Eastchester Author's Debut Novel Selected for 'The Big Read'

“The idea came to me out of nowhere,” said Eastchester native and author Andi L. Rosenthal about her first book, the novel The Bookseller’s Sonnets.

Selected for the Eastchester Big Read, The Bookseller’s Sonnets was published in September 2010 by O Books. During the Big Read, everyone from senior citizens and book clubs to high school students and their parents will read the novel and meet with the author for discussions and question-and-answer sessions. Rosenthal will take part in the community-wide reading event on April 11 at the Eastchester Public Library.

The inspiration for her novel came while Rosenthal was in graduate school. She was taking inventory in the bookstore where she worked when she began wondering what would happen if she came across an old manuscript, a historically significant manuscript written by someone whose voice was considered lost.

“I was studying the religious mystics of England at the time—the women whose voices never really made it into the body of literature,” Rosenthal said. “This is when I became particularly interested in Margaret More.”

Margaret More was the daughter of Thomas More, counselor to King Henry VIII during the English Reformation. More was beheaded when he refused to swear allegiance to Henry as head of the English church.

“More had a close relationship with her father, as I’d had with mine. I focused on More in 1994 and this was the real beginning of the book.”

After graduate school, Rosenthal worked in marketing and communications at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

“Since it was a new museum, I had the opportunity to learn about almost every facet of museum work,” Rosenthal said. That experience gave rise to the novel’s protagonist, Jill, who encounters a rare manuscript. In her quest to authenticate it, Jill discovers connections between Catholic England of the 16th century and the 20^th century Nazi atrocities.

Storytelling comes naturally to Rosenthal. “My father was a homicide detective who loved to tell stories, and my mother is a scholar, so I have a rich heritage.”

She began the real writing of the book in 2005, after a series of unfortunate events: a broken engagement, the sudden death of her father weeks later, and returning to her job only to face a layoff.

“I borrowed a laptop computer from my cousin, wrote the first word of the book, and didn’t stop. I wrote every day,” she said. “I had been writing the sonnets all along; they were finished. So now I had to weave the story around them.”

Rosenthal finished The Bookseller’s Sonnets on Father’s Day, 2005.

Although written for adults, Rosenthal said the book has generated a buzz among high school students and young adult readers.

“I’ve heard of students as young as 10 and 11-years old reading it.”

Rosenthal is thrilled to have The Bookseller’s Sonnets selected for the Big Read.

“There isn’t a day in my life I’ve gone without reading,” she said. “I tell my students that reading and writing gives people a chance to try on different lives and visit different time periods in history.”