Exclusive interview with author Catherine McKenzie and a review of her new novel about a woman who tries to come home after being declared dead
Rating: 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I got the idea several years ago when I heard about a woman who had gone to Africa, gotten sick, and when she got home, someone else was living in her apartment and all her stuff was gone,” says Forgotten author Catherine McKenzie. “I hope she got her stuff back. I immediately asked the person who was telling me this story to stop telling me any additional details because I saw the potential of the premise and didn’t want to know anything more about the real person.”
McKenzie writes well and makes Forgotten a fast read. Emma returns home to find everything she had is gone, that someone else lives in her apartment, that her boyfriend has a new girlfriend. That doesn’t trigger as a major a life change as you might expect. Emma gains a new love interest, but that relationship could have more heat. With the exotic setting of Africa, readers could expect a story that’s bigger and has more details about Africa. McKenzie writes in the first person.
Emma Tupper leaves her growing practice at a large law firm to fulfill her mother’s deathbed wish for Emma to take the trip she always wanted to Africa. While there, Emma gets extremely ill. When she’s well enough to travel home, she calls her boyfriend Craig to say she’ll be flying in the next day. Catastrophe strikes, and she can’t get home for months. Once back in New York she realizes everyone thought she was dead. Everything she thought she was coming home to is gone. Everyone has moved on. Can she?
McKenzie used the Internet to do her research. “I did quite a bit of research about Africa and the area in which I wanted to set the book,” says McKenzie. “I even looked at geological maps in order to figure out where a massive earthquake could appear.”
McKenzie has written two other novels: Spin and Arranged. Her fourth novel, Hidden, will release in June in Canada and in the spring of 2014 in the U.S. McKenzie blogs regularly for the Huffington Post. Spin has been nominated as best commercial fiction by RT magazine for 2012. Arranged is a Booklist Pick for Top Ten Women’s Fiction for 2013.
Spin has been optioned for film,” says McKenzie. “It would be great if that happened for the others, too. Maybe this sounds like false modesty, but I’m always pleasantly surprised when a book I write is positively reviewed.” McKenzie says it’s a thrill to go into a bookstore, a library or an airport store and see her book on a shelf.
McKenzie’s editors in Canada are Jennifer Lambert and Jane Warren. In the U.S. It’s Emily Krump and Stephanie Meyers. “I met my editors after my agent sold my book to them,” says McKenzie. “The general process is to provide me with an editorial letter, basically a big picture outline of all the things that need to be fixed in the book to make it better. Then it moves into line and copy edits. When I first got published, it was a challenge to me to understand how to make the editorial changes my editors were asking for, but I’ve learned along the way.”
McKenzie’s agent is Abigail Koons at Park Literary. “We met at a writer’s conference,” says McKenzie. “When I was looking for an agent many months later, I queried her and it worked out.”
McKenzie is based in Montreal, Canada, and was born there.
Forgotten by Catherine McKenzie. Paperback: 448 pages. Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Original edition (October 16, 2012). Language: English ISBN-10: 0062115413
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