Virtual Book Tour and Giveaway: Shadows of Time by Jackie Meekums-Hales

Welcome to my stop on the virtual book tour for Shadows of Time by Jackie Meekums-Hales. This book tour was organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. On my stop, I have an excerpt from the book as well as a fantastic guest post from the author. There's also the tour wide giveaway for a chance to win a $25 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card. Be sure to visit the other stops on the tour for more content. Enjoy!

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Title: Shadows of Time

Author: Jackie Meekums-Hales

Publisher: Willow River Press

Publication Date: April 26th 2022

Genre: Women's Fiction

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Maggie’s daughter, Cathy, is a successful business woman in Australia. After the failure of a relationship and her mother’s death, she returns to England for the funeral, hoping to rekindle her childhood sense of carefree life in the Yorkshire countryside. She is confronted by revelations about Maggie’s tragic past, which has a legacy of loss overshadowing her family’s present and future. As Cathy and her sister June unravel the truth, her mother’s story unfolds in a flashback to 1945. Life for the young Maggie before they were born reflects the world of mid-century attitudes towards women who dared to have a baby out of wedlock. The illusion of the Maggie her daughters knew is dispelled.

Meanwhile, two young women explore family history, and fate takes a hand. Three families are linked through coincidences and circumstances they did not know they shared. Cathy must decide how far, and for what reasons, she allows herself to live in the shadows of the past.

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EXCERPT:

The past was being rewritten, and she no longer trusted it. It seemed it could acquire a life of its own, turning, chameleon-like, into something that camouflaged itself.

As Cathy stepped through the door, she felt It seemed as if life just kept throwing the unexpected at her, like someone aiming at a coconut shy in a fairground, the prize being the removal of her peace of mind.

Was it her own fault? Did she just hand it over? She was no longer sure whether fate or her own actions had been the root of her situation, but failure was the outcome she felt. Here was June, her children around her, her job satisfying her, contentment oozing from her. Why didn't she feel that same satisfaction with her life? Others wowed at her photographs that captured a lifestyle most of them could only dream of. She’d made it to the top, despite the odds. She had a beautiful home full of beautiful things, remaining pristine and undisturbed by the turmoil of invasion by the young. Yet here she was, wishing that somehow she could capture that feeling of home. She was reeling from the discoveries she and June made in the loft. It was as if her mother had a secret life, of which they were not a part. Under the surface of the woman they had thought they knew was someone else, someone not shared with them—a stranger.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jackie Meekums-Hales is a member of the Society of Authors, whose debut novel Shadows of Time was the fulfilment of an ambition nurtured during her working life as a teacher, inspired by her research into her own and others’ family histories. She has been writing as a hobby since childhood, contributing to poetry anthologies since her undergraduate days and being a Poetry Guild national semi-finalist in the 1990s. She has also written short stories for friends, family and students. Since retiring, she has contributed to Poetry Archive Now (2020), with 20-20 Vision, uploaded to YouTube, and has had poetry and flash fiction published online by Flash Fiction North. One of her flash fictions is to appear in an anthology, having been selected from entries during the Morecambe Festival 2021. She had a creative memoir, Shelf Life, published by Dear Damsels in 2019, a precursor to collaborating with her sister on a creative non-fiction memoir Remnants of War, published in 2021. She writes a blog about her walks and thoughts in the Yorkshire and Somerset countryside.

Blog * Facebook * Goodreads * Twitter

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GUEST POST:

- Have you always wanted to be a writer?

For a working-class girl, growing up in a London suburb in the 1950s, being a writer wasn’t even on the radar. It wasn’t something you did, if you lived in our street. I had an older cousin who became a reporter, but I went to grammar school, and I was expected to do something academic, or work in a bank. But I wrote… There was a group of us who played in woods behind our houses, on land abandoned during the war. I must have been a compulsive organiser, even then, because I was inspired by Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven to form a “Woods Club”. We had secret meetings in my dad’s shed, and I started writing plays for us to make our long-suffering parents watch. I didn’t consciously think I wanted to be a writer, but my imagination found its way onto the page, even then.

It wasn’t until I was studying literature and history for my degree that I really started to write. I wrote poetry, and I thought it was just something that allowed me to express my thoughts and feelings. Then, one of my fellow students put together a booklet of poetry contributions, and his preface acknowledged that we’d all thought no-one else would relate to what we wrote, but we were wrong.

In subsequent years, I had the occasional poem published in an anthology, and I began writing scraps of prose we might now call Flash Fiction, but there was no label or market for it then. Poems and prose accumulated in a box, in the bottom of the wardrobe. I wrote short stories, shared with family and friends, but I was busy as an English teacher, and writing a novel was a “one day” idea. I started one for children, involving a wizard, and when Harry Potter came out, how I wished I’d managed to finish that before J.K. Rowling got going!

I shared some writing with my students. When they were struggling with the language of “Macbeth”, I went home and wrote a rap, to grab their interest and get the basics of the story into their heads. When I taught the older students about formulaic writing, I wove the “ingredients” of a fairy story together for them, and challenged them to write their own feminist versions. When an exam class had to study First World War poetry and concluded that poetry was just doom and gloom, and they didn’t want to be made miserable, I wrote a light-hearted poem for them, to prove not all poetry had to be sad. So I wrote, but I had a career, and I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I was a teacher with a hobby.

It was only when I retired from teaching that I had time and head-space to start writing more. I had a piece of creative non-fiction accepted for publication on line, and I thought maybe I could engage others, rather than just write for myself. I submitted short stories to competitions, and eventually I grasped the nettle and applied myself to tackling a novel. When Between the Lines Publishing accepted it, I was over the moon, as it was just before my 70th birthday. Maybe I was becoming a writer, at long last. Now I’ve written two more novels (not published) and I’ve had poetry and flash fiction accepted online. During the first lockdown, in 2020, I started a Covid diary, and I took up daily walking, from which my blog was born. I hadn’t dared to aspire to writing as a profession, but writing has always been part of my life, so maybe I’ve always been a writer.

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GIVEAWAY:

Jackie Meekums-Hales will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter. Good luck!

(All the Ups and Downs is not responsible for this giveaway, its entries, or the prize. Goddess Fish Promotions and the author assume all responsibility for this giveaway.)

a Rafflecopter giveaway