Who writes stories about women who refused to let history make them small
Sherilyn Decter writes historical fiction about women who refused to be small — bootleggers and dreamers, rule-breakers and trailblazers, mothers and daughters forging their own paths through the raw, rapidly changing world of early 20th-century America. Grounded in deep research and told with heart.
Sherilyn’s characters are women who refuse to let the world define them. It’s not a coincidence.
Raised in a single-mother household when that was anything but common, she built a career that most people would need three lifetimes to fit in — entrepreneur, nonprofit leader, insurance company board chair, and mayor of her city. She raised three daughters with her husband, and now watches the next generation of strong women taking shape in her grandbabies.
She doesn’t write about resilience from a distance. She writes it from the inside.
Set in 1919 East Harlem, The Promise is the coming-of-age story of Lucie Santoro — a seventeen-year-old Italian immigrant daughter who has done the unthinkable: graduated high school. In a community where tradition is law and daughters are expected to marry well and keep house, Lucie dares to imagine something more. She wants to become a teacher.
But dreams come at a price. At home, Lucie faces a mother whose fierce love crossed an ocean yet clings to Old World customs. A kind, steady man has already been chosen for her. And beyond the narrow streets of East Harlem, a world reshaped by the Great War, women’s suffrage, and the promise of independence is calling.
Rich with the textures of Italian-American life — crowded kitchens, whispered gossip from fire escapes, church bells and streetcar clangs — The Promise Trilogy explores the tension between tradition and transformation. It is a story about mothers and daughters, inherited dreams and chosen destinies, and what it truly means to become American.
For over a decade and across eleven novels, Sherilyn has been telling stories about women at the crossroads — women who looked at the world they were given and decided to build their own. In the Bootleggers’ Chronicles, a single mother in 1924 Philadelphia takes on the bootleggers destroying her neighborhood — with a ghost detective as her unlikely mentor. In the Rum Runners’ Chronicles, a woman builds a smuggling empire along the Eastern Seaboard with cunning and nerve. In the Moonshiner Mysteries, an outlaw moonshiner solves murders in the Montana wilderness with the help of an imaginary friend named Charlie Chaplin and a wolf so uncannily smart he makes Lassie look like an amateur.
The Promise Trilogy turns inward, to a different kind of defiance. The steel spine is still there. It just bends in new directions. It follows Lucie Santoro through the summer and autumn of 1919 in East Harlem — three books about who a young woman is allowed to become when her neighbourhood, her family, and her church have already decided for her. Sherilyn has written about the place that made Lucie and why these three books had to be set there.
Discover the world behind the fiction → The Cost of Becoming
The years following the First World War were a crossroads for women. They were just losing the corsets — literally learning to move freely — while fighting for the vote, entering classrooms and boardrooms, owning property, and rewriting family law. A decade of change so compressed and frantic it mirrors the arc of a woman’s own growth: dependence, the fierce reach for independence, the stumbles, the fight, the pause to reflect, and finally, the laying down of roots.
That’s the story Sherilyn keeps telling, in different settings and through different women, because it never stops being true.
The worlds she builds are meant to be trusted. Philadelphia book clubs helped capture the atmosphere of 1920s neighborhoods. Alumni associations checked the accuracy of period curricula. Police archives filled in procedural details. And a group of stamp mill oldtimers in Montana met with her over Zoom — more than once — to explain exactly how someone might be killed in a stamp mill in 1920. She’s found that people love to be asked about their history. And she often stumbles across something so intriguing during the research that it reshapes the story itself.
How I came to write late, and what it cost me. The public-service career, the outline that failed, and the twenty drafts behind The Promise Trilogy.
Sherilyn Decter writes historical women’s fiction set in early 20th-century America. Her novels explore resilience, identity, ambition, and the fierce bonds between women in times of transformation — from the immigrant kitchens of East Harlem to the speakeasies of Philadelphia to the wilderness of Prohibition-era Montana. She is the author of The Promise Trilogy, the Bootleggers’ Chronicles, the Rum Runners’ Chronicles, and the Moonshiner Mysteries.