Julie Valerie Books In Order

Publication Order of Village of Primm Books

Julie Valerie
Author Julie Valerie serves on the board of directors of James River Writers and is the founder of the 85K Writing Challenge. Julie received a master’s degree in education, got an editing certificate from the University of Chicago Graham School, and a bachelor of fine arts in fashion. Julie is also certified in wilderness first aid.

She enjoys the study of wine, traveling, books, and hikes on the Appalachian Trail. Julie is also an avid Scrabble player and once played QWERTY on a triple word. She loses her ability to spell when she writes with a Sharpie marker.

Julia is a voracious reader and has reviewed over two hundred books in her genre and won the BookSparks Summer Reading Challenge Grand Prize in the year 2015.

Julie married her college sweetheart, and together, they have four kids (two sons, two daughters) and two English Labradors (one chocolate and one yellow).

Julie wrote for a long time before she ever thought of herself as a writer. While she was growing up, a spiral notebook was a novel that was just waiting to be created, and she almost always had a spiral notebook novel that was “in progress” inside her backpack. After she finished college, she wrote a “real” full-length novel, but it is a novel that shall remain in the drawer.

Once her youngest child began kindergarten, the house finally grew quiet enough for her to reconnect with the writer within her. After she had given a lot to her family, it was her time, finally. She began writing for her book blog and was penning her second novel as she read and reviewed two hundred books in her genre, women’s fiction.

As a book reviewer, she began writing about books she was passionate about. Like a lot of book bloggers, however, she soon lost control of her reading since she had a tough time saying no to requests on book reviews. She had a bunch of books being sent to her from publishing houses, and authors were sending her more and more review queries.

Julie read books that appealed to her, but quickly found the time she used to spend browsing shelves at her favorite bookstore just about stopped entirely since her to-be-read pile was so very long. She got so “booked” with books that she lost her intimate moments with bookshelves, as she would quietly hand pick her next read. So many books, yet so little time. For a while, she was getting around twenty queries a day, far more than she would ever be able to read.

The other problem is all the reading she had to do took away precious time for writing.

On her blog, she will fall silent on books that she didn’t really connect with rather than just use her blog to bash a book openly. Julie still indicates areas of the novel that are lacking while still noting valuable merits of a novel.

As a writer, while she reads for enjoyment, she will also read in order to study the craft of writing.

As she was writing “Holly Banks Full of Angst”, the first character she had in her mind was Mary-Margaret St. James, the villain. She spoke so clearly to Julie and wrote one entire first draft of the novel in second person perspective from Mary-Margaret’s “voice”. It gave her the space and time to figure out truly who she was, what her motivations were, and hopefully capture her in such a way that readers would enjoy.

Mary-Margaret spoke so loudly that Julie had to quiet her before she could be placed down on the page, and it took quite a few revisions to figure out who she was and what she wanted during the first book. Mary-Margaret was the device Julie used for exploring, through modern motherhood, satire, and the impossible standards that we place on ourselves, with the village being a close second.

A lot of the inspiration for the novel comes from her being a mother herself and experiencing all the wonderful and wild zaniness that Mother Life will bring. Holly is close to Julie’s heart since she tries very hard to succeed among women she thinks are more accomplished at motherhood than her. One thing Holly doesn’t realize is that all moms try their hardest in the high-stakes game of motherhood, and that most moms are less than perfect mothers looking for mostly happy in a pretty good life.

Her debut novel, called “Holly Banks Full of Angst”, was released in the year 2019.

“Holly Banks Full of Angst” is the first novel in the “Village of Primm” series and was released in the year 2019. Holly Banks really couldn’t have made a worse first impression on the apparently perfect mothers in the Village of Primm, her new affluent community. It turns out that wearing her pink piggy pajama bottoms while she was dropping her kindergartener off late on the first day of school was not at all her best look.

Not to mention the fact that Holly is worried that her husband could be having an affair, her hard-won film degree has been collecting dust, and she cannot get her daughter to quit sucking her thumb. As if that weren’t bad enough, the power-hungry PTA president totally has got it in for her.

Even worse, Holly’s natural penchant for drama lands her right in the middle of a neighborhood mystery, right when her crazy mom turns up in Primm “to help”. Through everything, Holly starts to understand her neighbors might be equally flawed as, and possibly even wackier than, she is. It leaves her wondering if there really is such a thing as a perfect mom?

Readers enjoyed the novel, liking the laugh out loud moments that Holly finds herself in as well as the story line. Fans felt like Julie had gotten into their brains and knew what all of their insecurities about becoming a mother. This novel is heart-warming, light-hearted, as well as both funny and fun. The novel is also quick paced, making it tough to put down for too long.