New Book!!!

 After many years, my book is finally for sale.  I know, I know, everyone has been clamoring for it-  here is is.  Don't break the doors down trying to get it.... oh, wait.  It's an e-book at an e-store-  oh well.

The Dragonfly Convention is five interwoven stories: Two sister, a Korean refugee, an American soldier, and the Korean war.

Lauren  MacKenzie is back in her home town of Pacific Grove, California. The occasion is the death of her mother, Soon Wan MacKenzie.  The house and all its contents have been left to herself and her sister,  Jennifer Stowe. 

Both sisters are at critical junctures in their lives.

Lauren is a woman who’s job has always been her life;  a shy, contemplative, diffident woman, she is a teacher who has just received a pink slip from the near bankrupt San Francisco school district.  Losing her job is a major crisis for her.

Her younger sister Jennifer, on the other hand, is the golden girl;  she has always been the social, popular, outgoing sister.  Jennifer is a free-lance writer and illustrator living in Southern California.  She is between projects and currently enmeshed in a painful separation from her husband of seven years;  she is beginning to contemplate a divorce.  As a woman who has always felt the necessity of having a man in her life to feel complete, losing her husband amounts to a turning point for her.

Both sisters feel that the settling of the estate is a good opportunity to take some time out and reevaluate their lives.

The house is a Victorian along the ocean in Pacific Grove.  It is quite familiar to the women, who grew up there.  The house is full of painful memories and emotions of a turbulent, tumultuous childhood.  Memories of their mother, a pianist, and an alcoholic, and her vicious verbal and sometime physical attacks.  Memories of their much older father, an artist, who died years before their mother.  Memories of the ferocity of the violent fights between their parents.  They wonder, as they always have, how two such disparate individuals came together and why they remained together for so many years.

While going through the contents of the house, Lauren finds a box of letters, and newspaper clippings, as well as a journal written in Korean.  The journal is the diary of her mother’s life immigrating from North Korea to South Korea in 1950, and gives a glimpse of her life as a refugee in war-torn Korea.  The letters, from their father to their mother, begin in 1952, and continue until the couple actually marries in 1954.  Together, the letters, newspaper clippings and journal and trace a turbulent period of history that Lauren and Jennifer know very little about, and reveal a relationship that becomes a bittersweet romance of two people from two divergent cultures and generations.

In recreating their parents’ relationship, Lauren and Jennifer gain greater insight into their past and their parent’s lives.  The sister’s begin to understand and forgive their mother for her shortcomings.  Lauren discovers that in accepting and making peace with her past she is able to move ahead with her life.  Jennifer realizes that leaving her husband is not the end of her life, but could be a new beginning, if she can find the strength within her.

The Dragonfly Convention is available at http://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=the+dragonfly+convention

I can be found at http://allysonwonders.tumblr.com