The Bradford sisters are famous in Rockport, Massachusetts: for their beauty,
their singing voices, their legendary ancestors, and their elegant mother,
Sarah, who has run the historic Folly Cove Inn alone ever since her husband
disappeared.
The two youngest sisters, Anne and Elly, fled Folly Cove as soon as they could
to pursue their dreams and escape the Bradford name, while Laura stayed and
created a seemingly picture perfect life. After a series of bad decisions, Anne
has no choice but to come home and face her critical mother and eldest sister,
reluctantly followed by Elly, another Bradford woman who’s hiding something.
As the three sisters plan a grand celebration for their mother’s birthday, they
struggle to maintain the illusions about their lives that they’ve so carefully
crafted. But when painful old wounds reopen and startling family secrets are
revealed, they soon discover that even the seemingly unbreakable bonds of
sisterhood can be tested. Author Holly Robinson e-chats with Fresh Fiction
Columnist Yona Zeldis McDonough about her page-turning new novel.
Novelist, journalist and celebrity ghost writer Holly Robinson is the author
of several books, including The Gerbil farmer’s Daughter: A Memoir and the
novels Beach Plum Island and Haven Lake. Her articles and essays appear
frequently in The Huffington Post, More, Parents, Redbook and dozens of other
newspapers and magazines. She and her husband have five children and a stubborn
Pekingese. They divide their time between Massachusetts and Prince Edward
Island, and are crazy enough to be fixing up old houses one shingle at a time in
both places.
YZM: Tell us about your journey to becoming a writer.
HR: I'm a late bloomer, or maybe a slow learner! I started writing
fiction in my twenties, but it took a quarter century to publish my first novel.
Fortunately, I successfully published lots of nonfiction, and that kept me
going. Once I finally published my first novel with Penguin Random House, it
felt like I'd stepped onto a speeding train because the publisher started
expecting me to write a book every year. The twists along the way to this point
in my career included having a nasty fiction editor tell me I was “too old to be
called promising” when I was thirty, weeping into a glass of cognac when my
fifth novel was rejected, discovering I could make a good living as a ghost
writer, and realizing that the thing that matters most to me, ultimately, is the
act of writing.
YZM: This is your fifth novel; does experience make writing a novel get
any easier?
HR: Ha! If only! I compare writing to motherhood in this way: just
because one of your children is more difficult than the others to raise, that
doesn't necessarily mean that child is better. The only thing that changes is
that you learn to trust the process more. For example, I know for a fact that,
with every book, I will reach a point about two-thirds through the manuscript
where I become absolutely convinced that there is NO WAY I will pull this off
and make the book come together. By now, I've learned that I can break through
this wall of doubt. It's just a matter of buckling down and being more
determined, rather than giving in to fear.
YZM: Water, coastlines and New England are frequent settings in your
books; care to comment?
HR: My novels are primarily set in New England because I love the lush
and varied geography here, and the fact that history is seeping out of every
tumbling stone wall. I live in a house that was built in 1799, and there are
other dwellings in my town that date back to the sixteen hundreds. I'm always
running into inspiring literary history here, too, like the fact that there is
an actual Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA, where Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott are all buried on
the same ridge. I'm drawn to set my novels along the shore because there is
something so primal and cleansing about our connection to the sea. Anyone who
has ever walked along a beach can feel that tug of the surf's rhythm. Listening
to the ocean can make us feel sometimes as if we're breathing at one with the
planet. And isn't that the point of life, in the end? To be at one, and at
peace, with our surroundings?
YZM: The subject of sisters, especially estranged sisters, seems to draw
you. Can you say more about that?
HR: I have always wanted a sister. I did have one until I was twelve and
she was five, but she died of cystic fibrosis. Since then, I have always
wondered what it would have been like, had my sister lived to be twenty, thirty,
even fifty years old. Would we have stayed close? Would our children have grown
up together? Or would we, like many sisters I know, have had a falling out and
spent years apart? It seems to me that the bond between some sisters is so close
that, when they do become estranged, it must be the most painful thing in the world.
YZM: What are you working on now?
HR: I'm a third of the way through my next manuscript, and it's a slight
departure for me: this book has twin plot lines, one contemporary, one
historical, and both are written in the first person. Fingers crossed that it
all works out, but even if it doesn't, I'm having fun and learning as I go.
YZM: Where do you see yourself as a writer in five years? In ten?
HR: With this new book, I'm exploring what it takes to write historical
fiction. (Hint: research is hard and takes forever!) I like to think that I will
continue exploring different genres, bringing what I've learned with me into
each new type of book I write. For instance, my husband (a software engineer and
science fiction addict) are talking about writing a YA fantasy series together.
How much fun would that be? I mean, provided we didn't get divorced in the
process of working together...
An emotional and rich new novel about family and secrets from the
acclaimed author of Chance Harbor.
The ties of family bind us forever—no matter how far we may go to escape
them...
The Bradford sisters are famous in Rockport, Massachusetts: for their beauty,
their singing voices, their legendary ancestors, and their elegant mother,
Sarah, who has run the historic Folly Cove Inn alone ever since her husband
disappeared.
The two youngest sisters, Anne and Elly, fled Folly Cove as soon as they could
to pursue their dreams and escape the Bradford name, while Laura stayed and
created a seemingly picture perfect life. After a series of bad decisions, Anne
has no choice but to come home and face her critical mother and eldest sister,
reluctantly followed by Elly, another Bradford woman who’s hiding something.
As the three sisters plan a grand celebration for their mother’s birthday, they
struggle to maintain the illusions about their lives that they’ve so carefully
crafted. But when painful old wounds reopen and startling family secrets are
revealed, they soon discover that even the seemingly unbreakable bonds of
sisterhood can be tested...
Women's Fiction
[Berkley, On Sale: October 4, 2016, Trade Size /
e-Book, ISBN: 9781101991534 / eISBN: 9781101991541]
About Yona Zeldis McDonough
Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of six novels; her
seventh, THE HOUSE ON
PRIMROSE POND, will be out from New American Library in February, 2016. In
addition, she is the editor of the essay collections The Barbie
Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty and All the Available Light: A
Marilyn Monroe Reader. Her short fiction, articles and essays have been
published in anthologies as well as in numerous national magazines and
newspapers. She is also the award-winning author of twenty-six books for
children, including the highly acclaimed chapter books, The Doll Shop
Downstairs and The Cats in the Doll Shop. Yona lives in Brooklyn, New
York with her husband, two children and two noisy Pomeranians.
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