The Sea House by Elisabeth Gifford

About the book: 

The Sea House (St. Martin’s Press, April 2014)

Scotland, 1860.

Reverend Alexander Ferguson, naive and newly-ordained, takes up his new parish, a poor, isolated patch on the Hebridean island of Harris. His time on the island will irrevocably change the course of his life, but the white house on the edge of the dunes keeps its silence long after Alexander departs. It will be more than a century before the Sea House reluctantly gives up its secrets. Ruth and Michael buy the grand but dilapidated building and begin to turn it into a home for the family they hope to have. Their dreams are marred by a shocking discovery. The tiny bones of a baby are buried beneath the house; the child's fragile legs are fused together --- a mermaid child. Who buried the bones? And why? Ruth needs to solve the mystery of her new home --- but the answers to her questions may lie in her own past.

Based on a real nineteenth-century letter to The Times in which a Scottish clergyman claimed to have seen a mermaid, The Sea House is an epic, sweeping tale of loss and love, hope and redemption, and how we heal ourselves with the stories we tell.

Purchase a copy: http://amzn.to/ZSbs53

About the Author: 

Elisabeth Gifford grew up in a vicarage in the industrial Midlands. She studied French literature and world religions at Leeds University. She is the author of The House of Hope: A Story of God's Love and Provision for the Abandoned Orphans of Chinaand has written articles for The Times and the Independent and has a Diploma in Creative Writing from Oxford OUDCE and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway College. She is married with three children. They live in Kingston on Thames but spend as much time as possible in the Hebrides.

Find Elisabeth online: website, Facebook

Margie's Comments: I love stories that span the years, reaching into the history of an area to solve a contemporary puzzle or mystery. So when The Sea House by Elisabeth Gifford came up for review, I requested a copy. And the story didn't disappoint. Starting out in today's world, Michael and Ruth are excited about their project to fix up this old, disused house for a family and a business. But when they find the bones of the mermaid child, Ruth can't leave the questions behind. The author's gentle storytelling voice drew me into the story, and I found it very difficult to put it down. Even when it got later and later at night. The author uses a blend of the past and present to tell a tale that is woven into the culture of the islands of Scotland. The masterful plotting, characterization, and storytelling have me looking forward to reading more from this author in the future. NOTE: This book was not written or published for a strictly Christian audience, so be aware that there are some instances of strong language. 

Emily of Deep Valley by Mitali Perkins

This week, the  Christian Fiction Blog Alliance  is introducing  Emily of Deep Valley  Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (October 12, 2010)  by  Mitali Perkins   





ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

A word from Mitali: Who In The World Is Mitali Perkins?

That's a good question. I've been trying to figure it out myself, spending most of my life crossing borders.

I was born Mitali Bose in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, and always tried to live up to my name—which means “friendly” in the Bangla language. I had to! Because my family moved so much, it was the only way I could make new friends.

By the time I was 11, I'd lived in Ghana, Cameroon, London, New York and Mexico before settling in California just in time for middle school. Yep, I was the new kid again, in seventh grade, the year everybody barely makes it through.

My biggest lifeline during those early years was story. Books were my rock, my stability, my safe place as I navigated the border between California suburbia and the Bengali culture of my traditional home.

After studying political science at Stanford and public policy at U.C. Berkeley, I taught in middle school, high school and college. When I began to write fiction, my protagonists were often—not surprisingly—strong female characters trying to bridge different cultures.


Mitali Perkins is the author of several books for young people, including SECRET KEEPER (Random House), MONSOON SUMMER (Random House), RICKSHAW GIRL (Charlesbridge), and the FIRST DAUGHTER books (Dutton).



ABOUT THE BOOK   

Often cited as Maud Hart Lovelace’s (of Betsy-Tacy fame) best novel, Emily of Deep Valley is now back in print, with a new foreword by acclaimed young adult author Mitali Perkins and new archival material about the characters’ real lives.

Emily Webster, an orphan living with her grandfather, is not like the other girls her age in Deep Valley, Minnesota. The gulf between Emily and her classmates widens even more when they graduate from Deep Valley High School in 1912. Emily longs to go off to college with everyone else, but she can’t leave her grandfather. Emily resigns herself to facing a “lost winter,” but soon decides to stop feeling sorry for herself. And with a new program of study, a growing interest in the Syrian community, and a handsome new teacher at the high school to fill her days, Emily gains more than she ever dreamed...

In addition to her beloved Betsy-Tacy books, Maud Hart Lovelace wrote three more stories set in the fictional town of Deep Valley: Winona’s Pony Cart, Carney’s House Party and Emily of Deep Valley. Longtime fans and new readers alike will be delighted to find the Deep Valley books available again for the first time in many years.

If you would like to browse inside Emily of Deep Valley, go HERE.

Review to come later.

2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Results

Every year the Bulwer-Lytton group runs a contest for the worst first sentence. It is based on Bulwer-Lytton's own first sentence:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

2010 CONTEST RESULTS

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

Molly Ringle
Seattle, WA

The winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Molly Ringle of Seattle, Washington. The author of one published and two soon-to-be-published novels, Molly Ringle only writes bad fiction when she fails at good fiction. She'd rather not say how often this happens. She lives in Seattle with her family, and her vices include uncalled-for moments of sarcasm, excessive consumption of Nutella, and an unladylike avidity for the raunchy films of Mel Brooks.

Molly Ringle is the 28th grand prize winner of the contest that that began at San Jose State University in 1982.  She is also the second consecutive Washingtonian in a row to win the contest, last year’s being David McKenzie. 




For more first line (and a few laughs) click here.

Romantic Elements in Our Writing

This month, the ACFW Colorado bloggers are writing about romantic elements. To see my post on working the "Great Romance" into our stories, go here.

Character Creation

Yesterday my characters for my new novel finally came out to play. (Only a writer will truly understand what that means.) And I found out so many fascinating things about them. Including the fact that my hero doesn't open himself up to strangers! Ooookkaayy! LOL But he finally made an exception. Nice of him.

I've been doing a lot of reading about character creation. Yes, a little OCD on the subject right now. But I am a recovering perfectionist. The internal editor is very hard to turn off. However, I've read good things from everyone who has tackled the subject.

However, I wanted to point out one book in particular that has helped me the most. Jeff Gerke's Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist. You can find it here. Learning about the personality types and finding one that fits my heroine, hero, and antagonist (they are truly different) revealed a whole lot of ways conflict and friction between the characters, inside the characters, and through their spiritual journeys can play out in the story. It opened a whole new world to me.

Jeff's method has many questions to answer throughout the template, and then leaves space for summaries of each section. At the end you're ready to write all you know about that character from his/her point of view. At first I felt overwhelmed looking at the template as a whole, but as I worked yesterday, I found that it really did free me up to write as each of those characters. So cool!

And of course I'm already figuring out what works for me in this method and what other things I need to incorporate into it in order to make it work for me. That only emphasizes the fact that as writers we are all unique in our approaches to writing fiction. It reinforces the wisdom in learning from many different writers to see what works for them. Then I can determine what works for me and throw out the rest.

Now back to meditating on plot twists and conflicts while I clean house today.