Announcing a new release from Author Tam May!
To what lengths will one go to exorcise a specter?
One rainy morning in 1892, people gather to mourn the death of San Francisco socialite Penelope Alderdice. Among them is a strange little woman named Bertha Ross, who claims to have known “Grace” in the 1850’s in the small town of Waxwood. But Penelope’s granddaughter, Vivian, has never heard of Grace or Waxwood.
Bertha reveals surprising details about Grace’s life in Waxwood, including a love affair with Evan, an artist and member of Brandywine, Waxwood’s art colony.Vivian’s mother, Larissa, insists Bertha is an imposter who has come not to mourn a woman she knew in her youth but to stir up trouble.
Vivian, however, suspects the key to her grandmother’s life and her own lies in Waxwood. She journeys to Brandywine where she meets Verina Jones, Evan’s niece, and discovers a packet of letters her grandmother wrote forty years ago about her time in Waxwood.
As Vivian confronts the specter that holds the truth to secrets buried in the family consciousness, she examines her grandmother’s life as a mid-19th century debutante and her own as a Gilded Age belle. Will she find her way out into the world as an autonomous being, or will she be haunted by the specter of her grandmother’s unhappiness all her life?
Available at the following online retailers:
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RLVX7NW
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07RLVX7NW
Apple iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1464211695
A Brief Interview with the Author:
Tell us, Tam, what do
you love about this new book?
I love the character of Vivian Alderdice. She’s the unofficial
protagonist of my historical family drama, the Waxwood Series, and she’s a
representative of the Gilded Age woman moving into the new century (the 20th
century) which saw so many changes in America, including a flourishing of
women’s rights. I love that she isn’t afraid to probe into the past, and that she
realizes knowing the past is necessary to a peaceful and enlightened future, not
only historically, but personally.
I am also fascinated by the dynamics of the Alderdice family. I
struggled with this family since 2004, as I knew there would be so many complications
to their dysfunctionality, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on where they
were coming from until I wrote this book. There is so much going on under the
surface related to their personal family dynamics and the expectations of the
Gilded Age. I think the stage is set The
Specter for this family to develop more meaningful interactions and startling
revelations as the series progresses.
Introduce us to the character who made you
laugh first.
That’s a
challenging question, because none of the characters in The Specter are really that light-hearted. But I think the
character that most made me laugh, though not in a mean way, was Bertha Ross.
She’s an elderly woman who’s a little “confused,” let us say, but very
kindhearted and wise in her own childlike way. She has a quirky pattern of
speech, and her thought processes aren’t always easy to follow. Sometimes she
says funny things without meaning for them to be funny. But she also has insights
that lead Vivian to important places on her journey to discovering some of the
truths about her family.
Share one or two things you learned while
researching.
Oh, wow,
there are so many things I learned! I’ve done research in the past on the 19th
century, and I’m an avid reader of classic literature of that period, but this
was the first time I did research on specifically the Gilded Age. The biggest
thing I learned writing The Specter
was all about late Victorian mourning practices, as there’s a lot of mourning
going on in the series. These practices were extremely specific and elaborate,
and many of them were based on superstition, as people in the 19th
century believed superstitions much more than we do today. For example, I
learned that all the mirrors in the house were covered and all the pictures put
face down because of the fear that the spirit of the deceased would emerge from
one of these images or his/her reflection in the mirror and possess the living.
Kind of creepy!
How has your writing grown since your last
release?
It’s grown
so much! My last release was in 2017, a book of contemporary literary short
stories titled Gnarled Bones and Other
Stories. I loved writing it and was glad to release it. But in the
intervening years, I discovered my true passion lay in historical fiction. All
my stories are psychological fiction --- that is, story comes out of character and
the plot includes the deeper elements of character, such as thoughts, musings,
dreams, fears, and desires. That hasn’t changed. But I realized while
continuing to work on my writing that the past influences our future on both a
personal and a collective level. Painful as it sometimes is, we must look back
at the past, or we can’t move on to the future, at least, not without complete
peace of mind and self-knowledge. We don’t want to dwell on the past, of course,
but I think we need to recognize it and acknowledge how it shaped us, who we
are, our beliefs, our choices in life, our emotional and psychological reality.
In my first book, my characters realize that and go through their own emotional
journeys to get to the end of a long, dark tunnel where they can walk into the
light, if not knowing who they are now, at least seeing the potential of who
they can become unhindered by who they were in the past.
What's next for you?
I’m working right now on the second book of the Waxwood Series which
is going to focus on Jake Alderdice, Vivian’s brother. Then next year, it’s on
to the last two books of the series involving other characters whose
psychological and emotional lives lend themselves to Vivian’s growing awareness
of who she is and who she wants to be, as well as reflecting the rapid motion
of the last years of the 19th century that hurled us into the modern
age.
What are
you reading now?
I read several books at one time. I just started a novel by
historical fiction author Libbie Hawker called Madam. I always try to find historical books set in 19th
century West Coast towns (Hawker’s book is set in Seattle), as so much Gilded
Age fiction seems to be about the East Coast or the Midwest. I’m also always
reading one classic fiction book, since I love the oldies. I discovered
Gertrude Atherton several years ago, and I’m right now in the process of
reading as much of her work as I can, since she is a San Francisco writer and
comparable to Henry James and Edith Wharton, who were both psychological fiction
authors. The book I’m reading of hers right now is called The Sisters-In-Law and it’s a fascinating “insider” look at the
1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, although it’s much more about two women
who become sisters-in-law and their differing attitudes toward class and
society at the turn of the 20th century.
Lisa's Review:
Lisa's Review:
The Specter is a deeply impressionable tale of a nearly lost
Bohemian culture taking place across America in the 1850s. May focuses on one
such community north of San Francisco, where artists and other odd ducks could
live and create in a setting of like-mindedness and peace.
May’s historical fiction picks apart the delicate façade of
American gentility in upper class, well-heeled families on the wild West Coast
at the end of the nineteenth century. The world is beginning to change yet
again as society shifts with a burgeoning middle class. A matriarch of a
shipping family passes away, and with her death come more secrets that
granddaughter Vivian will do anything, even break strict mourning codes, to
unravel. Bypassing her unemotional aristocratic mother, Vivian follows a
mysterious old woman who insists she was Grandmother’s friend, to the summer
getaway of Waxwood, where Grandmother spent an adventurous year as a Waxwood
Belle. There, and in the artist’s colony of Brandywine, specters breathe.
A large portion of the novel consists of letters home, which
slowly reveal some of Grandmother’s secretive life, but only if one reads
between the lines. I had fun thinking up numerous solutions to the riddles,
some of which were cleverly revealed, and others left tantalizingly dangled.
The research and era-specific codes, dress, and references were nearly
faultless to Grandmother’s mid-1850s period, and the era of Vivian, the 1890s.
Told mostly through Vivian’s perspective, and as she reads the letters, the
grandmother’s, readers of American family drama who enjoy riddles will find
much to appreciate about this first novel in a series. Although complete with a
thoughtful conclusion, another mystery is dredged up at the very end which I
assume will be the focus of another book in the series.
Thank you, Tam.
Tam May grew up in the United
States and earned her B.A. and M.A in English. She worked as an English college
instructor and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher before she became a
full-time writer. She started writing when she was 14 and writing became her
voice. She writes historical and contemporary fiction about characters who must
examine their past and the time in which they live to move on to the future.
Her first book, a collection of contemporary
short stories titled Gnarled Bones And Other Stories, was nominated for
a 2017 Summer Indie Book Award. She is currently working on a Gilded Age family
saga, of which the first book, The Specter, is now available. She is
also working on a historical mystery featuring a turn-of-the-century New Woman
female sleuth. Both series take place in Northern California.
She lives in Texas but calls San Francisco and the Bay Area home. When
she’s not writing, she’s reading classic literature and watching classic films.
For more information on Tam May and her work, feel free to check out her
website at www.tammayauthor.com.
