When Christina Holbrook moved to the town of Breckenridge in 2014, she didn’t bring much. Among her limited possessions were six cartons filled with journals, some dating back to the mid-1960s when she was 6 years old.

For Holbrook, “writing has always been a way to process things.” And though she’d been writing from an early age, it wasn’t until later in life that Holbrook made her craft into her career.

Now, the Summit County resident is celebrating the success of her first novel, “All the Flowers of the Mountain,” which earned best romance fiction novel honors during a Colorado Book Awards event last month.

The work has also garnered international acclaim after it received a bronze medal in the romance category during the Independent Publisher Book Awards this spring.

“It’s really been a very meaningful thing to me,” said Holbrook, whose experience writing the novel was mired in both professional and personal turmoil.

The same can be said for the novel itself. “All the Flowers of the Mountain” explores trauma, the abuse of privilege, class conflicts and the endurance of love all set amid scenic descriptions of nature.

Holbrook said she hopes the work touches on near-universal aspects of the human experience.

“Although it’s fiction, it’s a great way to explore personal themes that’s a little bit more freeing,” Holbrook said. “You are exploring ideas and experiences and decisions that are important to you as a person.”

And much of those themes are derived from Holbrook’s own experience.

Born in New York City in 1961, Holbrook spent her childhood north of the city in the town of Scarsdale, New York. During summers, she vacationed with her family in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

In the early 1980s, Holbrook moved to Manhattan to jumpstart her career. While she loved writing, the concern of being successful financially meant it wasn’t a profession “I could permit myself to do,” Holbrook said.

So she delved into the world of publishing, working various jobs until she eventually became a publisher herself. But by 2010, Holbrook was ready for a change and to take a chance on writing as a full-time career.

Her first professionally published stories were articles for Forbes. In 2014, she reconnected with a high school best friend, Alan Dulit, who had gone on to be a ski instructor and was living in Breckenridge. In what felt like fate, Holbrook decided to move to Colorado, moving in with the man who would later become her husband.

While living in Breckenridge, Holbrook wrote a biweekly column for the Summit Daily News titled “Lark Ascending.” The column followed the her journey of a “city slicker who moves to the West and makes a life in the mountains,” and ran from 2016 to 2020.

It was also during this time when Holbrook co-published her first book, “Winelands of Colorado,” in partnership with a South Africa-based photographer who Holbrook said was looking to document a lesser-known wine region in the United States.

The book published in 2017, the same year Holbrook began working on her romance novel.

“As time went on, I really wanted to be writing more personally,” Holbrook said.

Her first draft, which she said was finished in just six months, was only a third of the size of the final copy. It took Holbrook roughly a year to find an agent who could help get it published.

But as she worked on the novel, which inevitably went through several major rewrites, Holbrook began to experience headaches and “weird visuals.” A brain scan revealed a large tumor that Holbrook said “changed everything for me.”

Holbrook’s diagnosis, she said, was “not that great.” Despite chemotherapy treatments and surgery, she said her days are now numbered, adding, “I don’t know what my timeline is.”

“I first felt complete despair,” said Holbrook, who feared she’d never see her novel published as delays and rewrites went on for years.

She pulled out of working with a larger publishing house and found a small, Colorado-based organization, Sunroom Studios, which agreed to get the novel published “as fast as possible.”

Her friends in the editing world helped pitch in with edits and book design. In July 2022, “All the Flowers of the Mountain” was published.

“That in itself just felt like a huge accomplishment,” Holbrook said.

The story, which begins in the present before rewinding to the late 1970s, follows two protagonists: Michael Pearce, a skier who comes from a small town and is destined to run his father’s hardware store and Kit Morgan, a restless, troubled daughter of a wealthy New York family.

During a pivotal summer in New Hampshire, Michael grows determined to have a future with Kit, despite her desires to become an artist and her struggles with the past.

“The category of romance is an interesting category these days. When I wrote the story, I thought of it more as a coming of age story,” Holbrook said.

Serving as a reconciliation of the past, Holbrook’s novel looks at the conflict that comes from choices around love and careers “when so much is at stake.”

“Particularly when the forces around you, whether it is family or society, is pushing you away from a direction that’s right for you. I feel like a lot of us can relate to that,” Holbrook said.

Outside of the book’s emotional themes, Holbrook also hopes readers will identify with its descriptions of the outdoor world. While primarily set in New Hampshire, Holbrook said she drew on inspiration from living in the Rocky Mountains to communicate “the love of the natural world, and particularly a mountain community.”

“That particular freedom that comes outside of the city … that is the same feeling that I try to give readers in the novel,” she said.

Amid her diagnosis, Holbrook said the novel’s success has pushed her to “make the most of everything.”

Published on SummitDaily.com.