A Crack in the Sky
by Victoria G. Parnham

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Goldie and her little brother TJ grew up in a small coastal town in Maine in the late 1960’s with both a Mom and a Dad. Families went to church together and ate meals together. Most folks still had one car; Dad worked and Mom was expected to stay home. For entertainment, families watched black and white TV and gathered to watch Walt Disney or Wild Kingdom. Radios across the country blared the music of the Beatles and the Stones. Our entire country was in an extremely turbulent time: The Vietnam War filled the airwaves. Young folks, were referred to as hippies who wore long hair, torn-up jeans and tie-dyed shirts. Everyone thought that anyone under the age of 25 smoked pot all day because they preached ‘peace’ and ‘free love’ to anyone who would listen. It was a time of awakening in the world as well as in Goldie and TJ’s isolated world. Goldie and TJ’s problem is their mother who is stricter than God himself, so much so that she treats them as if she was a warden and they were her prisoners. The highlights of their week were going to the grocery store and attending church, because when they were outside the prison walls of their ‘home’ they could pretend that their family was normal – whatever that meant. There were family secrets that no one from the outside world knew, what actually went on inside their close-knit family. Mental illness, addiction, cruelty and isolation were Goldie and TJ’s secret and THIS is their story.

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Victoria G. Parnham is from Maine where the story unfolds. As a child, her greatest pleasure was reading books and her favorite writer at that time was Grace Livingston Hill. “I thought to myself, I would love to be a writer. About twenty years ago, I took a writing course. Writing is the best way I have of expressing myself and for me, it just flows. So, to start, I keep little notes on index cards/post its and I don’t actually keep them in much order. When I undertook this project, I laid them all out on a table and picked which ones I could use in my book and which ones could be saved for future use. Incidentally, my instructor stated that I had too much information and had more than enough for a second book. I got my idea from the commercial I saw once, ‘words hit a child as hard as a fist.’ I built it from there.” Stephen King once said to take an idea and see what kind of fossil you can dig up. Having talked mostly to adults who were the victims of child abuse – including verbal and mental abuse – she has heard of several instances where they would rather have been struck or beaten than to endure the constant criticism and humiliation of cruel, hateful, belittling words in addition to being told they were ‘wrong’ all the time, being told they were dumb or stupid and everything they did or said was wrong. A Crack in the Sky is the author’s debut novel.

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Contributors

Author

Victoria G. Parnham

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