Promoting Gillain Marchenko

I recently came across the writer Gillian Marchenko. She's an author who's struggling to find an agent and a publisher for her book. Here's what her website had to say about her and the book she's written, Krasata.

The day Gillian Marchenko was told her daughter had Down syndrome, she was standing by her crib alone in the former Soviet Union and let go of of her baby’s hand and ran out of the room. Not only did she run from her child that day, but in the months to follow, Gillian also ran from the God whom she had known on a first name basis since she was 15 years old. Gillian dove into a staggering grief over the child she expected and hid in fear of a brokenness that she had, come to find out, carried with her all her life.

KRASATA (“beauty” in Russian), a Memoir of Motherhood, Down Syndrome, and Surprising Beauty starts with a mother whose faith nearly breaks by the birth of her daughter with special needs. With humor and inspiration, spanning two continents, the story ends with the unexpected beauty of an unwanted child pointing her mother back to what matters most. KRASATA is about redemptive love both between mother and daughter, and child and God.

Gillian recently won most promising new writer at the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference in California.

In the past, I have done small things (such as liking someone on Facebook, putting in a blurg on this blog, following on Twitter, etc.) for author's who are trying to find an avenue into the mainstream. Over the past decade I've read around 100 books written by self-published authors or printed by smaller independent publishing firms and have written about most of those books on different sites.

I have not read Marchenko's book so I can't say if it's good or not. The material sounds interesting and I think it would be a book I might enjoy, but since I haven't read it, I can't say. I'm writing about this now on my blog because the author is having a contest for a $100 Amazon gift card and that would really help me out and allow me to get some gifts for family member's upcoming birthdays. So, yeah, this is a shill post, but it's one for a person who's just looking for her break, something I can really relate with.