Past perfect

MOSES LAKE — You could say A.L. Sowards is living in the past.

“I’ve done a lot of World War II (stories),” she said. “But I've also done medieval and one that was 16th century. I kind of like to immerse readers in historical time periods.”

Sowards, a 1999 Moses Lake High School graduate whom locals may remember by her maiden name Amanda Grant, is about to see her 13th novel printed. Her métier is historical fiction, which should not be confused with historical romance, a genre in which the historical setting is sometimes merely a backdrop for a love story.

“I wouldn't call my books historical romance; I’d call them historical fiction with a romantic subplot,” she said. “The line between historical romance and historical fiction can be really fuzzy. I would say I fall on the historical fiction side.”

Sowards’ family came to Moses Lake when she was 3, she said. She attended Moses Lake schools and competed both on the MLHS and the Manta Rays swim teams. She went on to attend Brigham Young University, where she studied political science and English.

“Political science sounds kind of an off-the-wall thing for a writer, but it was good in teaching me how to research and evaluate sources. So I'm glad for that. And then English was good for learning proper grammar. My editor still has plenty to do when I give her my manuscripts, but she says I'm one of her cleaner authors, so I guess the English helped.”

Sowards, who now lives in Alaska with her husband, their twin daughters and their son, sold her first book two weeks after the twins were born, she said, after the publisher had sat on it for 18 months.

That novel, “Espionage,” a spy story set during World War II, came off the press in 2012, but it had its beginnings much earlier.

“I actually started writing (it) when I was in high school in Moses Lake. We had a creative project for one of our class assignments. I think it was my junior year English class, and I wrote a short story. And I later turned that into the first chapter of my first novel. I had to rewrite it a few times, but eventually, it came out.”

Getting it right

Getting the history right is very important to her, Sowards said, and she researches every time and place she sets a book in extensively.

“I find that the more I write, the more picky I become about historical research,” she said. “It can ruin a book if something's not accurate. I don't claim to get everything perfect, because there's so many things that I think authors don't even know that you need to research, but I put in a good-faith effort, and I try to do a lot. My last book that came out in March, somebody had asked me about how many books I read, and I counted and there were like, 40 books that I referenced. So I do try to do a thorough job.”

Some time periods are more conducive to exhaustive research than others, she said. The 20th century is easy because so much has been written about it, by historians whose primary goal is accuracy. The Middle Ages, on the other hand, are much less well-documented and sometimes it’s hard to tell where fact ends and legend begins.

Two of Sowards’ books are set in Thebes in the 14th century, and she said researching the background for those required a certain amount of extrapolation.

“There was some information known about it in letters written between the people who were there and the people who were back in what's now Spain. And they said So-and-So was involved, and they were trying to get his lands confiscated for them — if they won their lands back, they wanted to take his too because they felt like he betrayed them — and there were all these holes in the letters. So I plugged in fictional aspects to kind of stick with what was known and then fill in the whole story, because the whole story has been lost to history.”

The meticulous research must appeal to readers, because Sowards has a 4.58-out-of-five-star average rating on the book review website Goodreads and about the same on Amazon.

“Very masterfully written,” wrote one reviewer on Goodreads of “Of Sword and Shadow,” Sowards’ first novel set in Thebes. “The combination of slavery, soldiers, masters, rulers, freedom, identity, woven together with a tender story of friendship and budding love was wonderful.”

“I loved the action and adventure, the characters and character growth,” read a review on Amazon. “It was obvious that the history was well-researched, and yet the author wove the historical details expertly in the story.”

Sowards’ new book comes out Oct. 10, according to Amazon. It’s called “Codes of Courage,” and like the first, is set during World War II. It involves a German U-boat sailor, an Austrian refugee working on a tramp steamer and a codebreaker at Britain’s wartime cryptography office at Bletchley Park.

“My history teacher in high school, Mr. Frederick, he suggested I read this book about it,” Sowards said. “It was called ‘The Ultra Secret’ and it was about the code-breaking. That historical interest of mine has been around since high school, and I finally found a book that I could bring that into.”

A faith motif

Most of her novels have an adventure story with a romantic subplot, Sowards said, but there’s another current that runs through them as well: faith. Sowards is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and so Christian themes are usually present in her work.

“A lot of my themes are finding faith in God and strength through faith,” she said. “(In) some of them forgiveness is the big theme; in some of them, it's finding faith. Usually the history is at the forefront, like when I wanted to tell a story about the siege of Vienna. That's the main thing, but I also have sibling relationships in that book, and having faith even when things are hard, that type of thing.”

“I think that there's a need for faith in our world and talking about the strength you can get from that,” she added. “Whether you're a slave growing up in the Middle Ages, or someone whose home is being besieged or someone in the middle of World War II, you can find strength from that.”

For more information or to buy Sowards’ books, visit her website at www.alsowards.com.