HOW LONG MUST TWINS BE SEPARATED BEFORE THEY FORGET?

HOW LONG MUST TWINS BE SEPARATED BEFORE THEY FORGET?
Two new novels follow the separate lives of twins whose parents thought it possible.

The twins are fraternal, a boy and a girl, with very different personalities. What could be more natural when Mom and Dad divorce than for Mom to keep the girl and for Dad to take the boy? “And never the twain shall meet” is the parents’ decision for the four-year-old brother and sister.
Kyleah’s Tree, by Janet Muirhead Hill, begins when Kyleah is eleven years old. She lives in a foster home because her mother died when she was five, and the grandparents she was sent to live with moved to a retirement home a year later. “We’re sorry, they don’t allow kids,” she was told before someone took her to a family of strangers. Is it any wonder that Kyleah has trust issues and determines not to make close friendships? “If I love them, I lose them,” she believes.
Many hair-raising adventures ensue when she and a thirteen-year-old foster brother run away, trekking from Kansas to Canada in search of families they have lost.
Kendall’s Storm, the companion novel, begins when the boy is ten-years-old going on eleven. His dad takes him from town to town and state to state, leaving each without notice or any time for Kendall to gather up his belongings to take with him. He is the timid twin who fears both his father’s wrath and just about everything else. He longs for his sister and carries a faded photo of the two of them taken just days before their fourth birthday—and their separation.
When Kendall rescues a dog from a hail storm, his loneliness is somewhat abated, his courage begins to grow, but his fateful adventures are far from over. Kendall has learned that when he dares to ask his father questions, he might not get an answer, and that when Dad doesn’t answer, it’s bad news. Two questions he’s learned never to ask are whether or not his sister and mother are alive and, if they are, why can’t he see them?
When Dad decides to settle in southwest Washington on Long Beach Peninsula, Kendall is not happy. He hates the cold dampness and is afraid of the ocean. When he learns that his father’s job is not with the FBI as Kendall liked to believe, but rather a drug dealer, Kendall is devastated and runs away only to be lost in the rain forest. After he’s rescued, Dad is arrested, and Kendall goes to a foster home where he lives with three other boys until a typhoon sweeps the area.
Kendall and Kyleah, twins with different innate traits, travel journeys that have almost no similarity. They live in very different settings, experience different life styles, and are influenced by different kinds of people. The foster homes they each live in are opposite—one kind and responsible, the other abusive and negligent. Yet, they share a bond like no other, a bond formed before birth and strengthened in the first four years of life. Book reading groups will find fodder for lively discussion as they compare and contrast these children’s stories. The comprehensive discussion guides in the back of each book will stimulate thoughtful debates for adult readers as well as for middle-grade students in classroom settings.

Each of these novels is an exciting, stand-alone read and both are now available. A third book will be released next year, completing this trilogy of twins.

For more information about these novels or to schedule an interview or a school visit, please contact the author at 406-685-3545 or e-mail her at author@janetmuirheadhill.com. These books may be purchased for $12.00 each at www.ravenpublishing.net, www.amazon.com, or in many fine stores.

Kyleah's Tree is a finalist

Kyleah Ralston's mother has died. She doesn't know where her father and brother are or even if they are still alive. She joins her friend Benjamin to leave the foster home in Kansas where they both live. Though she seeks to find her lost brother, it is her true self she is looking for—and finds, through the many hair raising adventures they encounter from Kansas to Canada.  

Kyleah's Tree, by Janet Muirhead Hill has been selected as one of three finalists in the fiction category for the Parmly Billings High Plains Book Award. Read on for the entire press release:

2009 High Plains Book Award Committee Announces Finalists

Thirteen books have been selected as finalists for the 2009 Parmly Billings Library High Plains Book Awards. All finalist books were published for the first time in 2008 and written by a regional author or writing team, or are literary works which examine and reflect life on the High Plains region.  The High Plains region includes Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.  Nominations were received from 20 publishers and several individuals in the U.S. and Canada. 

 

The finalists have been selected in five categories : Best Novel; Best Nonfiction; Best First Book; Best Poetry and Zonta Best Woman Writer.  The Best Poetry award has been added this year.  A five hundred dollar cash prize is awarded in each category. The finalist books are: 

 

Fiction

Kyleah's Tree, Janet Muirhead Hill, Raven Publishing; So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Leif Enger, Grove/Atlantic; Another Man's Moccasins, Craig Johnson, Viking/Penguin

 

Nonfiction

In Contemporary Rhythm, Peter H. Hassrick and Elizabeth J. Cunningham, University of Oklahoma Press; The Wide Open, Ed. by Annick Smith/Susan O'Connor, University of Nebraska Press; Legacy of Stone, Margaret Hryniuk, Frank Korvemaker and Larry Easton, Coteau Books

 

Poetry

Made Flesh, Craig Arnold, Ausable Press; Prairie Kaddish, Isa Milman, Coteau Books; The Baseball Field at Night, Patricia Goedicke, Lost Horse Press

 

First Book

Horses That Buck, Margot Kahn, University of Oklahoma Press; Sherlock Holmes: The Montana Chronicles, John Fitzpatrick, Riverbend Publishing; Wind River Country, Bayard Fox and Claude Poulet, Fremont County Publishing

 

 

 

Zonta Best Woman Writer

 

The Wide Open, Edited by Annick Smith and Susan O'Connor, University of Oklahoma Press; Road Map to Holland, Jennifer Graf Groneberg, New American Library/Penguin; Horses That Buck, Margot Kahn, University of Oklahoma Press

 

More than 40 local volunteers read and evaluated the nominated entries.  The top three books in each category will be sent to regional judges for final selection as award winners.  Judges are published authors in the various genres with strong ties to the High Plains region. 

“We are hoping bookstores and libraries will publicize the nominees and finalists so the public will have an opportunity to read this interesting array of books,” said Parmly Billings Library Director Bill Cochran.

Winners in each category will be announced at the High Plains Book Awards Banquet on Friday, October 2, 2009 in Billings, MT.  The event is the kickoff for the 7^th annual High Plains BookFest. For more information go to: http://highplainsbookawards.org

 

END.

True Fiction for child victims

No matter how one feels about the war in Iraq, all must surely agree that the children who are left behind are the innocent victims. As I watched news clips after the invasion of Iraq, I felt deep empathy and sorrow for the children pulled from the arms of a mom or dad, and in some cases, both, after a prolonged and tearful goodbye. I listened to a mother left behind with three preschool age children who at first missed their father. When he did not return right away, they refused to talk about him, for it was easier to forget him, than to suffer the pain of his "abandonment." When a new boy started school with my grandchildren, I learned that he had come to live with his grandparents when both his parents were deployed to fight in Iraq. 

How does that feel? I asked myself. But I knew, just from agony of homesickness I suffered from a two week separation from my parents when I was nine. And they were not that far away. Just multiply that experience a hundredfold or a thousandfold, and I'd have an idea. What if they never came back? was my next question. How could I know what that was like? I had recently lost my mother and five years before that, my dad. I know the ache of missing them. But I'm an adult. My parents were in their eighties and their deaths were not unexpected. I could only imagine how painful it would be for a nine year old to lose a parent. 

But imagine I did, getting into the heart and mind of Danny, a fictional nine-year-old boy, as best I could. He is a rancher's son, and very close to his father. They worked and played together, and when Danny asked for a horse of his own, his dad could not refuse him. The horse, Dragon, becomes Danny's pride and joy and constant companion until the day his father dies. Then he can't look at him anymore, sure that it was the expense of the horse that forced his dad to join the Air National Guard, go to Iraq, and die in a fiery plane crash. Blaming his horse and himself, he withdraws from everything. 

The story continues as the loss is compounded on his family, (himself, his mother, and older sister) each dealing with his or her grief privately. Financially unable to hold on to the mortgaged cattle ranch, they move to Denver to live with Danny's grandparents. 

Can Danny adapt? Will he survive this additional loss of everything he has ever known. Will he get his "Dragon" back? Will his family, torn apart by deep personal sorrow, ever regain the happy unity they once shared? When Danny confronts the "enemy," an Iraqi classmate in the Denver school, will blame and hatred overwhelm him?   

The answers may be found in "Danny's Dragon" by Janet Muirhead Hill in book stores or online at www.ravenpublishing.net.