Wordsmith– I also write books
Just released my New Adult futuristic, interracial sweet romantic suspense, A BRAND NEW ADDRESS! Here is a review from Amari Barash, PhD:
At once humorous, solemn, and moving, Kathleen Rowland’s A BRAND NEW ADDRESS is a quirky coming-of-age story taking place during Earth’s 22nd-century Second Ice Age. The novel’s engaging and plucky heroine, Yardley Van Dyke, faces a fiendish combination of family tensions, personal insecurities, and life-threatening cold; she is a teenager with whom any intelligent young reader, female or male, can immediately identify.
As the story develops, Rowland tells parallel, multi-layered stories about Yardley, Marchand, her twin brother, and their companions: the characters experience the typical laughs, anxieties, and ups and downs of everyday life; their trajectories, though, are riddled with moments of deathly seriousness as they are forced to confront the realities of Earth’s dwindling resources and the grave dangers of space travel. Caught between her attachment to her greenhouse in frigid California and her desire to join suave, intrepid Marchand LaFont on the intergalactic adventure of a lifetime, Yardley blossoms as a person, flourishes as an intellectual, and is physically transplanted to a new environment – as is her beloved vegetable garden.
Rowland’s prose, which seems to mirror both the wisdom and the awkwardness that shine through her dreamy yet shrewd adolescent characters, imparts a flexibly casual feeling along with an unusual richness of vocabulary, style, and imagination. By peering into the minds and hearts of personalities as diverse as a corrupt octogenarian CEO, unsavory tattooed jailbirds, and young sisters who suddenly lose both parents, Rowland never shies away from the sobering tragedies, the terrifying uncertainties, or the unfair nature of many of the challenges we face as both youths and adults – using profound metaphors drawn from nature to both explain and alleviate the uglier aspects of human nature. But far from a simple cautionary tale, A BRAND NEW ADDRESS is also a satisfying love story, an erudite romp through space, and a courageous call to protect the soaring potential of the human spirit.
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