A Coming-of-Age YA Novel
What if the past suddenly invaded your present?
Fifteen-year-old Lesley Graham starts having nightmares when she accompanies her family to a remote village in the South of France. Her first job, first crush and a series of unsettling events challenge Lesley in ways she never expected – and force her to reconsider the role that history plays in our lives.
“Romance, danger, evil, and bravery are brought vividly and sensitively to life in a tale that will not only thrill young readers but also reveals the strength of the human spirit.” — Lawrence Feuchtwanger, poet and authorBook review by Phyllis Reeve, Gabriola Arts Council newsletter, April 14, 2021:
“Amidst the adventure and romance, history never stops. What happened in the Age of the Troubadours becomes relevant to our own Troubled Times.” — Phyllis Reeve, magazine reviewer
"Think of a terrible event that happened hundreds of years ago. Then imagine that you are forced to spend an extended time in a village near where it happened. Add to this that you suddenly start seeing flashes of that tragedy, both in your dreams and when awake. That’s what happens to 15-year-old Lesley Graham from Vancouver. Lesley’s flashes lead her on a series of adventures … and to the realization that the past, even the long ago past, has something to teach us." – Naomi Beth Wakan, essayist and poet
"What's your father's book about again?" Megan asks.
"It's about a crusade and inquisition in the South of France that happened hundreds of years ago. People called Cathars were stuffed into churches and burned alive because of their beliefs. I don't know why he is even interested in such horrible events. What happened way back then was awful, but it has nothing to do with today. It's totally irrelevant"
But of course, Lesley, the narrator, is mistaken. The horrible events of long ago are relevant. In fact, long ago is still happening. Long ago is today.
When Charlotte Cameron told me she was writing a book about the Cathars, she may have been surprised by my excitement. Cathars! The connected stories rushed to mind: Crusades, Troubadours, Knights Templar, Courtly Love, the Holy Grail from Thomas Malory to Monty Python, and my favourite novelist Lawrence Durrell, whose final series The Avignon Quintet was all about Cathars and the presentness of the past. So this novel aimed at readers age 10 and up (our kids are getting a lot of good books these days!) offers all of us much to think about and much to enjoy.
When Charlotte Cameron told me she was writing a book about the Cathars, she may have been surprised by my excitement. Cathars! The connected stories rushed to mind: Crusades, Troubadours, Knights Templar, Courtly Love, the Holy Grail from Thomas Malory to Monty Python, and my favourite novelist Lawrence Durrell, whose final series The Avignon Quintet was all about Cathars and the presentness of the past. So this novel aimed at readers age 10 and up (our kids are getting a lot of good books these days!) offers all of us much to think about and much to enjoy.
Lesley grumbles because she must accompany her parents on sabbatical in the south of France, while all the real excitement in her 15-year-old life goes on without her in her home neighbourhood of Kitsilano. But as soon as they reach Paris strange things begin to happen; there is a beautiful but anxious young woman named Clara and a creepy stalker. When they settle in the village of Minerve, the strangeness deepens. Lesley is drawn into the village's tragic past, encountering Clara, her stalker, and most intensely Clara's doppelganger, a shepherdess also named Clara who has been missing for 800 years. The book has everything - a kidnapping, a trans-border car chase, caves and cliffs, friendships and jealousy, several love stories (including Lesley's own), and some deliberately unresolved mysteries to keep our heads spinning. The reader might learn some history, but it is all part of the fun.
Even the history we thought we knew is enhanced. There is a nasty villain named Simon de Montfort. In my version of English history, he was a hero, and an inventor of parliamentary democracy. Turns out there were several Simon de Montforts, same family, different generations, swashbuckling about the Middle Ages. That's another story, but you see how one thing leads to another. That's the mystery of history.
Charlotte could not have foreseen how current events would catch up with her work-in-progress, how the ending, in Spring of 2020, would have to accommodate a Pandemic and her heroine would have to rush home to Kitsilano before the world went into quarantine. The year 1210 was not a plague year in France, but 2020 was. As artist Sun Xum comments in a recent post from the Vancouver Art Gallery: "We are used to creating a boundary between the present and the past. But actually history has no such boundary."
The striking cover, like the novel, is a palimpsest: a fantasy portrait "Medieval Dream" by Enrigue Meseguer depicting a mysterious girl (one of the Claras? Lesley herself?) hovering over layered images from a photograph "Cityscape of modern Minerve, France" by the author`s partner Thomas Fraser Cameron, and a diorama of Crusaders from the Musée Hurepel de Minerve.
GET YOUR PRINT COPY AT PAGES BOOKSTORE ON GABRIOLA ISLAND, BC
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