Losing Adam
Adrienne Clarke
Publication date: April 4th 2018
Genres: Contemporary, New Adult, Romance
What happens when the person you love most in the world suddenly becomes a stranger?
Adam and Jenny’s world is falling apart. Their dream of attending college together away from home quickly becomes a nightmare when Adam begins hearing the voice of the Snow Queen. Adam’s startling transformation from popular drama student into a withdrawn, suspicious stranger leaves Jenny frightened and confused. How can the person she loves most in the world suddenly become someone she doesn’t recognize? As Adam drifts farther and farther away into the Snow Queen’s mysterious world of ice and snow, Jenny believes she must fight to bring him back or risk losing him forever.
Vividly narrated by Adam and Jenny, the struggle to understand the impact of Adam’s mental illness, forces both characters on a journey of self-discovery that leads to understanding about life’s uncertainty, the power of first love, and the pain of letting go. Drawing on elements of The Snow Queen fairy tale, Losing Adam is a unique combination of drama and romance.
The challenge of writing about the recent past
Why 1994? The question most people ask when I explain that my YA/NA novel Losing Adam is set at a college campus in 1994. The agents and editors who expressed interest in the manuscript early on, were particularly concerned that the ‘historical setting’ would put off readers who preferred stories set in the here and now.
I listened carefully to these concerns, but in the end, I chose to move forward, or backwards if you like, with 1994. The setting felt right for several reasons. First and foremost because I wanted to create a setting with a timeless, romantic feel, free from the technology shorthand that dictates the way modern teenagers communicate with one another. I wanted my characters to express themselves in letters, rather than through texts, and to do this I had to set my story before smart phones took over the world. While I don’t consider myself old-fashioned, I do long for the lost days of letter writing. I believe letters allowed people to reveal themselves in ways that texts messages just can’t. For those who claim that today’s teens don’t care about letters because you can’t miss what you never had, I think that for some, the past always holds a certain amount of fascination. Especially for those who might sometimes feel disconnected from the modern world. No matter what age you’re living in, I think there is always a certain amount of nostalgia for lost things.
My second reason for setting Losing Adam in 1994 is because that’s the year I started university. The first year of college is different for everyone, but there is a kind of rhythm and emotional language that’s difficult to recreate the farther you get away from it. The advantage of setting my novel in 1994 is that I would be familiar with the music, world events and pop cultural references relevant at that time. When it comes to music, many of the bands I reference in the novel including, The Clash, The Cure, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, are still popular in 2018.
The more I talked to the young adults I work with, the more convinced I became that setting my novel in the recent past wouldn’t affect the novel’s ability to find readers. Just like in 1994, or at any other time in history, there are always teens who feel out of touch or disconnected from their generation. What matters more than the time period is the emotional connection readers feel to a specific character, and my hope is that readers will feel pulled into Adam and Jenny’s world. The adage, ‘the more things change the more they stay the same,’ holds true in the way that although our ways of communicating with one another may change, a lot of the emotional baggage stays the same. The struggle for self, for understanding, for compassion, for love, are eternal concerns. But don’t take my word for it. Take a journey with me in Losing Adam to the recent past and tell me what you think!
Author Bio:
I became a writer because the world inside my head was so real and vivid, sometimes more so than the outside world. In some sense I have lived parallel lives, present in my real and fictional existence in different ways. A lover of faerie tales, fantasy and gothic horror, a thread of the mysterious or unexpected runs through all my work. My dream is to find readers who will gather round and let me tell them stories that will become a part of their life the way they have become a part of mine.
My short fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, The Storyteller, A Fly in Amber, New Plains Review, Silly Tree Anthologies, and in the e-zines Les Bonnes Fees, The Devilfish Review, Rose Red Review and 87 Bedford. An excerpt from my forthcoming YA novel Losing Adam won first place in the Young Adult category of the Seven Hills Literary Review contest.
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