We’re delighted to be joined on our blog by Mills & Boon Medical author, Luana DaRosa. Luana talks about her writing journey, identifying with the characters she writes and her new book set in Brasília!

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Before I can get into the story of how Yara and Salvador came into existence for my next release Falling Again For The Brazilian Doc, I need to step back a couple of paces to tell you about my experience as a Latinx writer.

My first attempt at writing a medical romance novel was the story of a white woman falling in love with a white man, and strangely enough—or not—I couldn’t identify with the characters I had created. Though I still believed in the bones of my story, I got a rejection but with that rejection also got some encouraging words to try again, pointing out some of the flaws in my story.

The trap that I fell into was one of representation. Because I hadn’t read stories featuring people like me, I thought I also couldn’t write those stories. And then I stumbled onto the A Summer in São Paulo mini-series, a collaboration between Ann McIntosh, Charlotte Hawkes and Tina Beckett—and it opened my eyes to a different possibility.

So back to the drawing board I went, and that’s how my debut novel Falling For Her Off-Limits Boss was born. I realised I could actually write about Latinx characters, write about my country and its people, and bring the joy of knowing that to other people. This, in retrospect, sounds relatively obvious, but that’s how much of an impact diversity and representation can have.

Knowing that the sky was the limit with my stories and that I had the support of my fantastic editor and the publishing team at Mills and Boon, I sat down to think about what else I wanted to see in the medical romance series that I’ve not seen before. The answer came quite quickly to me: Queer representation.

Because I just so happen to belong to that group as well. So I decided that in Falling Again For The Brazilian Doc, I would make one of the characters bisexual—and thus Salvador Martins was born.

Falling Again For The Brazilian Doc is a second chance romance of two friends—Yara and Salvador—that were on the brink of becoming more than that, but then Yara left Brazil to study medicine abroad, and they drifted apart. Thirty years later, they find themselves working at the same hospital back in their home city of Brasília.

Neither of them expected the sparks that had survived thirty long years.

I love writing—and reading—second chance romance because I love the concept of ‘right people, wrong time’ and working on the backstory for what kind of growth they need to go through to become the people they need to be to be right for each other. For Yara, an overachieving badass of a woman, she needed to come to terms with the failure of her marriage. At the same time, Salvador had made the hard decision to separate from his boyfriend because his life’s circumstances had changed, and he was not the guardian of his nephew.

Nothing excites me more than seeing the friendship that underpins any good romance develop. It’s the foundation of any good relationship, so exploring how the friendship of Yara and Salvador fractured over the years and helping them repair it was so much fun.

I hope you enjoy reading this queer, Latinx medical drama as much as I enjoyed reading it 💖

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Falling Again For The Brazilian Doc by Luana DaRosa

World-renowned diagnostician Dr Yara Silvia has returned home to Brasília to consult on a challenging case—not rekindle her teenage romance with Dr Salvador Martins! It’s been thirty years since she was forced to leave him behind and their priorities are different now. Sal’s focused on raising his nephew, while Yara avoids commitment following her painful divorce. One thing is for sure, their burning attraction is still utterly irresistible! But will their past hold them back?

Read now in eBook or in paperback which also features The Single Mum He Can’t Resist by Janice Lynn.

By Lauren Gardiner