Author

Rita Dragonette is the author of the award-winning debut novel The Fourteenth of September, a woman’s story of Vietnam. She is currently working on three other books: Last Sunset in San Miguel, a novel that pays homage to The Sun Also Rises about expats chasing their last dreams in San Miguel de Allende; Violating the Prime Directive, a memoir in essays; and Master Race, a WWII novel about the impact of war through the matrilineal line, following an American Army nurse and a German woman recruited into the Lebensborn program. She lives and writes in Chicago, where she also hosts literary salons to showcase authors and their new books to avid readers.

If you devoured Kristin Hannah’s The Women, you’ll also love this novel about the brave women of the Vietnam War.

A Coming of Conscience Novel

In 1969, as mounting tensions over the Vietnam War are dividing America, a young woman in college on an Army scholarship risks future and family to secretly join the anti-war counterculture and is ultimately forced to make a life-altering choice as fateful as that of any male Lottery draftee.

“The ebb and flow between a nineteen-year-old’s mistakes, vulnerability, and surprising moments of insight ring achingly true. The Fourteenth of September is a moving tribute to lives altered by chance. The draft lottery and its rippling effects highlight a generation that came into adulthood amid devastating uncertainty.”

–– Foreword Clarion Reviews

“Rita Dragonette has written a strong-hearted and authentic novel about a naive young girl and her struggle to reconcile the dissonance between the world she sees and the world she was raised to believe in. Judy is truly a quiet hero; you won’t forget her.”

–– Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

For a generation of dreamers this last one really must come true.

In a homage to the lost generation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, RACHEL BARNES and her circle of Boomer expats in idyllic San Miguel struggle to make their last dreams come true before it’s too late.

After a wrenching betrayal fiftyish Rachel leaves her husband and career, transforming her life one last time by moving to the expat capital, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. There, inspired by SYLVIA the enigmatic bullfighting aficionado, she opens La Querencia--a bar named for the stage near the end of the fight when the bull breaks away, assuming he’s won, and in that moment lives the best time of his life.

To Rachel’s chagrin, a circle of her Boomer friends have followed her. Wounded by the unmet expectations of purpose and passion they were raised to expect, they form a community of tangled relationships, each one seeking to fulfill their final dream, at last. 

When an unwanted visitor charges into this delicate balance of history and hope, an unstoppable chain reaction of tragedies culminates during the Day of the Dead fiesta, shattering illusions and making the friends question why they thought their lives could really change.