Thursday, August 28, 2025

Blog Tour: The Blackest Time by Ken Tentarelli



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The Blackest Time

A Novel of Florence During the Black Plague

by Ken Tentarelli



September 29th - October 10th, 2025

Publication Date: September 25th, 2025
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Pages: 268
Genre: Historical Fiction


Set in the 1300s during the devastating black plague, The Blackest Time is a powerful tale of compassion, love, and the human spirit’s ability to endure immense adversity.


Gino, the central character, is a young man who leaves his family’s farm to find work in a pharmacy in Florence. His experiences show us how people coped in the most horrific time in history.


Shortly after Gino arrived in the city, two years of incessant rain destroyed crops in the countryside, leading to famine and despair in the city. Gino offers hope and help to the suffering— he secures shelter for a woman forced to leave her flooded farm, rescues a young girl orphaned by the plague, and aids others who have lost everything.


The rains had barely ended when the plague hit the city, exposing the true character of its people. While some blamed others for the devastation, the story focuses on the compassionate acts of neighbors helping each other overcome fear and suffering. Doctors bravely risk infection to care for their patients. A woman healer, wrongly accused of witchcraft and driven from the city, finds a new beginning in a village where her skills were appreciated.


Despite the hardships, love blossoms between Gino and a young woman he met at the apothecary. Together they survive, finding strength in each other and hope in a world teetering on the edge. 


The Blackest Time is a testament to the strength of the human spirit in overcoming unimaginable tragedy.



Praise for The Blackest Time:


The complexities and the helplessness of the plague is captured exquisitely in The Blackest Time.
~ The Independent Book Review


Tentarelli’s ability to immerse readers in medieval Florence’s sights, sounds, and struggles makes this a novel worth diving into.
~ The Literary Titan


The historically rigorous description of the apothecary profession, including the guild that regulates it, is impressively presented by the author, whose research is impeccable.

~ Kirkus Reviews


This is truly an uplifting and edifying narrative of the inherent ability of mankind to rise above all the worst trials and tribulations. I enjoyed this story immensely and highly recommend it.

~ Readers Favorite 5 star review



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Ken Tentarelli

Ken in Florence

Ken Tentarelli is a frequent visitor to Italy. In travels from the Alps to the southern coast of Sicily, he developed a love for its history and its people. 

He has studied Italian culture and language in Rome and Perugia, background he used in his award-winning series of historical thrillers set in the Italian Renaissance. He has taught courses in Italian history spanning time from the Etruscans to the Renaissance, and he's a strong advocate of libraries and has served as a trustee of his local library and officer of the library foundation.

When not traveling, Ken and his wife live in beautiful New Hampshire.

Author Links:

Website • Facebook • BookBub • Instagram




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Blog Tour: Then Came The Summer Snow by Trisha Pritikin



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Then Came The Summer Snow

by Trisha Pritikin



Thursdays, September 25th - October 16th, 2025

Publication Date: September 15th, 2025
Publisher: Moonshine Cove Press
Pages: 300+
Genre: Historical Fiction / Dark Humour



When radioactive fallout covers Richland, Washington in the 1950s, a concerned mother gathers her courage to fight the atomic bomb testing at the Nevada Test Site to save her son and others.



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Trisha Pritikin



Trisha Pritikin is an internationally known advocate for fallout-exposed populations downwind of nuclear weapons production and testing sites. She is an attorney and former occupational therapist.

Trisha was born and raised in Richland, the government-owned atomic town closest to the Hanford nuclear weapons production facility in southeastern Washington State. Hanford manufactured the plutonium used in the Trinity Test, the world’s first test of an atomic bomb, detonated July 16,1945 at Alamogordo, NM, and for Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that decimated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Beginning in late 1944, and for more than forty years thereafter, Hanford operators secretly released millions of curies of radioactive byproducts into the air and to the waters of the Columbia River, exposing civilians downwind and downriver. Hanford’s airborne radiation spread across eastern Washington, northern Oregon, Idaho, Western Montana, and entered British Columbia.

Trisha suffers from significant thyroid damage, hypoparathyroidism, and other disabling health issues caused by exposure to Hanford’s fallout in utero and during childhood. Infants and children are especially susceptible to the damaging effects of radiation exposure.

Trisha’s first book, The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice,  published in 2020 by the University Press of Kansas, has won multiple awards, including San Francisco Book Festival, 1st place (history); Nautilus Silver award (journalism and investigative reporting); American Book Fest Book Awards Finalist (US History); Eric Hoffer Awards, Shortlist Grand Prize Finalist; and Chanticleer International Book Awards, 1st Place, (longform journalism). The Hanford Plaintiffs was released in Japanese in 2023 by Akashi Shoten Publishing House, Tokyo.

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Tour Schedule

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