Welcome to my tour stop of Earth by Caroline Allen, a literary fiction novel. This is book 1 of the Elemental Journey series. The tour runs from October 26-30 and the full schedule can be seen here.
Print: $15.99
eBook: $4.99
ASIN: B00SUWJ5FQ
Apple ID: 962247664
ePub ISBN: 978-1-62015-665-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62015-651-3
Series Title: 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.
EXCERPT
That King James Bible and an
almanac were the only books we ever had in the house. Once, a hardbound
Reader’s Digest Father had found in the woods, some of the pages so speckled
with mold you could make out only sixty percent of the words. All my life I was
starving for books. Hungry for story.
I’d already read the Old Testament. After
Meghan left, I’d locked myself in the bathroom and covered the begetting and
begatting, brother killing brother, being forced off the land, tossed off the
earth, ripped from the magic of the soil. Lobbing a rock, flailing a bit of a
plow, cracking a sibling over the head. Blood flowing and soaking. Forced to
roam. Some crazy, heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching universal plan.
In my house, nobody ever told tales. It wasn’t
just my parents. My relatives were all shut up too. The silence of my kinfolk
wove core-deep. So few stories, you could fit them in the palm of your hand.
Poor folk didn’t talk about themselves, wary of what specters such stories
might invoke. I was surrounded by clenched jaws, thinned and bitter lips. My
story was a lack of story, a poverty of legend, a dearth of poetry. I wanted to
tell Mother that our being poor wasn’t just about food— we were starved for
legend.
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. This is her first novel. To learn more about Caroline and the upcoming novels in the Elemental Journey series, visit:
GIVEAWAY
The prize will be a 9x12 original watercolor painting that was done as part of Op365, featured on www.carolineallen.com. It has a retail value of $125.
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