Want To Read My Book? Consider This Your Warning
By: Shannon Quist
Tags: Fiction, Truth, Adoption, Warning Letter, Novel

This is your only warning. You might not like my book, Rose’s Locket. Like life, it’s full of magic and darkness alike. I believe fiction is the best place for anyone to use lies to tell the truth, and that’s what I tried to do. But if, like me, you think that rules are for breaking and meaningful truths (even if they’re painful) are worth knowing, maybe you’d better read on.

Rose’s Locket begins on an eighteen-year-old girl’s birthday, the birthday her parents finally hand over the more gruesome details of her adoption and biological history. Drugs, serious mental illness, and the unspoken issue of questionable moral character are just some of the things that surface in regards to her birthmother’s past. These are not light topics, nor should they be. Fear is a dangerous tool to employ, especially in the already precarious territory of a young woman attempting to define her identity and future, but fear is clearly weaponized here.

And like me, the main character is no good girl. She gets angry, she does what she wants, and she has moments of recklessness. For the first few chapters, you’re not supposed to like her. She reacts to her birthday news by running away, smoking, drinking, and sulking like any brooding teenager might. She has no respect for her parents’ religion and consistently ignores their perspective in search of some kind of validation about why she is the way she is. Her views are cynical, especially when it comes to the way Christianity seemingly interferes with the story of her adoption; her challenges are not meant to be easy to read about.

She tries to pin down her birthmother’s story by driving across the state of Texas and beyond in order to find her, but what she finds only makes her situation worse.

She encounters the realities of mental illness, homelessness, violence, prostitution, and jail, but doesn’t find the one thing she set out to find: the rest of her story.

Despite her deep depression, or maybe because of it, she writes the most outlandish story she can muster about a fictional family that might have been her own. Her generational epic spans the lives of daughters and mothers and all the different pieces of family and family history. Though peppered with magical experiences like unicorns and fortune-telling, darker moments like teen pregnancy, sex, murder, witches, demons, and drama span these pages, too.

But even when she writes the last chapter, she isn’t satisfied. And more trouble comes for her afterward. She’s forced to deal with her own future, something she doesn’t know how to navigate without the context of where she came from.

Though we may dream of unicorns sharing their magic with us or finding mermaids who impart their wisdom, it’s the monsters of reality we are pitted against, and, for me, there is no way to soften that blow. If you hope for high redemption, first you must experience existential hopelessness. Rose’s Locket is a good place to start that journey. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Over the next couple of months, I’ll be sharing reflective pieces about my journey writing and publishing my book. Rose’s Locket, now available on Amazon, is a fictional novel about a girl’s exploration into her adoption and life’s meaning. If you want to connect, find me on Instagram.