Character Spotlight ~ Rachel Hauck's Elle Garvey from Love Starts With Elle

Welcome to the first Character Spotlight post! The compassionate and thought provoking Rachel Hauck gets to play guinea pig for me! Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this little endeavour, especially any authors and/or characters you would like to see featured in this segment or ways to improve it. Send an email if you would prefer to relzreviewz @ gmail . com (minus spaces)

Today the spotlight shines on......................... Elle Garvey!

Rachel Hauck has a gift for creating genuine and engaging characters so over the next few weeks we are going to spend some time with Rachel as she chats about each one of her leading ladies, starting with Miss Elle Garvey of her recently released Love Starts With Elle.

Brief physical description:

Elle is a blonde, medium build, green eyes. Heath is "good looking." Fill in the blank. I don't do a whole lot on physical description because I see them more internally. It's really hard to maintain an image of them on the outside, but I see them more internally. Yet, I see them move and smile, hear them laugh and speak. But details, not so much.

When I had the video made for the book, the animator asked how to design Elle. I sent him pictures of Kate Hudson. Physically, she makes me think of Elle.

Rel here: Jim Caviezel is my choice for Heath ;-)

Strengths and weaknesses:

Elle's strength is her creativity. Her weakness is her lack of confidence in her ability.

Heath's strength is his decisiveness. He knows what he needs to do and does it. Weakness is.... Elle!

Quirk (if any):

Elle didn't really have a quirk, nor Heath. He does take up carving with a chain saw, but he learned how to do that as a kid.




Your inspiration for the character:

Elle inspired me. She came alive on the pages of Sweet Caroline and I knew she needed her own story. After that, I read a lot about art and artist, even painted a picture myself. I'm NO artist.

Background to the story:

When I realized Elle loses everything, I wanted to put her in a place of prayer. Pretty tricky, cause how do you write an interesting book where the character has nothing going on in her life but prayer.

Adding Heath's point of view, bringing his story to the page, helped broaden the scope so I could have Elle develop a routine of prayer.

I believe in prayer. It's important and so often we get swept away in the busyness of life, the "doing" we forget to just "be."

In the quiet, Elle discovered God's heart for her.

Thanks Rach - love what you have shared!

Check back next week as we delve into Caroline Sweeney from Rachel's Sweet Caroline.

Relz Reviewz Extras

Read my review of Love Starts With Elle

Watch the Elle book trailer

Visit Rachel's website and blog

Buy Love Starts With Elle at Amazon or Koorong