Commemorative Christmas Ornament Features Lumina Pavilion

The Lumina Pavilion on Wrightsville Beach is now featured on this lovely collectible commemorative Christmas ornament. The Christmas 2019 ornament is the first of its kind, offered by the Wrightsville Beach Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to enhance recreational opportunities while helping preserve and improve the area's beautiful coastal environment. It also seeks to provide assistance within the county to educational and care-giving organizations in need, especially during times of natural disaster. This ornament, and those that will follow annually, will help raise funds to support the mission. By joining the Foundation and by gifting or collecting their annual ornament, you will put the "YOU" in their organization to help achieve their goals.

Christmas 2019 

This lovely ornament was sent to me by one of the organizers of the Wrightsville Beach Foundation. She found a copy of LUMINA that I'd left in her Little Free Library and decided I needed an ornament of my own! How fitting it is that the first ornament of its kind is of Lumina in the same year my LUMINA was published. I am so honored and touched by Jody Becker's kindness and recognition of my work. The universe has a wonderful way of connecting her beings!

You can order your own ornament at wrightsvillebeachfoundation.org.

Upcoming LUMINA Events

August 21- Wednesday at 7 pm - Park Road Books in Charlotte, NC

August 25 - Sunday from 6-9 pm - Lumina Daze at the Blockade Runner in Wrightsville Beach, NC

October 5 - Saturday - Ol' Front Porch Music Festival in Oriental, NC

October 19 - Saturday - Valle Country Fair, Valle Crucis, NC

November 2 - Saturday - Persimmon Festival, Colfax, NC

November 10 - Sunday from 11-4 MADE 4 the Holidays at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville St., Greensboro, NC 27405

December 7 - Saturday from 10-3 - Holiday Market sponsored by the St. Francis Day School, 3506 Lawndale Dr., Greensboro, NC 27408

December 8 - Sunday from 11-4 MADE 4 the Holidays at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market, 501 Yanceyville St., Greensboro, NC 27405

To order your autographed copies of LUMINA, or to request an author visit, please visit the website at www.TheOneNovel.com.

Looking for LUMINA?

You are invited to the LUMINA Book Launch!

Tuesday, April 2, 2019 at 5:30 pm

St. Francis Episcopal Church Parish Hall

3506 Lawndale Drive, Greensboro, NC 27408

Bring a friend, invite your book club!

Wear your shagging shoes!

RSVP to mflinn56@gmail.com by March 27, 2019

Here is a list of other signings and bookstores where LUMINA is sold:

April 5-7, 2019: The Azalea Festival Street Fair

Front Street, Wilmington, NC 

Friday from 6-10 pm, Saturday from 10 am - 6 pm, and Sunday, from 10 am-6 pm

Look for Mary Flinn's tent on Front Street near Cape Fear Community College

Saturday, April 13, 2019 at 3 pm - Book talk and signing at Sunrise Books

1101 N. Main St. Suite 202, High Point, NC 27262

Tuesday, April 16 at 7 pm - Book talk and signing at Barnes & Noble

3102 Northline Avenue, Friendly Center, Greensboro, NC 27408

Tuesday, May 7 at 7 pm - Book talk and signing at Scuppernong Books

304 S. Elm St., Greensboro, NC 27401

Saturday, May 18 at 2 pm - Book talk and signing at Barnes & Noble

6835 Conservation Way, Mayfaire Town Centre, Wilmington, NC 28405

Saturday, June 13 - Lumina Day at the Wrightsville Beach Museum of History

Explore Lumina "back in the day" spanning each decade from 1905 until 1973

Time TBA: games for kids, book talk, dance exhibitions, and refreshments at the newly restored 1924 Bordeaux Cottage on the museum site at 303 West Salisbury Street, Wilmington, NC 28480

LUMINA is proudly sold at these independent bookstores in North Carolina:

Scuppernong Books - Greensboro

Sunrise Books  - High Point

BookMarks - Winston-Salem

Quail Ridge Books - Raleigh

Park Road Books - Charlotte

Pomegranate Books - Wilmington

Old Books on Front Street in Wilmington

You may purchase autographed copies or request a visit by Mary Flinn at TheOneNovel.com

LUMINA Coming April 1 - No Fooling!

LUMINA will be released April 1. 

Please check back in March for more details. Copies will be available at TheOneNovel.com, Amazon, in Kindle and Nook formats, and in bookstores worldwide by special order.

“It was, after all, eight o’clock. We were perfect for four more hours.”

In the summer of 1928, Lumina, known as the “Palace of Light,” is only reachable from Wilmington, North Carolina by trolley car, where it occupies the entire southern tip of Wrightsville Beach. The grandest beach pavilion on the East Coast creates the backdrop for this fictional tale of young people falling in love—not only with each other but with Lumina itself, where everything is magic from eight until midnight on Saturday nights.

As twenty-year-old Kip Meeks writes in his opening letter to his college pal Perry, “Lumina is the great equalizer for young people who are out for a bit of fun and to celebrate the happiness of youth. The best of the bands come there to play for the summer and thousands of people from all walks of life—tourists and locals, middle-class and aristocrats alike, arrive to dance the evening away on a Saturday night. Many a romance has been born at Lumina, I’ll tell you.” Kip chronicles the summer in weekly letters to Perry, who is laid up in Pinehurst with a broken leg, while Kip’s seventeen-year-old sister Sylvie keeps a diary account of the same events—meeting an heiress with a secret, the jazz explosion, a new dance, and plenty of old front porch gossip—creating a compelling glimpse into two families’ lives.

Fast forward ninety years to the summer of 2018. While going through her late mother Sylvie’s possessions, Anne Borden Montgomery (known from the pages of Flinn’s A Girl Like That) discovers a manuscript that was never published, a novel, compiled from her mother’s diary and her uncle’s letters. AB shares the story on her own front porch with her eager friends, Mr. May, Elle, and Nate, who take turns reading the story aloud, finding interesting parallels in their own lives while becoming acquainted with "new" old friends.