Book Description
Banished from Wild Point Island as a child, Ella Pattenson, a half human-half revenant, has managed to hide her true identity as a descendent of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Thought to have perished, the settlers survived but were transformed into revenants--immortal beings who live forever as long as they remain on the island.
Now, Ella must return to the place of her birth to rescue her father from imprisonment and a soon to be unspeakable death. Her only hope is to trust a seductive revenant who seems to have ties to the corrupt High Council. Simon Viccars is sexy and like no man she’s ever met. But he’s been trapped on the island for 400 years and is willing to do almost anything for his freedom.
With the forces of the island conspiring against her, Ella must risk her father, her heart, and her life on love.
Guest Post From Author Kate Lutter
You can never go home again.
How many poets, authors, and I guess people who are a lot smarter than me have said that?
So why didn't I listen?
No, instead, I talked my four sister, my four wild sisters into pilgrimaging back to our hometown--a tiny no nothing town in New Jersey--yes, Bruce Springsteen land--no, we're not on the Jersey shore but close enough to it --yeah--to revisit our old haunts because it was the tenth anniversary of our father's death--and we wanted to somehow pay tribute.
We would visit the house we'd grown up in, the church we'd attended as kids, the school we'd gone to, and the cemetery that now held the remains of our parents.
So we met at my sister's house, piled into my other sister's car--which was big enough to hold all of us--and set off for lunch--our first stop. Food to nourish the soul and to give us time to plan our itinerary.
We decided to go to ______ Diner, which was still there. Thank God. Because, of course, I was already dreading that so many things would be different . . . changed since we'd last been to South _________. So we pulled up --anticipating the food would be less than, well, perhaps a little too GREASY. Determined to ignore that aspect, we each ordered some type of sandwich because every sandwich came with--and had come with for over 50 years--cucumber salad and coleslaw. This is the traditional appetizer that we longed to eat.
The waitress arrived and plopped the cucumber salads down. What?? My first disappointment.
I wasn't going to say anything, but then I couldn't hold it in.
“It's disgusting. They put the cucumber salad in plastic cups. It's come to this.”
The fact that it tasted different didn't even matter. It was those plastic cups.
We, somehow, made it through the meal.
My sister Karen tried to cheer us up. “Let's go visit Sacred Heart.”
She meant the Church and the school we went to as kids. A private Catholic school that, unfortunately, had closed the year before. The building was still there, but it had been taken over by someone else. We drove half a mile from the diner into the parking lot, parked the car, stared at the school, which looked the same, ignored the new owner's sign, and then went into the Church. Safe haven? At least the Church was still the same.
Or so we thought.
Inside, we winced when we saw that the pews we used to sit in, on the left side of the church, had been removed to make way for the Choir. What! Here's my memory. Every Sunday we'd pile into the car, go to the bakery, then park on the street near the Church, enter in through the side door at exactly 9:20 for the 9:30 mass. But now the pews were gone.
My sister Cheryl broke the silence. “Let's go home.” She meant it was time to visit our childhood home. My other sister Caroline chimed in, “And let's drive around to the back of the house and see what they did to the back yard.” She meant the new owners.
We had a plan.
We drove the route we used to walk as kids. It was only a mile, but it had seemed much longer than that when you're in grade school and have to walk through rain and snow.
The house we used to live in had been sold years ago when my mother died. It looked completely different. We parked one house away and stared at it. I took a picture. Then we drove around to the back, where there used to be woods, where we played as kids. The town had now built a park. We drove through and parked the car. It started to rain, but we didn't care. Now, like peeping toms, we snuck up and surveyed our old back yard.
My memory of our yard: Hedges surrounded the yard. There was a giant oak tree. A sand pile with swings. A pool. A garden.
Now the yard was small--so small. Someone had removed the giant oak tree. There was no pool or garden. Only grass. Just grass. And a tall white fence replaced the hedges.
We climbed back into the car in silence.
We have three brothers. One is a captain of the police department in our hometown. We stopped on a whim and by some miracle he was in the parking lot, leaving to go home. Seeing him buoyed our spirits.
Then it was onto the cemetery. My mom and dad are laid to rest--side by side--in the mausoleum. I always say the same thing when we come to visit as a group. I repeat what my youngest sister Cyndi said so many years ago when my mother died. “It isn't fair,” she said. “You had her for so much longer than I did.”
“Do you remember what you said, Cyndi, when mommy died?”
She nods.
The one thing we don't talk about this time is the dream we all had about a year after she died. We all dreamed that she came back to our childhood home and knocked on the front door. She came to visit for a day. She came back from heaven for a day because we'd all said--if we could only have her for one more day. We all had the same dream.
You can never go home again, or rather you should never go home again.
Let the memories stay as they were.
Those childhood memories shouldn't be disturbed.
I write novels for a living. In Wild Point Island, my heroine--Ella Pattenson--returns to her childhood home with her sister, Lily, to rescue her father from imprisonment. Twenty years have passed since she's been on the island. But when she arrives at her childhood home, everything is the same. There's not even dust on the furniture.
That's my fantasy.
Somehow, there would be a way to do that--to return to your childhood home, and it would look exactly the way you left it.
Wouldn't that be lovely??
About The Author
Kate Lutter believes she was born to write. She wrote her first novel when she was in eighth grade, but then almost burned her house down when she tried to incinerate her story in the garbage can because she couldn’t get the plot to turn out right. Now, many years later, she lives in NJ with her husband and five cats (no matches in sight) and spends her days writing contemporary paranormal romances, traveling the world, and hanging out with her four wild sisters. She is happy to report that her debut novel, Wild Point Island, the first in a series, has just been published by Crescent Moon Press. She is busy writing the sequel and her weekly travel blog entitled Hot Blogging with Chuck, which features her very snarky and rascally almost famous cat.
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