GIVEAWAY!! Spotlight: Never Gone by Laurel Garver with a guest post

Never Gone
written by Laurel Garver
published by Laurel Garver

find it here: Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Goodreads, Kobo, Smashwords, CreateSpace

About the book – from Goodreads: Days after her father’s death, fifteen-year-old Dani Deane begins seeing him all around New York — wading through discarded sketches in her room, roaming the halls at church, socializing at his post-funeral reception. Is grief making her crazy? Or could her dad really be lingering between this world and the next, trying to contact her?
Dani desperately longs for his help. Without him keeping the peace, Dani’s relationship with her mother is deteriorating fast. Soon Mum ships her off to rural England with Dad’s relatives for a visit that Dani fears will become a permanent stay. But she won’t let her arty, urban life slip away without a fight, especially when daily phone calls with her lab partner Theo become her lifeline.

To find her way home, Dani must somehow reconnect with Mum. But as she seeks advice from relatives and insights from old letters, she uncovers family secrets that shake her to the core. Convinced that Dad’s ghost alone can help her, she sets out on a dangerous journey to contact him one last time.

Setting is a key element of my novel, Never Gone, about a teen who is grieving the death of her British father, and must somehow build a life with her workaholic American mother. Danielle’s trip from the US to England becomes a catalyst for her to get to the bottom of family secrets. Setting also undergirds the story flow.

I’ve been asked why I set the American portion of the story in New York rather than Philadelphia, which would be easier since I live there. My story decisions usually develop out of the characters, rather than the other way around. As I got to know my protagonist Dani’s parents, Graham and Grace, it became clear that no other place would work for them. Grace is a driven advertising executive who would never settle for working outside Madison Avenue. Making a living as a professional photographer—which is Graham’s career—requires proximity to the most potential purchasers of this kind of service, like ad agencies.

Honestly, though, New York City is only two hours away, and we have friends there who’ve been a great help answering my questions about family life in the city. I did five trips (combined with family fun) to choose Dani’s neighborhoods and gather sensory details.

Dani’s homes in Park Slope Brooklyn and the Upper West Side are based on real buildings. I was able to find real estate listings online for her UWS high rise, including floor plans, which I adapted slightly.

Dani’s school, Rexford Academy, is a fabrication based roughly on a private school on 91st, though I place it in the West 70s. Her church is riff on All Angels in the Upper West Side, mixed with several Anglican/Episcopal churches I’ve visited in the US and Britain.

I think it’s important to make fabrications realistic by drawing details from real places. If a reader comes across an inauthentic detail, it pulls them out of the story and the magic of the story world is broken.

When it came to settling on my British location, I looked first at characterization. I wanted the time that Dani spent in her late father’s hometown to challenge her strong identification with him. The setting had to be a big contrast from her very American, very urban home, so her dad is not only foreign, but rural.

I’d originally planned to set the story in the Cotswolds in southwest England near Wales, where I lived for a semester in college. But while I was researching and drafting, friends invited us to visit them in Durham, which is up north. When I discovered that folks from northern Britain face deep prejudice in the south, it made Graham’s back story even more compelling. He’d have a hard time breaking into photography in London because of his accent, and would more easily find work in the US. Most Americans can’t tell a Cockney or Geordie accent from a posh Oxbridge, or don’t have enough context to be prejudiced against less desirable regional dialects.

So that visit turned into a major research trip. I invented Ashmede (a popular name for streets, but no village bears it) from places I visited then, and a North Yorkshire village I stayed in during spring break as a student. Durham itself was a wonderful discovery, a rare jewel few tourists ever see. The city is perched on cliffs on a peninsula formed by the rivers Tyne and Wear, with a stunning 900-year-old cathedral its crowning beauty. At the cathedral and elsewhere in the region, we saw evidence of Christianity’s long history sunk deep into this land–back to Roman times. The ancient past of the Vikings, the Saxons, the Romans seems nearer here than in the south, where generations have built over the past time and again. This got me thinking about the decision every generation must make: will we examine and learn from the past, or bury it?

I also set a chapter at Kings Cross Station, where all the northbound trains leave London. It worked nicely on a couple of levels, including Dani’s love of Harry Potter.

About the author: Laurel Garver is the author of Never Gone, a novel about grief, faith and finding love when all seems lost. A word nerd, Indie film enthusiast and incurable Anglophile, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway 
             Happy reading wherever you are and whenever you get a free chance!!!