Behind the Character: Genevieve Donovan

Genevieve Donovan is the protagonist of Gilded Silence, the first book in the Hollow Crown Trilogy.

At first glance, she appears to be living the life most people dream of. Wealth. Influence. Security. A powerful husband to back her up. But appearances can be deceiving.

She was not born into that circle of wealth. When she graduated from high school, she won a scholarship to Yale, which is where she first met Conrad Donovan, the first person she fell in love with, and the man who would marry her right after she graduated.

Marrying into his family could only be described as stepping into a different world.

She immediately becomes one of the wealthiest, most influential women in the world, backed by a dynasty built on ambition, power, ironclad rules, and generational expectations. To an outsider, she is living the dream. With no financial worries, a secure future, opportunities knocking on her door, and a devoted spouse, she has what most people can only dream of having.

Behind closed doors, all of that cannot keep her loneliness at bay.

Behind the perfect image she presents to the world, she has been slowly crumbling under the weight of the expectations that were placed on her, from the day she got married. She makes no decisions, not for herself, and not for anyone else. Every decision made for her is already connected to a dynasty larger than herself. She is not afforded the luxury of choice. It is a risk the empire does not allow, not when the consequences of any such choice could affect more than just her future.

She is not a warrior. She is not a revolutionary. She is not the most powerful person in the room. She does not control the empire.

She was just a woman who broke under the enormity of the expectations demanded of her, and somehow found the courage to piece those broken fragments back together again.

This is what I loved most about her story. She was never striving to become something different. She was just finding herself, stripping away years of conditioning and expectations. The person she was looking for had always been there, far beneath the surface.

When Gilded Silence begins, she is already carrying far more than most people can imagine. As the story unfolds, she is faced at every turn with a choice to make, whether it is about her marriage, love, loyalty, a purpose, or the future that she envisions for herself.

Whether she succeeds is the journey that Gilded Silence takes the reader on.

For me, Genevieve’s story is about choices.

In this story, there is no such thing as an easy choice.