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.

Of Death Do We Speak? Helping children cope with death of a loved one.

My paternal grandfather died when I was eight years old. I cried as I watched my parents and two older siblings drive away to attend the funeral.  I was not allowed to go to the funeral. I guess my parents felt I was too young and it would be too hard on me. Or maybe they were just so steeped in their own grief to think of my need for closure. I loved grandpa. I did not want to be left out of anything that involved him. And I knew I would never see him again.

Grandpa's death was never talked about in my presence. Maybe no one talked about it. I think in those days, people, at least in our family, hid their grief. If anyone cried, they did it privately. Death, like sex, was a subject children should never hear or speak of. So what did I do with my grief at age eight? I guess I stuffed it somewhere deep down and out of sight, adding death to the many mysterious evils that I was to fear, but not to question. 

I think—hope—it is generally different today. Children who experience the death of a peer,  a parent, or anyone close to them are often taken to a therapist for grief counseling. And therapists often use books or stories to help children better understand the feelings they are experiencing. When children read of a character with whom they relate and see that character experience the same feelings they suffer, they can better accept that they are not alone, and that their feelings and reactions are not wrong. 

Because death is natural, inevitable, and universal, it has found it's way into many of the children's novels I have written. It is my belief that children who have suffered or will suffer the death of a beloved person or pet will be better prepared for sorrow that threatens to overwhelm them by reading about a character who is going through the same grief. 

Janet Burroway, in her book, Writing Fiction, wrote, "Literature offers feelings for which we don't have to pay." Kids will find it easier to articulate their own feelings when they can relate them to those of a character in a book. 

Characters in my books who, each in his or her way, have each dealt with loss of a loved one through death are Danny in Danny's Dragon whose father is a casualty of the Iraq war, Kyleah in Kyleah's Tree whose mother died, and her father, and brother, with whom she is separated. Miranda, who lives with her grandparents in Miranda and Starlight, knows nothing of her father until she gets a letter from him and an explanation of the accident that resulted in his missing at sea and presumed death in Starlight's Courage. In Starlight Comes Home Miranda loses a mentor who is like a grandfather to her. Kids and adults alike like these books for the emotions, happy and sad, that they experience when reading them.

For other books, both fiction and non-fiction, written to help kids deal with death, I Googled "books to help children cope with death." One site that gives a nice list of books, most of which I confess I have not read, is:  http://www.leeanne.com/grief/

Although I still encounter parents, librarians, and teachers who would "protect" children from "sad" topics in books, I also find that kids like to have their emotions touched, and their favorite books are the ones in which the characters feel deeply about life's problems that they may also face.

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.