The Alchemist’s Daughter will pull you from whatever you are supposed to be doing into Sidonie’s fortunes, and hold you there cover to cover.Marked by high adventure, and delicious language, Kernaghan’s use of real historical figures like Dr. John Dee, Lady Mary Herbert, Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare, blended with original fictional characters are a powerful mix, while her impeccable research allows you to learn something of an age that has long held a spell over contemporary readers.
I grew on a dairy farm outside Grindrod, B.C., Canada, population 600. A solitary child, I worked my way
several times through the family bookshelves -- Greek myths, Jack London, G.A Henty's ripping yarns, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Book of the Month Club bodice rippers. And then one day I came across my uncle's musty collection of Weird Tales and Thrilling Wonder Stories. While my contemporaries read Nancy Drew,I was lost in the worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Jack Vance: tales of vanished civilizations, fabulous cities of antiquity, wars and wizardry at the end of time. The moment I stumbled across those yellowing pulp magazines, my future career was decided.
My first published story, written when I was eleven, was a rousing tale about a boy trapper in the north woods. It earned me a byline, a half--page illustration, and a cheque for $12.65.
My first published SF story, "Starcult' (written after a twenty year hiatus) sold to Galaxy magazine. My next two or three stories accumulated so many rejection slips that in despair I decided to write a novel. Remembering my early love affair with lost civilizations, I wrote the first of my "Grey Isles" trilogy, a bronze age fantasy called Journey to Aprilioth. That one, and the next two in the series, Songs from the Drowned Lands and The Sarsen Witch, sold to Ace Books and appeared during the eighties.
Along the way I co-authored a writer's handbook for the pacific northwest, and a non-fiction book on reincarnation and past life experience, Walking After Midnight. Out of the research into Walking After Midnight came my first young adult fantasy, Dance of the Snow Dragon, set in 18th century Bhutan, and based on Tibetan Buddhist mythology. An adult spin-off, "Dragon-Rain", later appeared in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Ninth Annual Collection.
My young adult fantasy The Snow Queen, is a reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale. It gives the story a feminist twist, and incorporates northern shamanism and some elements of the Finnish myth cycle, the Kalevala. The Snow Queen won an Aurora Award for the best English language Canadian novel, and was shortlisted for the Canadian Library Association's Children's Book of the Year award. It was followed in 2004 by The Alchemist's Daughter, an historical YA fantasy set in Elizabethan England. My latest adult fantasy is Winter on the Plain of Ghosts: a novel of Mohenjo-daro. Set in the prehistoric Indus Valley, it's an homage to those fabulous cities of antiquity that held me spellbound so many decades ago.
Wild Talent, set in London and Paris circa 1888-89, is my most recent YA historical fantasy, released in 2008. Madame Blavatsky, William Butler Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Alexandra David Neel all make guest appearances.
What else? I've published fiction and poetry in a variety of magazines and anthologies, both mainstream and speculative, in the U.S. and Canada. I've been a member of a five-woman poetry group called Quintet, and in 1998 we published our first collection, Quintet: Themes and Variations. Some of those poems also appear in my speculative poetry collection Tales From the Holograph Woods (Wattle & Daub Books 2009). I also belong to The Lonely Cry -- a group of west coast SF and fantasy writers who have banded together to promote our work by whatever means we can devise. I conduct two long-established writing workshops in the Vancouver BC area, and for twelve years I ran a used bookstore with my husband Pat. We have three grown children and four grandchildren, and live in New Westminster B.C. (next door to Vancouver) with an eccentric cat.
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