|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
What do we inherit from our parents? How do the choices parents make echo down through the generations? And how much of who we are is because of who, what and where we come from?
Local author Karen Nelson’s debut novel, “The Sunken Town,” published Dec. 6, is an intriguing thriller that’s also an exploration of family dynamics and identity.
In the book, Lindsay, a young Palo Alto jewelry designer and private art collection manager, has always been aware that she’s adopted and never had much of an interest in finding out about her birth family. While her adoptive parents certainly aren’t perfect, and her relationships with them are at times strained, they’ve loved and supported her to the best of their abilities over the years and are eager to help her settle down and buy a home nearby. She’s shocked to learn that her birth mother, Claire, has suddenly died and left Lindsay her farmhouse – all the way in Maine. Lindsay heads across the country and soon finds herself uncovering secrets that have been kept for decades. She’s forced to grapple with her family’s past as well as what steps she wants to take in her own life going forward.
The story is told from both Lindsay and Claire’s perspectives, with Lindsay discovering a diary written by Claire 30 years before. Readers, along with Lindsay, learn about some dark secrets connected to Claire’s attendance at a posh New England college, and about the events leading up to Lindsay’s birth.
Nelson’s characters and the interactions between them are imperfect and complex.
“I thought it was important to explore the different types of parental relationships,” she said, following Lindsay’s evolving understanding of both her birth and adoptive families, from a more youthful, immature viewpoint to realizing fully “that parents are people too.”
While the story is definitely a work of fiction, Nelson did pull from her own background and life experiences when creating the novel.
“I am adopted, and one of the things I’ve always said is, ‘I’m not interested in finding out who my birth parents are'” Nelson said, adding that friends were always perplexed by her lack of curiosity on the matter. “I’ve always said I would have to be forced on that journey if I was going to take it,” she said.
Years ago, when she was living in New England, Nelson’s boyfriend at the time was asked by his boss to step in as a caretaker to the home of someone who’d suddenly died.
“It was absolutely fascinating to me to walk into this house of someone who had just left; there was so much that was so telling about what her life was like,” Nelson recalled. That experience stuck with her throughout the decades and became the basis for Lindsay’s story. She wondered, “What would happen if my birth mother had been killed in a car crash and left me everything?” and was keen to imagine a character who “made different choices than I would.”
Like her characters, Nelson has lived in both California and New England. She grew up in Los Altos, attended Colby College in Maine, then ended up back on the Peninsula, living in Palo Alto’s College Terrace neighborhood (the setting, in fact, for some of the book), eventually buying the house she grew up in, back in Los Altos.
Her bicoastal observations come through in some of the sensory details included in her novel, such as the Bay Area’s signature scent of bay and eucalyptus leaves.
In the book, the titular “sunken town” in Maine refers to a body of water that was created in the 1950s when a valley was flooded as part of an electrification project, leaving remnants of a former settlement under the water. Lindsay is fascinated and disturbed by this eerie history, and it becomes a metaphor for the suppressed truths that are coming to the surface.
The idea for that submerged town also comes from real life. When Nelson was a student, her college hosted outdoor adventure experiences for freshmen – hiking and canoe trips to places like Flagstaff Lake, which covers parts of several abandoned settlements. The imagery of a drowned village haunted Nelson as it does her protagonist.
“It just creeped me out and always has been one of those things that I can’t get out of my head,” she said. “I hated it; the idea that there were things down there was super scary to me.”
Though “The Sunken Town” is Nelson’s debut novel, “I’ve always written. It’s sort of the way I process the world,” she said. She’s part of a long-term writing group and sometimes writes for travel publications.
“The Sunken Town” is published by Sibylline Press, a traditional small press that exclusively publishes work by women over 50.
“I’m super excited about them,” she said. “They’re very supportive, very good communicators … they really want to make a long-term relationship.” Nelson’s second novel, about a young woman dealing with the repercussions of a traumatic event at a summer camp years earlier, is due out in 2026.
“It’s really good to be with a California-based press, a West Coast press,” she said. At Sibylline, “you’re not a small fish in a big pond, you’re not a big fish in a small pond, you’re just with the school of fish.”
Most of Nelson’s career has been dedicated to the nonprofit world. She’s worked with a number of organizations, including the Los Altos-based Sempervirens Fund, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training and Bay Area Cancer Connections (formerly Breast Cancer Connections). And more than a decade ago, her passion for nonprofits and writing came together when she co-founded Writing By Writers, an organization that arranges workshops led by a variety of accomplished authors.
She said interacting with so many people over the years has also helped her to write realistic characters and relationships.
“It’s been wonderful because you get to be involved with people in the community – all kinds of ages and walks of life and careers,” she said. “That’s one thing I’ve learned working with many people. There’s many sides to everybody. Nobody’s all good or all bad. They’re trying the best they can.”
Nelson will hold a book launch event for “The Sunken Town” on Dec. 15 at 4 p.m. in the Sequoia Room of the Los Altos Community Center, 97 Hillview Ave. Los Altos. More information is available at karennelson.net.
