Kelly Moore | AMBER HOUSE Blog stop

The roots of Amber House run back to my youth, nearly forty years ago now. As
the story was first conceived, I am ashamed to admit, it was full of the
stereotypes of two generations ago: a house built on the remnants of Native
American holy ground; a sage African American woman who functioned to help the
main characters — the white characters — find their way. A lot can
happen in two generations. Awareness can happen.

But awareness is a process and progress in it is painfully achieved.

We all three of us — my daughters and I — have become caught up in the women's movement, and through it, other movements that shine a light on othering. I find I am, very belatedly, a feminist. I was one of those women who thought the time of feminism was past. I went to law school, I worked in a man's world as a man's equal, or so I told myself. I didn't understand until my daughter was raped that women are still "other," that our lives are not as free and robust and unconstrained as men's. I was never a man's equal. I walked in fear everywhere I went, keeping to the "safe" zones, gripping my keys so they protruded through my fingers in the futile hope they would be a weapon if I needed it. Knowing that any man could take everything from me unless I kept within the lines. I have learned that until women are free to walk the world with the same confidence as men, they will continue to be other. And in finding out about women's still persistent otherness, I began to see otherness everywhere.

The privilege of being the "norm" is a way of disproportionately
owning the world that is almost impossible to see from within the norm. And
when we stand in the place of privilege, we see no reason to change the norm.
We hear complaints as whining; we look upon persistent difference as failure.
Instead of reforming our own views, we think others should change, to conform to
the pattern that is the most lucrative and the most powerful. To be like we
are. But the world that does not celebrate and embrace difference is
fundamentally unjust and rotten in its very core.

In founding a novel in American history, we were able to highlight some of the
threads of otherness that were woven into the fabric of our country and that
continue to warp it to greater or lesser degrees. We touch on issues of
nationality and religion in our protagonist's distant Irish-Catholic
first-generation immigrant ancestors, observe divisions of class in the English
sea captain's relationships to his American in-laws, explore sexism and its
intersections with racism and judgments about psychiatric and emotional norms
— Deirdre and Nyangu, Maeve and Fiona, Ida and Anne. We were even able to
touch on some of the othering born of the differences in neural wiring, by
introducing a character with "high-functioning" autism.

In writing Amber House, we have striven to incorporate an accurate reflection of
America's history when it comes to issues of otherness. With this in mind, our
very clever editor, Cheryl Klein, has helped us when we committed oversights.
But one of the things we are satisfied with, in our writing of this series, is
that some readers reached the end of the first book and never realized that
Jackson is black, because we never thought to call him "black" in the
same way we never thought to call Richard "white." He is only
Jackson, as free to be who he is as any other character in the book. And that
may be the best we can wish for any of us.

In NEVERWAS, Sarah must piece together the mystery of her forgotten past with the help of clues left behind by her great-grandmother, Fiona Warren. For readers interested in the chance to win a signed first-edition hardback of NEVERWAS -- with an exclusive hint for what's in story for Sarah in the final book, OTHERWHEN, hidden inside -- visit each blog on the tour for the month of December, collect the various lines from the poem, arrange them in the proper order, and submit the final sonnet by January 10th for a chance to win the special copy of NEVERWAS!

About the authors

KELLY MOORE is a New York Times best-selling author, former litigator, and
single mother of three. Her latest project, the young adult fiction series THE
AMBER HOUSE TRILOGY, co-written with her two daughters and based loosely upon
her own family history, examines fourteen generations of Maryland women and
their ties to the past, present, and future. The first book in the series was
nominated for the 2014 Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award for its realistic
portrayal of characters with autism; Moore is outspoken about her inclusion in
the autism spectrum, and is dedicated to autism awareness.

TUCKER REED is an award-winning fiction and nonfiction writer. She has been
recognized on the national level for her short stories, essays and poetry. She
is also a notable political blogger and has appeared on CNN, CBS, ABC and
HuffPost Live, as well as featured in articles published by TIME magazine, Marie
Claire magazine, Ms. magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and
The Guardian, among numerous others.

LARKIN REED is a professional photographer, currently pursuing a Bachelor of
Arts degree in filmmaking. In 2013, Reed established her own multimedia
production company, and has subsequently produced and directed several short films.