Good morning! I’m happy to report that there is now a way to subscribe via email to my blog. You can find it in the sidebar for real this time. Thank you very much to everyone who has already signed up, your support means the world to me.
Today I’d like to tell you a little bit about my newest book, which is releasing end of February 2022.
It’s called The Lost Girl of Goose Creek and is not related at all to my first book. In fact, it’s quite different because it is 1) written in verse, 2) substantially darker, and 3) there are no faeries. However, it still has LGBTQ+ characters and deals with mental illness. I was particularly interested in exploring how fantasy can be a coping mechanism for trauma. I’ll talk more about this later in the post, but for now let’s see more details!
I commissioned art of the main character Etta and her girlfriend Lex, and Audrey sure delivered. Meet our duo…
Art by Audrey Golden / @avgolden on IG / https://gurtdogpress.com/audrey-golden/
BLURB:
A novel in verse from the author of Unraveled about rebuilding a life after everything is taken from you.
When sixteen-year-old Etta Jacobs went missing, the small town of Goose Creek, Montana went into a panic. But after years of searching, the trail went cold and everyone wrote her off as dead. She left behind her girlfriend Lex and a grieving family, including a father whose health worsens every day.
Only she’s not dead. She’s been held in an underground cellar for eight years, abused by a man whose name she doesn’t know. Reading her favorite fantasy book over and over to escape the abuse, she slowly begins to lose track of what’s fiction and what’s real. By the time freedom comes, Etta confuses herself for the main character in the book – a girl named Mathilde who suffers her own story of abuse.
The world Etta returns to doesn’t know what to make of her, and she can’t tell what’s real. She doesn’t even know how to be a person anymore, let alone reconnect with her family and girlfriend. How can she learn to exist again when for so many years she just tried to hide?
And who is she really, Etta or Mathilde?
***
This book would probably be classified as “New Adult.” I know that New Adult (NA) has a reputation for being Young Adult (YA) but with graphic sex – and that’s not the case here. The subject matter is just heavier and the main character goes from 16 to 24 years old throughout the book. I would recommend it for older readers of YA.
I did my best to handle the subject matter as respectfully as possible, because it was inspired by real events. I began working on the idea for this book in 2017 when I first learned about cases of long-term captivity…where people are kidnapped and held for long periods of time before escaping/being rescued. I began to read all the accounts I could find, specifically Jaycee Lee Dugard’s and Elizabeth Smart’s books. If you are interested I can share a list of all the material I consulted while researching this book.
I started thinking about what it would be like to survive an impossible situation like this, and what that would do to your mind. I learned about Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) as a response to trauma and this worked its way into my brainstorming. Although Etta does not have DID (because this condition usually begins in early childhood as a trauma response), she does have some aspects of the disorder with how she dissociates from her reality.
I am lucky that I’ve never had any truly traumatic experiences. But I do have severe mental illness myself (anxiety and OCD) and I have always used fiction as a way of escaping the real world. In difficult times, I have imagined myself as my favorite fictional characters so that I could be anyone except me…because those characters were able to deal with a scary situation when I was not. So when I started writing The Lost Girl of Goose Creek, I wanted to explore what this would look like for Etta, who’s locked away with nothing except her favorite fantasy book.
Fun fact: Both Unraveled and The Lost Girl of Goose Creek feature a fictional book that readers have mistaken as real. In Unraveled, it’s The Modern Manual of Faeries by Eleanor Bishop, who is Cat’s grandma. In Goose Creek, it’s La Fille Perdue, which is the book Etta obsessively reads over and over (and means The Lost Girl – Etta is half-French and bilingual.)
And it’s a novel in verse! Which I’ll talk more about in another post. But you don’t have to read, or even like, poetry to read this book. 🙂
I will share the cover reveal and preorder links as they become available. The Lost Girl of Goose Creek will be available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover, and I will also have signed editions. Thank you so much for your interest and for reading!
Super excited for this and I liked reading about the process of writing it! Makes me want to hear more about the inspiration behind your other books. I’m definitely preordering this as soon as I can 👏 Looking forward to the cover reveal 👀