Elemental Journey Series, Book One
Winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers’ Gold Medal for Best Midwest Fiction
In rural Missouri in the 1970s, thirteen-year-old Pearl Swinton has just had her first mystical vision. There is no place for Pearl’s ‘gift’ in the bloody reality of subsistence farming and rural poverty. As her visions unfold, she must find her way in a family and a community that react with fear and violence.
When Pearl discovers that her Aunt Nadine, the family shame, has a similar gift, she bicycles across the state to find her. That trip unexpectedly throws Pearl into a journey to save her runaway sister and sends her into a deep exploration of herself, her visions and her visceral relationship to the earth.
Told with fierce lyricism, Earth is a story about the importance of finding one’s own truth and sense of self in dire circumstances and against the odds. It is also a story about the link between understanding ourselves and our relationship with the earth.
In this first of the four-book Elemental Journey series that will follow Pearl across continents and into adulthood, Caroline Allen introduces a form of storytelling that is unflinching in its honesty, filled with compassion and underscored with originality.
*****
About the Author:
Caroline Allen worked in newsrooms across Asia and in London. She is now a novelist and visual artist who lives in rural Oregon. She is the founder of Art of Storytelling, a coaching service for writers. Earth is her first novel.
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*****
Excerpt:
On Meghan’s street, the houses looked like broken castles: columns out front, neck-high weeds in the yard, some windows with the glass blown out. I found the house number. A brick building with a massive cracked sidewalk that led to a once-grand porch. The door was boarded up with an orange X painted on it. I jumped off my bike and ran it up the fractured sidewalk. The T-Bird idled. A terror grew in my belly. I pounded on the door. The driver yelled something out the car window. I knocked hard. Harder and harder.
“Yeah, just knock on a nailed-up door, someone will answer.” I turned, held blackened Miss Universe between me and the speaker. It was a large woman, in her hand a brown paper bag of groceries, two cartons of Lucky Strikes sticking out like long loaves of french bread. She laughed like a crazy woman, jiggled so much she almost lost a carton.
“My sister lives here.”
A guy in the backseat of the car catcalled something about me having a sister.
The old woman looked from me to the car. She shrugged. “It’s your funeral.” She laughed to herself and continued her hobbled walk down the sidewalk. She yelled without turning to look at me. “Try around back, genius.”
I went to the side of the building. I had to leave Miss Universe, something I fiercely didn’t want to do. The alleyway was narrow, littered with fast-food wrappers, empty cartons and broken glass. The whole time I was sure that I’d hear the creak of the T-Bird door and footsteps following.
*****
Giveaway:
The prize will be a 9×12 original watercolor painting that was done as part of Op365, featured on www.carolineallen.com (Retail value $125).
