Modern novels can sometimes have traditional twists. I
don’t just mean in the plots but in the themes and the
echoes they carry with them. I’m constantly surprised at the
things people see in my novels that I don’t see — and then I realise they’re
right.
When Looking For Charlotte, my new novel, was
featured around St Patrick’s Day as a Celtic novel
(loose definition being a novel set in one of the Celtic countries of Ireland,
Scotland and Wales) I was vaguely bemused. But in fact the novel fitted very
well in that kind of slot because it does have a Celtic theme.
At first glance Looking For Charlotte is a
romance-cum-mystery-cum contemporary women’s novel
that just happens to be set in Scotland, partly in Edinburgh and mostly in the
Highlands. It’s the story of a modern woman, in a modern situation,
setting out on a peculiar mission — to
find the body of a dead toddler. There’s no magic and no myth.
But wait… I’ve always been fascinated by the Celtic knots, the
patterns which have no end and no beginning — and
here’s my heroine, Flora, on her birthday, in conversation
with her colleague and friend, the widowed Philip. She’s looking over her birthday cards, at one of them in
particular:
“It was smaller than the others, a non-committal
abstract, a Celtic maze of colour which, if you untangled it, had no lines
which ended, all wriggling through in intricate patterns of earth tones, blues
and browns and greens in an eternal circuit. Philip’s eye was following its delicate tracery, she could
see, picking a line, seeing how the pattern unravelled. ‘Or rather, Mary. She’s very into the Celtic thing. Richard would just have
sent a card with flowers on it.’
‘Joanne liked Celtic patterns.’ He made an abrupt gesture towards the card, then stopped himself. ‘She said they mean things never end, yet that we’re all interlinked. She used to say that if the tide went out we’d find we were all part of the same piece of land. I used to think of that as her philosopher’s moment. I didn’t think I quite understood it at the time, and after she died it made even less sense.’”In the comings and goings of modern life, Flora keeps coming back to the continuity of a thread that links all humanity. It’s why she wants to help a stranger and it’s why, in the end, a stranger helps her.“Now she saw it holistically; she saw, too, what Joanne Metcalfe had seen in the swirling Celtic patterns such as that on her birthdays card from Richard and Mary, the levels of water among which she had dug fallen low and the constant connection between them revealed. In a sense it didn’t matter so much if Charlotte wasn’t found as long as someone, somewhere, could offer Suzanne the underlying sustenance of all human nature.”
Blurb
Divorced and lonely, Flora Wilson is distraught when
she hears news of the death of little Charlotte Anderson. Charlotte’s father killed her and then himself, and although he
left a letter with clues to her grave, his two-year-old daughter still hasn’t been found. Convinced that she failed her own
children, now grown up and seldom at home, Flora embarks on a quest to find
Charlotte’s body to give the child’s
mother closure, believing that by doing so she can somehow atone for her own
failings.
As she hunts in winter through the remote moors of the
Scottish Highlands, her obsession comes to challenge the very fabric of her
life — her job, her friendship with her colleague Philip
Metcalfe, and her relationships with her three children.
Author bio
I live in Edinburgh and I write romance and
contemporary women’s fiction. I’ve been writing all my life and my first book was
published in February 2014, though I’ve had
short stories published before then. The thing that runs through all my writing
is an interest in the world around me. I love travel and geography and the
locations of my stories is always important to me. And of course I love reading
— anything and everything.
Twitter: @JYnovelist
Excerpt
They parted
just beyond the bridge across the Ness, Grace heading up the pedestrian streets
and Flora cutting across to the library, fronted by the long line of cars full
of Saturday shoppers manoeuvering towards the car parks. She wasn’t a regular library user, but once
the idea had taken her she remembered that there was something she wanted to
check.
In the
reference section, she stood for a moment before selecting the Ordnance Survey
map that covered the area south of Ullapool. She knew it quite well. When the
children were young they’d gone walking there regularly, able to reach the open
spaces without pushing the slowest (usually Amelia, though Beth was the
youngest) too hard. They’d graduated to more difficult walks, then stopped
walking altogether. Eventually she had developed a fondness for the slightly
less bleak terrain to the south of Inverness, where she went occasionally with
Philip and his brother, or with a colleague from work. She hadn’t been out all year, not since
before Christmas, in fact, and even then they’d been rained off not very far in and driven back to
the comfort of a tea shop in Grantown-on-Spey.
A nostalgic
yearning for a good long walk swept over her as she unfolded the map and
smoothed it out across one of the desks. She and Danny used to look at maps
together plotting their routes. His stubby forefinger, with its bitten nails,
had traced the most challenging route to start, sliding along the steep and
craggy ridges until he remembered the children and reluctantly redrew, shorter,
safer.
She thought she
knew the place where Alastair Anderson had left his car, and found it easily
enough. Under her fingers the map was a flat web of never-parallel lines, of
ugly pock-marking that told of steep, loose rocks and inhospitable terrain,
just the type of place they used to walk. Somewhere up here, Charlotte Anderson
was buried. Carried there, already dead? Or walked there and then killed?
Surely neither was realistic; surely they would have found her, with their dogs
and their mountain rescue helicopters scouring the ground for new scars, and
all the rest of the equipment they had at their disposal.
Looking at the
map had been a mistake. It was obvious now. Besides, she couldn’t see it any more; all she could see
was the image of Suzanne Beauchamp, that beautiful face with the cold faรงade, like a wax death mask from Madame Tussauds. More
poignant, of course, since it must hide a struggle, a struggle to conceal or to
suppress a deadly mixture of grief and guilt.
‘Go away!’
she said softly to this mirage of a
grieving woman, a little afraid of its power. ‘Go
away!’ And then, in the
only defence left to her, she began to fold the map away.
Charlene's 4 Star review can be seen here:
We received the book from the author for an honest review.
This story ... it really grips your heart, and the characters are so well written that any mother can relate to them. I loved how the Author kept the Mystery all the way to the end to keep the reader intrigued and the fact that the 2 Main Character's have an impact on each other's lives without them ever meeting each other.
This Beautiful story has Depth, Compassion, Romance and Mystery.
This Beautiful story has Depth, Compassion, Romance and Mystery.
GIVEAWAY!
Make sure
to follow the whole tour—the more posts you visit throughout, the more chances you’ll
get to enter the giveaway. The tour dates are here: http://www.writermarketing.co.uk/prpromotion/blog-tours/currently-on-tour/jennifer-young-2/
No comments:
Post a Comment