Summerlands

by Emma Burns

Sixteen year old twins Rosalie and Millicent are glad to be reunited after growing up in very different lifestyles, but they have endless questions. Why now? Who is this father they've never known? Why did he bring them back to the vast crumbling mansion called Summerlands, where they were born? What happened to their mother and who was she really? The two girls have to get to know each other and their father while researching the mystery of their mother's disappearance, all while someone is mailing them pages from their mother's old diaries. Their own pasts and secrets come back to haunt them as well. In the end, the two girls must fight for a home and a family they can call their own.

345 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 26, 2025

About the author

Did you know I have a podcast? It's true! Look for Sacred Cheese of Life on Apple Podcasts, or go to http://emmaburns.org and click on Sacred Cheese of Life. You can also see a lot of essays about fiction on the Story on the Brain link.

My favorite things are reading, writing, watching things, and putting them all together to analyze fiction as a whole in a fun and energetic way in order to improve my own writing. Sacred Cheese of Life!

This refers to something Stephen Crane mentions in a very weird narrator comment in a short story called "The Open Boat," where he's mulling the meaning of life and how it's possible these people could just up and die when they're so close to shore. How is that fair? Are they getting yanked away just as they reach the sacred cheese of life? What on earth is he talking about there?

I think it's about all those things we love so much that they make life worth living. For me that's a lot of things, but life would be empty without fiction, for sure. So I love to dig into what makes fiction work and use that to improve my own writing.