Finding Ian
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Stephen Ambrose
Children's Authors
Stan and Jan Berenstain |
Romance author Stella Cameron bends the rules with powerful new novel
INTERVIEW BY SANDY HUSEBY
The truism in best-selling fiction is that when you've found a good niche, as Stella Cameron surely has in her romantic suspense novels, stick with what works. For Cameron, however, such rules are made to be tested, bent and ultimately broken. Her new novel, Finding Ian, explores the powerful emotional issues of child adoption and reconciliation from the perspective of Byron Frazer, a birth father compelled to confront his life-altering decision to give up his son, Ian. Cameron's own experience brought her to the issue -- she and her husband have three children, one of whom is adopted. "Our Korean daughter is a joy, a special child we are blessed to have. As she grew up, she steadfastly refused to talk about her birth family or country of origin," says Cameron, even though she tried to open those topics because everything she read advised her to do so. "Whenever I spoke of Korea or her birth mother, she would say, 'You're my birth mother. This is my country.' " Eventually, however, the tentative questions did come. She asked "how would we feel about her visiting Korea and looking at her official records," Cameron says, "and I knew then that this sweet but deeply wounded young woman thought a lot about who her birth mother and father were, and whether there were siblings. "This was the seed that brought Ian to my mind. This and my own frightened and frightening feelings about child abandonment. As a child, I knew fear and I lived with the possibility of being left alone. Strangers were kind, but they were not my own people. This is where my faithfulness to child advocacy began." Byron Frazer's decision to travel from California to Cornwall to learn firsthand whether his son is happy and well-cared for is also his final opportunity to determine whether he did the right thing by giving his infant son away for adoption after Ian's birth mother died unexpectedly. In the close knit English community, Byron finds a new reason to love in Jade Perron, part of Ian's adoptive family. Jade also must walk a difficult road between her family obligations and the possibility that Byron may take Ian away from the only family he has known. Cameron tells this story primarily through the viewpoint of Byron Frazer, a perspective that gave her both special challenges and opportunities as a storyteller. "Each story I write comes through the eyes of one character in particular. Until Jade came on stage, I saw everything from Byron's point of view. Writing from this male angle is very natural to me, I think because it allows me to flirt with actually knowing how men think. Don't most women long to know more about men's minds?" Cameron paints the Cornish landscape as colorfully as Frances Mayes depicted Tuscany in her memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun. So why Cornwall? "You've winkled out -- a Brit term -- a point I haven't been asked about before," says Cameron, a Seattle author with a British heritage. "I have been thinking about this story for a long time. A great deal was clear to me by the time I went to Cornwall to set my background, and part of what I'd known since I started was where I wanted to set the book. Cornish people are wonderfully pragmatic, and loyal to their own. In the story, Ian has grown up with a person like this and he needed to return to a place where he'd be surrounded by similar personalities. And I love Cornwall!" Cameron does see distinct threads weaving themselves through all her writing. "Good will triumph over evil and love can overcome all odds. I think I would sum up theme that way. The threads that never go away are the importance of honor, and the damage that is done by bad relationships, selfishness, cruelty -- and the fabulous power of optimism, a willingness to risk being a fool for love and a wacky sense of humor." Finding Ian resonates with the heartfelt intensity Cameron expresses for child advocacy, but the suggestion that this book is a major departure from her best-selling romantic suspense novels brings a quick demur from Cameron. "Relationships have to be at the center of whatever I write. I have so many stories to write about people, about love and its power -- some will be romantic suspense, some will be about people who can see both the serious and sometimes heart-rending side of life, and just how funny it can be -- but who won't give up on pursuing what is closest to their hearts. Finding Ian was always in my future. I just had to wait for the right moment to arrive before I wrote the book. I believe a storyteller should tell whatever story commands the most passion, the loudest demand to be told now, right now."
Sandy Huseby writes and reviews from her homes in Fargo, North Dakota, and northern Minnesota and remembers with warm nostalgia her long-ago penpal from St. Austell, Cornwall.
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