Maida Malby writes, reads, reviews, and lives Romance. The magic is in witnessing that love blossom within the pages of a book. People fall in love all around the world. I’d like readers of Carpe Diem Chroniclesto not only visit the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand when they read Boracay Vows, Singapore Fling, Samui Heat, and Palawan Promises, but also to experience the cultures through the languages, customs, and food I feature in them. That’s why, when I started writing, I’ve chosen to conjure the magic of traveling through books by setting my first series in my home region of Southeast Asia. There are a few others but I feel strongly about the need for many more books to take readers to the biggest continent on Earth without leaving their homes. Esguerra and her Romance Class cohorts’ works which always bring me home to the Philippines. There’s Sonali Dev’s angsty A Distant Heart which transported me to India and Hong Kong, Sherry Thomas’s epic The Hidden Blade and My Beautiful Enemy duology set in Imperial China, and Mina V. In reality, however, the US-centric world of Romancelandia has limited book travel options to Asia. I want to believe that this is the same for millions of readers all over the world. Truly, if there’s a special passport that gets stamped every time I travel in books, I would have to renew it every year.

Imagine how often I’ve been to England from reading books by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Barbara Cartland, Judith McNaught, Julie Garwood, and Johanna Lindsey. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence had me enthralled with the South of France years before I toured Europe in 1999. I had seen the grandeur of the Sydney Opera House through Emma Darcy’s Harlequin romances set in Australia before I beheld it for the first time in 1998. Judith Krantz’s I’ll Take Manhattan familiarized me with New York City landmarks prior to my first visit there in 1994. Thankfully, I had a bookworm for a father and a teacher for a mother who both encouraged me from a young age to read books that took me all over the world before I was able to actually travel to the locations in which they were set.

I grew up in the Philippines and coming from a poor family, I did not have the resources to travel out of my birth country until I was already a working adult. “A book is a magical thing that lets you travel to far-away places without ever leaving your chair.” Katrina Mayer

Boracay Vows by Maida Malby