A Novel Approach

By Emily Daniels

It is often said that college is a time to truly discover who you are and who you want to be in life. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a common question you’ve probably heard from the time you were five years old. With so many possibilities, there can be a lot of pressure on young college students to decide on the career paths they want to take prior to graduation. In fact, approximately 80 percent of college students end up changing their major at least once, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Then there’s Gabriella Saab. A 2016 College of Business graduate, Saab always knew exactly what she wanted to be, and she was determined to get there. Originally from Madison, Saab and her family moved to Mobile, AL, when she was a young girl. It was around that time that she discovered her dream job.

As a kid, I was a voracious reader,” Saab recalls. “When I was about five or six, I picked up a Nancy Drew book for the first time and loved it so much that I wrote my own Nancy Drew-inspired short story for fun. I really liked being able to imagine these different worlds and characters and put them down on paper. If I was reading Nancy Drew, I was writing mysteries. If it was Little Women, it was family stories. I decided I wanted to be an author right then and there.

So what made an aspiring novelist choose a degree in marketing?

“I really liked marketing because it reminded me of writing in a sense. It allows you to tap into that creative side of your brain,” she says. “If I was going to be a writer, I would need to learn how to learn how to pitch a story to a publisher, how to assess my target audience and how to tell if the market would even be receptive to my ideas. I knew of the prowess you gain from a business background, and I was confident that a solid foundation would help me no matter where my career took me.”

The idea for her first novel, The Last Checkmate, came to Saab while she was still in college. She knew that she wanted to write historical fiction, and she always found the World War II era especially interesting, thanks in part to her late grandfather, “Poppy,” to whom the book is dedicated.

“I think what really fascinated me about that time period is that it was such a devastating time – for everyone,” says Saab. “Obviously, the people who fought the battles were extraordinary in their own rights, but then you think of all the women at home who went to work and joined resistance movements and the people in occupied territories. Everyone really banded together and fought with everything they had to help those being oppressed and to overthrow the oppressors. It was a really important time in history, one that we should not forget, so I felt compelled to write about it.”

After graduation from Mississippi State, Saab initially thought about going to graduate school for publishing and maybe also putting her undergraduate degree to use working in the marketing department at a publishing house, while trying to get her writing career off the ground. But writing historical fiction can be a fulltime job in itself, requiring extensive research before the writing can even begin. Saab decided she would work part time in Mobile to have time to devote to her book – one that would later make it on POPSUGAR.com’s list of The Best Books of 2021.

The story follows heroine Maria Florkowska, a teenage Polish girl who, along with her family, aids the resistance in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during World War II. While on one of her missions, she is caught by the Gestapo, and the girl and her family are sentenced to Auschwitz – a concentration camp in its early days, where those imprisoned were exclusively male. Women, children and those deemed unfit for labor were killed immediately. Upon arrival at the camp, Maria gets separated from her family among the hundreds of newly sentenced prisoners when a Nazi officer sees her clutching a chess piece her father had made for her. He decides to move her from the execution line to the men’s labor camp, for his personal amusement. After finding out she is a chess novice, he forces her to play against him and other guards in exchange for her life. But the analytical skills learned through a game of chess would play a central role in her fight to survive. Through a series of twists and turns – and fellow prisoners she befriends along the way – she carefully devises a plan to escape. But her first order of business is bringing the Nazi officer who has killed her family to justice.

While Maria’s character in The Last Checkmate is fictional, many others – including resistance organizer Mother Matylda Getter of the Fransciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary, political prisoner Father Maksymilian Kolbe and sadistic camp deputy Karl Fritzsch – were real historical figures.

Saab’s first novel has received praise from the book industry and readers alike.

Photo courtesy of Gabriella Saab

“Growing up Catholic, one of my favorite saints had always been Maksymilian Kolbe, who ultimately died a martyr in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz,” says Saab. “I had this idea about him being in his cell when a young female prisoner that he had previously bonded with comes in to comfort him. He was always going to be a side character, though. I knew I wanted the main character to be a girl, because I can write about that experience better – so that’s how Maria Florkowska was born.”

Saab knew the importance of doing the research on such a difficult subject matter, so she read as many books as she could about Poland, the Nazi Resistance Movement and Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camps. But she felt to truly capture the setting, she would need to see everything in person.

“My family has always been supportive, but my grandfather was particularly passionate about it and was instrumental in making my research trip happen,” she says. “So in 2018 I went to Warsaw, Poland. I took a tour of Auschwitz, walking the routes where I knew I wanted my characters to be. I even got to interview the Franciscan Sisters about Mother Matylda and the convent’s help with transporting Jewish children to non-Jewish families to protect them during the war.”

Saab pitched her book to several agents at a writing conference in 2019 before signing with her current agent in January 2020. They submitted the novel to many publishing houses right as COVID was sweeping the country, so it was a slow process. By that time, Saab was already working on her next historical novel, Daughters of Victory (with a launch date of January 2023 – mark your calendar!). They had almost decided to shelve The Last Checkmate when a funny thing happened.

“In October of that year, The Queen’s Gambit had just come out on Netflix and caused a big interest in chess,” Saab says. “Not long after that, I heard back from my favorite editor, who was with William Morrow, my favorite publisher, and she loved my book! I got an offer and signed two or three days before Christmas.”

Since 2021, Saab has been very busy promoting not one but two novels. Her first has received much praise from the book industry and readers alike. The acclaimed paperback has now been translated in several languages and is also available as an audiobook. While book signing and promotional tours have kept her busy, Saab still finds time to spend with family and at her alma mater. In fact, she is slated to be the keynote speaker for the Spring 2023 Beta Gamma Sigma Honor Society induction ceremony in the College of Business.

When asked if she has advice for anyone with aspirations in writing or other creative fields, Saab is quick to reply.

Learn your craft, and read everything you can about it,” she states. “Think about different things that could help you in your chosen field or support you during your pursuit – whether that’s a job in that business or a job doing something else – because any job is going to help you in the long run. It’s going to teach you things that will help you grow both personally and professionally. I have developed so many skills that I learned in previous jobs, and even my business classes, that I never thought I would have needed but have helped me tremendously along the way. So pursue that passion, but also bear in mind that there are a lot of different paths you can take to make a dream come true.