The journey of our lives is sometimes filled with hurdles and challenges that at first seem to be overwhelming. I was 30 years old with two small children when my first husband died. That event became a benchmark for me, a call to measure up. Overcoming deep sorrow, fear, and loneliness is a daunting task. In my novel, Sunspots, I tried to capture this heartache and to also present the hope and eventual attainment of a fulfilling life. The story is fiction but the feelings are real and writing this book became a catharsis for me. I have always been attracted to the unknown energies around us that sometimes make themselves known. Mystical elements that help us shoulder on. Sunspots incorporates those elements in the narrative. But readers take heart. Sunspots is above all a love story and full of humor. Life is complex, and so the heroine, Aurora, is a complex character. She is a young woman of our times who doesn’t realize that sometimes marriage can isolating, that the “happily ever after” doesn’t happen automatically. Aurora has a gift. She can see snippets of her past lives. She can interact with a ghost who has played a pivotal role in all of her past lives, unbeknownst to her in this one. Ultimately, Aurora attains the strength to pursue the life for which she was meant.
The cover design depicts the aurora borealis, a phenomenon caused by dark spots on our sun that throw a firestorm to Earth and get caught in our magnetic field— hence the title of the book. Aurora was named in honor of that solar event by her hippie parents who traveled a great distance to witness it, and conceived her in its glow.
I have taken great care with the writing style of this work and some reviewers have categorized it as literary fiction or literary romance.