WHAT IF THE LIFE YOU WERE TAUGHT TO WANT WASN'T THE LIFE YOU WANTED?
Setting sail from Tahiti to France in 1866, La Liberation is a story of romance and longing - but also of self-worth, familial duty, sexuality, social exectation, cultural identity and personal liberation in a rapidly changing, globalizing world.
What makes a good daughter?
When does loyalty become self-betrayal?
What does a woman owe her family?
What happens when you begin questioning the beliefs that built your life?
Is marriage an obligation, an alliance, or an act of love?
THE STORY
Aata's future has already been decided.
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Her marriage to Jean-Louis will strength an important family alliance and take her from the island world she knows to a new life in France.
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She boards La Liberation expecting an ocean crossing.
Instead, the voyage becomes a crossing into an entirely different understanding of herself.
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Over months at sea, far from the expectations and familiar structures of home, Aata encounters people and possibilities that make it increasingly difficult to ignore the desires she has been taught to silence.
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Among them are Captain Frederick and First Mate Noah, mon whose presence complicates the boundaries between responsibility, attraction, loyalty, and freedom.
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By the time France appears on the horizon, the question is no longer simply whom Aata will marry.
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It is: Who will she become?
A ROMANCE ABOUT MORE THAN ROMANCE
THE WORLD OF LA LIBÉRATION
TAHITI. FRANCE. THE OPEN PACIFIC. 1866.
The Physical journey at the center of La Liberation mirrors Aata's internal one.
The ship becomes a world between worlds.
And sometimes it is only when we leave everything familiar behind that we discover which parts of our identify actually belong to us.
FOR READERS WHO LOVE...
Sweeping historical romance.
Strong, emotionally complex heroines.
Forbidden attraction and slow-burning tension.
Family expectations and arranged marriages.
Stories about identity and reinvention.
Women questioning the roles assigned to them.
Romance with psychological and philosophical depth.
WHY I WROTE LA LIBÉRATION
As an author - and through thears of working with people navigating major changes in their lives - I became fasinated by one question:
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What happens when a person realized that the life they have been dutifully building may not actually belong to them?
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La Liberation is a love story.
But beneath the romance is another kind of liberation:
the moment a woman begins to believe that her own desires deserve a voice.
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-Lesle Juvin-Acker, J.D.
QUESTION YOUR BELIEFS
Every Leslie Juvin-Acker book approaches this idea from a different direction.
Some explore beliefs through psychology. Some through careers, money, law, spirituality, education or human behavior. La Liberation explores them through love.
What have you been taught to believe about love, duty, and freedom?
And what might change if you questioned it?
