Title: The Wolf Mirror
Author: Caroline Healy
Publication Date: Feb. 14, 2017
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Changing places doesn’t always help you see things differently.
Cassie throws the first punch in a brawl at Winchester Abbey Girl’s School. Her subsequent suspension is a glitch in Cassie’s master plan; Finish School/Get Job/Leave Home (and never come back). As punishment her mother banishes her to Ludlow Park, their creepy ancestral home. In the dark of a stormy night Cassie finds herself transported to 1714, the beginning of the Georgian period.
With the help of a lady’s maid and an obnoxious gentleman, Mr Charles Stafford, Cassie must unravel the mysterious illness afflicting Lord Miller. If Lord Miller kicks the bucket the house goes to Reginald Huxley, the brainless cousin from London.
Cassie’s task is to figure out who is poisoning the Lord of Ludlow without exposing herself to the ridicule of her peers, getting herself committed to the asylum or worse, married off to the first man who will have her.
Cassie must learn to hold her tongue, keep her pride in check and reign in her rebellious nature – because the fate of her entire family, for generations, rests on her shoulders.
Meanwhile, Lady Cassandra Miller frantically searches for her smelling salts or her trusted governess Miss. Blythe, whose soothing advice she would dearly love. Instead Cassandra finds some woman and a boy squatting in the Ludlow mansion; her father, her lady’s maid and all the servants have magically disappeared.
Tell-a-vision, the In-her-net, horseless carriages and women wearing pantaloons; Cassandra is afraid that she might have inhaled fowl air causing her to temporarily lose her senses.
Only when both girls can get over their pride, societal prejudices and self-importance will they be able to return to their rightful century. Until then, they are free to wreak maximum damage on their respective centuries.
Caroline Healy is a writer and community arts facilitator. She recently completed her M.A. in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University. She alternates her time between procrastination and making art.
In 2012 her award winning short story collection A Stitch in Time was published by Doire Press. Fiction and commentary has been featured in publications across Ireland, the U.K. and more recently in the U.S. Caroline’s work can be found in journals such as Wordlegs,The Bohemyth, Short Story Ireland, Short Stop U.K., Five Stop Story, Prole, Literary Orphans and the Irish Writers’ Centre Lonely Voice
Her debut Y.A. novel, Blood Entwines was published by Bloomsbury Spark in August 2014 and she is in the process of writing the second book in the series, Blood Betrayal, as well as a short story collection, The House of Water.
She has a fondness for dark chocolate, cups of tea and winter woollies.
(More details can be found on her website www.carolinehealy.com)
I have been known to voluntarily clean the bathroom, iron (I really dislike ironing) and even go for 10k runs rather than sit down to write. Some days I have the whole day pencilled in for a writing project and I will get up, spend ages in the bathroom flossing teeth, make an elaborate breakfast, decide that the floor is filthy and needs a mop, realise that I have eggs that might be going off (in another two weeks) and just HAVE to be put into a cake. Then suddenly it is after lunch and I need to answer emails that just CAN’T wait and then it’s dinner and I finally sit down to the computer and its seven thirty in the evening and I am quite tired (wonder why!) so I decide to leave the writing until the next day…
A procrastinating expert!
However, if I have a deadline or I genuinely love the project and am determined I will religiously sit at my desk for three hours a day without fail seven days a week till the first draft is finished. And even if I don’t write a word I need to be at that desk to muscle memory my brain and body to the ‘Act’ of writing. Because sometimes it is an act, a charade, a farce. And that is the beauty of it, pulling words and sentences out of nothing and putting them onto the page until eventually you have a first draft…then the true work of writing can begin, because you have the building blocks of a novel at your disposal.
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