"The Ballad of Love and Glory" is a novel Reyna Grande never planned to write.
After a reading in 2013, an audience member had approached Grande with a book idea: "Have you heard about the St. Patrick's Battalion?"
Grande brushed it off. "Sometimes at events, people come up to me to talk and they tell me, 'You should write a book about this, you should write a book about that,'" she said. "It often happens to writers, and this was the same thing."
