Introducing a New Author

Susan McCaskill, the seamstress who made my fabulous costumes, has many talents!  It’s with great pleasure that I give a signal boost to her new, independently published children’s book, Penelope Parker: Witch in Training. It’s written for a young reading level, maybe about seven to ten depending on the reader. here’s the blurb:

Penelope Parker is a ten year old girl with a problem; she has just been expelled from school! Now what on earth could a ten year old girl have done that was serious enough to get her expelled? 

Well, Penelope has special powers, the trouble is she can’t control them. Her father is a wizard and her mother Mundane, with no powers at all, so the powers Penelope inherited from her father are not balanced by those of her mother. This causes no end of catastrophes, one of which ends with Penelope being expelled. 

From that time on, Penelope’s life was never to be the same. Follow her adventures and the scrapes she and Hecate, her talking cat get into, and the danger just around the corner.

and a link to Amazon:  here

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And here is Sue:

First, I’d like to thank Emma Jane Holloway for hosting me on her blog; it is much appreciated!

My book Penelope Parker: Witch in Training started rumbling around in my head a little over ten years ago. I played with it, wrote a couple of chapters, and made notes. Then Life intruded, and it sat collecting dust until last year, when I decided I wasn’t getting any younger, and the book was not going to write itself. (It did, but that’s another story.)

Penelope herself is based loosely on me as a child. I was gangly, a square peg in a round hole, and was mercilessly bullied. I also saw things others didn’t, and I’m sure my mother worried about me!

Gillian Barrington-Smythe, the antagonist, is also based on a girl I knew at school. She came from a rich family, and was spoiled and used to getting her own way.

The other characters just emerged fully formed from the recesses of my brain, and I’m not sure where they came from!

The school Penelope was expelled from is also the school I went to in England, as is the headmistress. Unfortunately, the school no longer exists; there is a council estate there now.

I love the Harry Potter series, but I always felt that a few more strong female characters would have been good, so I set out to do just that. There aren’t too many books in the fantasy genre that have a female as the main character, so Penelope was born, partly from me, partly from fantasy.

All the main characters are female, and the only males in the book are the fathers, Gwyddion and Marcus, Hecate’s brother, Paddy, and Jacob. I think that will continue, at least for the next book, and we’ll see what happens after that. I’m already working on the second book and hope to have the first draft finished by April if all goes well.

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About the author:

Susan (or Sue, as she prefers to be called), was born in post war England, and lived there until the age of nine, when she and her mother emigrated to Canada. Her father died when she was eight, and left a huge impression on her. Both her parents encouraged her to read, and learn. She has always believed in fairies and elves, and probably always will, and as a child, she saw things many others didn’t, and as a result she was thought to be a little strange.

Although she has been in Canada for so many years, she still misses the English and Welsh countryside, and because of this, her novel is based in the ancient, picturesque town of Betws-Y-Coed, and the surrounding countryside.

Sue lives on beautiful Vancouver Island, with her husband and her demanding cats.