Exclusive interview with author CA Belmond and a review of her new book, A Rather Remarkable Homecoming
Rating: 4 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I did a blog for the Huffington Post that caused a bit of a commotion,” says A Rather Remarkable Homecoming author CA Belmond. The article was titled: Bad Words: 6 Words You Should Never Write and detailed six words that are hyperbole no writer should ever use. Her new book, A Rather Remarkable Homecoming, is presumably free of those six tiresome words.
The novel is centered on a small Cornish village struggling to fend off aggressive real-estate developers from London. “While I was writing it, I kept hearing about one English village after another having such confrontations,” says Belmond. “Prince Charles, who has a bit of a cameo in my book, made headlines again and again as he spoke out to defend the English countryside and to build homes that work with nature instead of against it. Life really does imitate art.”
In this fourth novel in Belmond’s Rather series, Penny Nichols and her new husband Jeremy Laidley solve mysteries together and are witty. They seem a bit like Nick and Nora from The Thin Man movies. The characters in this novel are well defined, especially a bird-watching earl and a television chef. Belmond’a descriptions of Cornwall are vivid. You’ll want to travel to Cornwall after reading.
Belmond says the seeds for this novel were planted in the first book in the series, A Rather Lovely Inheritance. “My American heroine, Penny Nichols, is reunited with a childhood chum, Jeremy Laidley, whom she’d first met years ago. They were both children at her English grandmother’s seaside house in Cornwall.”
As adults reunited from the first novel, Penny and Jeremy must solve a family mystery. That leads to more novels, to A Rather Curious Engagement and A Rather Charming Invitation, and more adventures, taking them all across Europe. “They go to London, Paris, Rome, the French Riviera, Lake Geneva, Corsica, Lake Como, Italy, but they never got a chance to return to Cornwall,” says Belmond.
“I somehow always knew that Penny and Jeremy must one day go back to explore Cornwall again, to see what’s changed, and what new insights they can find in their shared past,” says Belmond. In A Rather Remarkable Homecoming, Penny discovers that her grandmother’s beautiful Cornish house-by-the-sea is in peril of being demolished, that the whole village is in jeopardy.
“Already readers are telling me how much they can relate to the fiercely protective feelings Penny has about wanting to rescue such an important family landmark as her grandmother’s house,” says Belmond. “Penny and Jeremy explore the wild, rugged, mysterious coast of Cornwall, home of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
Belmond says she enjoys having her book’s heroes interact with eccentric local folk, whose personalities for her grow naturally from their habitat. “I couldn’t help seeing a bird-watching English earl and a Shakespearean actor and a TV chef just springing out of the Cornish landscape, like wild, indigenous plants and mythological creatures,” says Belmond.
Belmond says she researches all her novels with extensive travel. “I read deeply about the history of the area, and I travel some more. Along the way, I talk to everybody I meet…whether it’s a museum curator, the waiter in a café, a stockbroker, a chef, a valet, a librarian, or the people at the next table in a restaurant. I invariably hear rich insights and the keen observations that people don’t always say in public. When it comes to storing up arcane nuggets of information for future books, I am a real squirrel, and whenever I find something of interest, no matter how obscure, I file it away.”
Belmond is writing her fifth Rather novel, plus two stand-alone novels with entirely different characters and stories. Belmond shuttles back and forth between Connecticut and France. She was born in New York.
A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (PENNY NICHOLS) by C.A. Belmond. Trade Paperback, 368 pages, Publisher: NAL Trade; 1 edition (September 6, 2011). Language: English ISBN-13: 978-0451234612 $15.00.
[adrotate group=”8″]
