As Courtney’s best friend and ride-or-die, Sadie is also a crucial protagonist. There’s a huge part of her backstory I had to cut when I reached the third draft of Mary, Everything, but I’ll be adding in this upcoming novel.
Sadie Van Tassel comes from an aristocratic family - a really old New York family of Dutch descent - but she’s never been the typical aristocrat. The horrific ordeals she had to endure as a teenager made her even more heartfelt and honest, and by the time all was said and done, she was completely unfit for a life in high society (even if she’d wanted one, which she never did).
At thirteen, she contracted polio. She had to watch in horror as her body decayed and stopped obeying her commands. This happened at a pivotal age, too, and that feeling of powerlessness left a permanent scar on her. She was fitted for painful, humiliating leg braces and looked forward to a life as a “cripple.” To add painful insult to injury, more snobbish members of her extended family mocked her for her illness and disability, even as she tried to adjust herself to it. She overheard older men in the family lamenting her eligibility for marriage, slurring her with crude sexual language.
But Sadie had always felt deeply that she was different, had always felt alone in her family and among her peers. Weird things tended to happen when she was around. Sometimes things would fizzle or explode if she laughed or got angry. Sometimes she could move things with her will. When a cruel, mean-spirited boy bullied Sadie for her disability, he pushed her too far.
Something inside her snapped, and before she knew it, she’d pulverized his hips as easily as one might step on a cracker. Horrified and traumatized by this experience, Sadie endeavored to learn about it and gain control of it. And the more she came into contact with her “freakish” power, the more a curious thing began to happen - she regained feeling in her legs. Then she regained movement. After some time, she was able to walk again. Somehow, in a bout of otherworldly fortune she couldn’t understand, she’d cured her own polio and won back control of her body. Her mother called it a miracle. Sadie herself wasn’t so sure. While she was grateful that she’d regained her ability to walk and was now free of the debilitating pain and helplessness of polio, she felt more “freakish” and alone than ever. Normal people couldn’t do the things she could, couldn’t come back from what she had. And then there was the bully she’d destroyed for life - he wasn’t coming back from that.
It’s not until Sadie meets Courtney that she senses a kindred spirit, someone as alone and apart as she is. And it isn’t until her quest to rescue her new friend that she learns that her powers weren’t some freakish mutation, but that she has been gifted with natural arcane abilities - she’s a Type A arcane. Use of arcane energy keeps its user safe from mundane illnesses. Arcanes don’t get bullied, either, and they’re able to protect their friends.
Sadie’s life is blessed with new determination - nobody will mess with her or her loved ones ever again.
The Flapper Covenant Series
Book One
Cassandra Yorke
Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, LGBTQ+
Time Travel, Time Travel Romance
Date of Publication: March 30, 2020
ISBN: 9780578680361
ASIN: B086HYTB3Q
Number of pages: 414
Word Count: 108,498
Cover Artist: Cassandra Yorke
Tagline: A gripping tale of best friends and romance, sorcery and survival, at the dawn of the Roaring 20s.
Author Commentary: This novel is a memoir wrapped in fiction. While it's a tale of time travel and sorcery, at its core are real events and real themes - haunted yearbooks in college archives, yearning for times long gone, battery and abuse, exile and homecoming.
While I hope you enjoy it, I promise you will never read another story like it. It's from the heart, it's gritty and lurid - and below the action, it's real.
Book Description:
A young woman born in the wrong reality.
A destiny that will lead her into the past.
And a love so enduring it reaches across time - and existence itself - to bring her home.
Courtney is a lonely undergrad at secluded Braddock College in 2004, working a drowsy summer job in the Archives. Assigned to a new project, she becomes haunted by a college yearbook from the 1920s - filled with familiar faces and memories of times she never experienced. A chance encounter with a mysterious girl named Sadie - dressed in long-outdated clothes - alters her reality. But if you were never meant to be born, that reality can expel you like an infection - or kill you outright. While Courtney struggles against forces she cannot comprehend, a psychopathic stalker smells blood and closes in for the kill.
Sadie, now in 1921, races against the clock to save her friend, joined by some remarkable allies - an American combat sorceress and veteran of World War I, an enigmatic professor who specializes in piercing the veil between realities, and two young women who insist they’re Courtney’s oldest friends - one of them even claiming to be her truest love.
Time is running out for Courtney, and a terrifying wilderness - haunted by the dead from centuries past - may hold the key to her salvation. But none who enter have ever returned…
Cassandra Yorke's groundbreaking debut brings Magical Realism home to the Midwest in an explosive new style, blending midwestern gothic and historical fiction with a warm lesbian love story to create a riveting, deeply immersive epic you won't be able to put down. It's the world of Boardwalk Empire and Gatsby, with an urgent, immersive narrative about what it means to belong, what it means to be hated, what it means to be loved, and ultimately what it means to come home.
Excerpt
The crosswalk is the busiest place in town any time of the year, and even if
Braddock has a fraction of the people in the summer, it’s still bustling. As
I’m coming up, I spot a girl approaching from my left. She’s ghostly pale like
me, with auburn hair cut in a short bob around her soft jawline. The most
striking thing about her is her narrow, almond-shaped eyes. I’ve always thought
chicks with eyes like that are really cute. They catch mine as I approach, and
there’s a kind of click; two people in a crowd with matching energy. She greets
me with a narrow, witty smile. I return hers in my usual unintentional way,
soft and genuine and a little bit sad-looking without ever meaning to seem that
way. And we stand there for a minute, waiting for the traffic to clear.
“Say, is it gonna be dry like this all week?” she asks.
“Um…” I wish I had a better answer ready. “I think so? I haven’t
really checked the weather.”
“Why, I sure hope it is.” She stares back across the street at the
shade of College Green. “Anything I hate is rain in the summer.”
Roll my eyes in agreement. “Ugh, totally.”
I sneak a look at her. She’s wearing a brown bell-shaped hat, the kind
that were popular in the 1920s. She’s wearing a 20s style dress, too: green,
knee-length, with a round-cut neckline and loose cap sleeves. She’s even
wearing old-fashioned brown stockings and brown heels. It catches my eye and I
stare for a second or two; it’s a hot day for stockings, especially the
old-fashioned silk kind like that. And her shoes are really retro, like old
church grandma shoes. She must shop at that vintage thrift store all the way up
at the far end of Court Street; it’s the only place around here where you could
get clothes like that, unless she goes thrifting in Columbus.
She’s standing here next to me, watching the street, not self-conscious
at all. Like she wears stuff like that every day without even thinking about
it.
Then she looks at me, glances away, looks at me again a little longer.
Her eyes linger on my top and on my legs, and she looks away again, blushing.
I’ve always been a little bit empathic and I can feel curiosity in her glance.
And…attraction?
Nah, that can’t be right - girls are never into me. Maybe I look too
preppy, I don’t know. I’m a D&D nerd, raised on video games from the age of
five, but because I wear an Abercrombie hoodie or Hollister shorts or flat iron
my hair, people assign me a whole package of expectations - Courtney is a
bitch, Courtney’s stuck-up, Courtney’s a backstabbing gossip, Courtney’s rich.
Courtney is heterosexual...? Look, I’ll be honest with you, I’m gonna have a
hard time living up to all of that. Maybe not the bitch thing - because yeah,
I’m probably a bitch - but the rest of it?
Sorry, no can do.
The traffic finally stops from the other direction. I give her one last
smile - which she returns warmly - and step onto the street. A few quick steps
take me to the other sidewalk. I stop and look at my slender Fossil watch,
making a pretense to turn in her direction again for one last look. She’s
awfully cute, and I love her chic vintage style. I wonder if she’d think I was
creepy if-
There’s nobody there. I glance around to see if she took off in another
direction. Nothing. There are plenty of people around, walking dogs, wearing
flip-flops, riding bikes. But no girls with vintage clothes.
She’s gone. It’s like she was never there.
But she totally was there! I talked to her!
Unless I’m finally losing it?
I rub an eye with the heel of my hand, not really caring that I just
stamped dry mascara on my skin. Maybe I need to get out more. Maybe I need
friends. I stand on the busy sidewalk for a moment, completely disoriented,
before remembering that I was looking for a place to sit down and eat my salad.
But even as I make my way onto College Green and up toward the Civil War
statue, looking for a place to sit, I can’t get that girl out of my head. Not
just because she was cute. Something about her, that weird click when we saw
each other.
Eh, maybe I’ll see her again. I shove a straw through the lid of my
drink. Nobody just vanishes.
I wish you could just disappear.
Though I guess if you wanted to disappear, this would
be the place to do it. Outside the city limits, the nights are dark and old,
and people who vanish are never seen again.
About the Author:
Cassandra's life was changed forever when she was taken captive by a haunted college yearbook as an Ohio University senior in the summer of 2004. Ten years later, she started work on Mary, Everything to make sense of the experience. Bathed in summer sunlight and crafted from early 2000s punk rock, Cassandra's goal is more than just telling a story - she wants to take you captive, too.
She lives in central Ohio with her wife, house rabbits, and video games.
And of course, her own ghostly memories.
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About the Author:
1 comment:
Loved the first book😍 can hardly wait to read the second book
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