Growing Up Girl, Book I
Fiction
Date Published: September 10, 2024
In Growing Up Girl: Book One, a young Bernadette Aller floats through her
life – job to job, lover to lover, place to place. She is an untethered
spirit trying to find her way in a world that’s not been too kind.
Now, as she barrels toward her seventies, she wants to tell her story, not
because it’s hers alone, but because it’s a surprisingly common story. It’s
a story much of which happens behind doors that display the word
unspeakable. Bernadette hires Scully Trippe to ghost write, translating
Bernadette’s personal experience into the third person, in what might (or
might not) be a misguided attempt to extend the story’s reach.
The time frame is malleable, with the storytelling moving back and forth
through several stages of Bernadette’s life.
In this first book of the Growing Up Girl trilogy, BernadetteWorld is
populated with Patience, her housekeeper; Maddie, a former lover and now a
ghost; and Lucinda, a time traveler who drops in and out.
It’s a quirky group.
Cover artist is Matt Smith. The image of the five-year-old on the cover is
Matt’s mother whom he never met. In his own words, “Although I have no
memory of her, I treasure the stories of Lynn’s strength, stubbornness, and
ferocious loyalty. My hope is to bring her from the muted mysterious shadows
into the light with love.”
EXCERPT
From Bernadette’s first encounter with a pre-teen child, Lucinda
By this time Bernadette wanted only one thing—to decide for certain
what these clouds were doing. They were scudding, that was certain; the
rest was obfuscation. She’d have been shocked if she were to learn she’d got
it all wrong.
Lucinda helped her expand her thinking.
“Uncertainty,” she repeated with increasing confidence, although she
could read Bernadette’s longing for its opposite. “Heisenberg. They call it
the new science. But there’s no way it’s new. More than a hundred years
old, quantum.”
About the Author
Caroline Fairless is a writer and a ceramic sculptor. She is a retreat
facilitator with a focus on the interdependence and connectedness of every
being, visible or not. She served several congregations as an ordained
pastor for twenty-five years, publishing several books during that time. Now
in her retirement, Caroline is writing fiction and learning new art
forms.
Over the past twenty years, Caroline and her partner Jim have been
fortunate to stitch back together three land parcels that once were one. One
of them borders on one of New Hampshire’s many small ponds. The other
two border a marsh that hosts otters, beaver, herons, turtles, geese, ducks,
and an occasional loon passing through.
In the New Hampshire summers, Caroline gardens and walks the dogs she and
Jim have rescued. New Hampshire winters will find her at her computer, still
walking dogs, and camping in front of the wood stove.
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