Authors Interviewing Characters: Kimberly Brock

Kimberly Brock interviews Pennilyn Young from THE LOST BOOK OF ELEANOR DARE

about THE LOST BOOK OF ELEANOR DARE

Now available in trade paper—just in time for women’s history month—SIBA bestseller The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare explores the meaning of women’s history and the sacrifices every mother makes for her daughter.

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known that the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured commonplace book. Brought from England on Eleanor’s fateful voyage to the New World, her book was passed down through the fifteen generations of daughters who followed as they came of age. Thirteen-year-old Alice had been next in line to receive it, but her mother’s tragic death fractured the unbroken legacy and the Dare Stone and the shadowy history recorded in the book faded into memory. Or so Alice hoped.

In the waning days of World War II, Alice is a young widow and a mother herself when she is unexpectedly presented with her birthright: the deed to Evertell, her abandoned family home and the history she thought forgotten. Determined to sell the property and step into a future free of the past, Alice returns to Savannah with her own thirteen-year-old daughter, Penn, in tow. But when Penn’s curiosity over the lineage she never knew begins to unveil secrets from beneath every stone and bone and shell of the old house and Eleanor’s book is finally found, Alice is forced to reckon with the sacrifices made for love and the realities of their true inheritance as daughters of Eleanor Dare.

In this sweeping tale from award-winning author Kimberly Brock, the answers to a real-life mystery may be found in the pages of a story that was always waiting to be written.

“From the haunting first line, The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare transports the reader to a mysterious land, time and family . . . the captivating women of the Dare legacy must find their true inheritance hiding behind the untold secrets.” —Patti Callahan, New York Times bestselling author

 

Kimberly: What was it like to see Evertell for the first time?

 

Penn: Seeing Evertell for the first time was like a dream. It was sort of terrifying because it was on this marsh and there were these spooky oaks with hanging moss and we could see a light in this high part of the house called a cupela, so it felt a little like a scary dream, too. But I didn’t care. I’d been trying to imagine it since we found the key and when I finally saw it, it was so much more than I expected. Living at Merely’s was so different. I liked Merely’s but I grew up inside a service station like I was one of the cars there for a new set of tires or an oil change. It was all business all the time. We were all stuck inside those little rooms and bumping around Imegine’s kitchen where you could barely turn around. But Evertell was this mansion–just huge. There were so many rooms, so many chimneys. In the dark it was hard to tell it was in such bad shape. I mean, it was in really bad shape. But it was amazing, too. It was so old I couldn’t even begin to think about all the Dare women that had been there before us or who had built it (there are shells in some of the walls) or just everything we were going to find there. It was like a big treasure box and even though all the stuff inside was mostly gone when we got there, it was ours. It was our home. Home is a place you’re supposed to belong and I never wanted to leave. I wanted to know everything about it.

 

Kimberly: What does it mean to you to be a descendent of Eleanor Dare?

 

Penn: Before I knew about the Dare women, it was just me and Mama. Especially after Pop died and Daddy was gone. We had Imegine but that’s not the same thing. She married my Pop but she wasn’t really my Mama’s mama. I used to look at Mama and think, what if she dies? Then it’s just me. There’s nobody else in the world that is like me. There’s nobody that looks like me, has eyes like ours or hands like ours. It was like I might disappear. And then we came to Evertell and I saw this place and the commonplace book and it was like there was this long, long line of us and I wasn’t alone. Some people think the stone wasn’t real and that Eleanor was never our ancestor, that the whole story was just a hoax. But I don’t care. I memorized the names in the commonplace book, all the Dare women. Even if I’m a ghost one day, I’ll always be part of something so big and deep. It makes me feel like we matter. I’m not afraid anymore. I’m history and I’m the future, too. It makes me want to be daring.

 

Penn: That’s easy. Grandma Imegine’s biscuits and ham. She always made them for everybody, but it felt like they were special for me. She taught me how to make them and Mama was always jealous because hers turn out flat and hard and mine have a good rise. Grandma Imegine says that’s angel’s breath that makes my biscuits soft. Mama always rolls her eyes at that but I think it’s funny.

 

Kimberly: Do you think you truly know your mom? Why? Why not?

 

Penn: There’s so much we just don’t get to know. There are all these stories in my family and they’re still a mystery to me. Even Mama has secrets. I have secrets, too. I thought I wanted to know everything about what happened to her and Grandmama Claire just like I thought I needed to know what really happened to Eleanor Dare and the truth about the stone that she said had been in our family for hundreds of years before it disappeared. I know some things for certain, though, and one of them is that Mama loves me. She loves me even with my mysteries. That makes it easier to think that even though I may never know the answers to so many mysteries about the people I love – especially Mama – we can trust each other.   

 

Kimberly: What is the thing you wished to learn most from the commonplace book?

 

Penn: I thought the commonplace book was going to give me a vision, some magic way to see my dad and tell him I’m sorry. I know I don’t have anything to be sorry for, but before we came to Evertell, I had this feeling that I shouldn’t be happy. I should be just living every single day and doing good, fun things or changing or growing up without him, because he never got those days. It felt so wrong to just keep living. It wasn’t fair. He died so young and so far away, and it felt like he was just lost and might find us if we just waited for him. The commonplace book wasn’t what I really thought it would be. The vision thing was different, too. It wasn’t some special thing to say or drink or anything like a spell. I did find all those things in the pages and it was amazing, but when I got what I wanted, it was nothing like I thought it would be. I wanted a vision to help me say goodbye to the past and look forward to all the possibilities ahead of me. I wanted to know what comes next in my story.

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Kimberly Brock is the bestselling author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare and her award-winning debut, The River Witch. She is the founder of Tinderbox Writers Workshop and has served as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. She lives near Atlanta with her husband and three children.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Interviews, On Writing