NEW VOICES
Sarah Penner
© Laura Foote
Asha Lemmie
© Lenka Drstakova
Exploring the twists and turns of history, debut novelists Asha Lemmie, Sarah Penner, Frances Quinn & Margaret Rodenberg invite us into worlds merging fact and fiction.
banks of the River Thames. Together, we can begin to unbury the secrets belonging to the lost apothecary. I only ask that readers tread carefully—for the apothecary is a clever woman and a master of disguise.” Asha Lemmie’s Fifty Words for Rain (Dutton, 2020) is set in post– World War II Japan, and her main character, Nori, is a girl growing up against a backdrop of a legacy of war and tradition. Lemmie graduated from Boston College with a degree in English Literature and Creative Writing. However, she had started writing Fifty Words for Rain when she was sixteen years old. “Nori came to me in much the same way as my daydreams. I knew I wanted to tell a story about a girl who belongs nowhere, and who blossoms all the same, but I never intended to write a novel. I only sought to find a release for a story that grew bigger and bigger, and eventually, became too much for me to hold inside my head. “I always loved reading books, and I have always loved writing, but it was not until this idea that it occurred to me that I could ever be an author. I did not understand how one could possibly take an idea from a seed, and turn it into a fully-fledged work of art that could reach people. I didn’t understand how one could take that first great leap of confidence and faith, knowing that the odds were unfavorable, knowing that long years could be spent on something that would likely live and die in a drawer in my desk.”
Frances Quinn
Margaret Rodenberg
The Lost Apothecary (Park Row, 2021) by Sarah Penner was inspired by a treasure hunt. As Penner describes it: “In the summer of 2019, long before pandemic-related lockdowns, I found myself standing in the mud of the River Thames in central London, wearing blue rubber gloves and a pair of old tennis shoes. I was mudlarking—hunting the river for old treasures. My story begins with one woman’s discovery of a mysterious vial on the banks of the River Thames. The vial is connected to a string of unsolved murders two centuries ago and the female poisoner behind them—an apothecary who sells welldisguised poisons to other women seeking freedom from the men who have wronged them. “The Lost Apothecary is very much a story about women controlling their own destinies. There are dark aspects to the story—like the burden of secrets and the destructive pursuit of vengeance—but it is also a story of hope and the way women can protect, honor, and free one another, even when separated by the barrier of time. While researching this book, I loved digging into historical documents and antiquated ephemera, particularly those relating to 18thcentury London. Over the last few years, I’ve happily passed many an afternoon in the Rare Books room of the British Library, my head buried in fragile manuscripts from bygone eras. I’ve studied firsthand accounts of apothecaries, druggists, and poisoners. (I know enough to be dangerous, as they say.) So, although The Lost Apothecary is a work of fiction, I have done my best to research and craft a story that is true to history.” What has delighted and thrilled Penner, she says, is that “The Lost Apothecary has been picked up in Canada, the UK, and eleven territories worldwide. It’s an interesting time to publish a book, but I hope my debut novel serves as an invitation for readers to escape our present reality, if only in the imagination, and join me on the 4
COLUMNS | Issue 95, February 2021
However, because Lemmie is “a natural-born performer, a trained musician,” she says, “there is no greater horror to me than devoting myself to something that will never be seen. I didn’t understand how one could take such a risk—until Nori. My desire to finish her story, to make it sing, blotted out my fear of failure. I wrote and rewrote, I researched, I took rejection on the chin. Whatever it took to do her justice, I was willing to do.” She even, she continues, “snuck off to Japan as often as I could, with money I didn’t really have. I spent years learning the language, and crystallizing a feeling I was already familiar with: the feeling of being in a place that is familiar, beloved even, but unalterably foreign. Ten years later, I am an author, and Fifty Words for Rain is in the world. I have come to appreciate that Nori and I share an ultimate triumph: both of us refused to be erased without making a mark.” Finding Napoleon (She Writes Press, 2021) by Margaret Rodenberg delves into the life of Albine de Montholon, Napoleon’s last lover, and also explores Napoleon’s interest in writing romantic fiction. From the moment that Rodenberg heard about “young Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to write a romantic novel,” she relates, “I vowed to finish it for him. I’d lived in France as a young teen and still loved its language and history. Since I planned to write a novel, the idea united my passions.” Rodenberg’s next step was to refine “the concept: that the defeated Napoleon in exile would finish his youthful manuscript as a gift for his toddler son. Since the aging emperor’s view of his adolescent idealism drove the story, I avoided his middle years of battles and geopolitics. But to ghostwrite for Napoleon, I had to know him as a person.” To achieve her aim, she carried out extensive research and “visited Napoleonic sites in France and Corsica. But the big prize was
