dishes with my phone propped up on an oven mitt where I could slip off my rubber glove and swipe the screen during a gripping novel I had to read.
Since re-discovering my love for reading, my preferences have also changed. I still read a lot of romance, and appreciate a less-intense read, especially an engaging rom-com. But it’s the “true-to-life” stories which capture my attention and imagination these days. And Women’s Fiction ticks this box so well.

It’s also a genre I now write.

Perhaps the peace in my marriage and home—thanks to my amazing Saviour—give me the confidence to tackle the harder topics because I find it a joy to write stories about women rediscovering who they are after their life implodes. I’ve spoken with women dealing with similar issues, and knowing I offer hope in my novels to those who might want to give up, blesses my heart.

My novels, Punctured Heart and Wounded Soul, are the first two books in The Tellarine Series, and deal with a slew of heavier topics. Despite the weightier issues, my books offer readers light in the darkness. Along with fun banter between characters, the romance novel addict in me won, and threads of romance are weaved throughout the series set in the fictional Australian town of Tellarine.

Do you enjoy novels which address intense topics and dig deeper into the human experience?