98.2

by Alexander Francis

In Eden, Washington, there are rules. Wear a facemask. Be home by curfew. And, most importantly, wash your hands. This is Emily's normal. Growing up in the fifty-year wake of a global health pandemic, Emily has never known any different. However, now that she is sixteen, the world is starting to look different. A new friendship is opening her eyes to life before the global pandemic and, as she learns more about the past, she grows even more frustrated with her present. Emily begins to see small fractures in the daily habits and routines that have come to define her existence. Risking the quiet comforts of normalcy, Emily's curiosity takes hold and she begins to step outside of everyday life in Eden.

Fifty-two years earlier, Sam is returning to campus for his final semester at St. Agatha University. Greeting old friends and preparing for graduation, Sam is wrestling with the excitement and sadness that comes with closing the door on his college years. However, his senior year is cut short when a horrible virus sweeps the globe and life is brought to a screeching halt. The virus changes everything and Sam struggles to adjust to life in the pandemic. Wear a facemask. Be home by curfew. And, most importantly, wash your hands. This is Sam's new normal.

Two sides of the same coin, Sam and Emily are desperately searching for answers. But, at what cost?

300 pages, Paperback

Published December 18, 2020

About the author

I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina and went to college there. I still have the sand in my shoes and the smell of the salt air in my nose, and when I return, encountering those two things brings back floods of memories.My first attempt at writing was to re-create some of my favorite episodes from childhood and, also, to poke a bit of harmless fun at my brother. In college, I discovered an ability to write poetry, thanks to a rather demanding English professor, who eventually came to appreciate and encourage my work.

Life intervenes, as it does for everyone, and there was a large hiatus before I found time to write again. My first attempt came almost by accident, because one day I simply wrote down what had happened to me the previous evening. The story slowly became a book…Are We A Band Yet?, and at the time, the few who read it were full of praise. Because the story was personal, and some of the characters real, I declined to publish it for a long time. But my language skills and my storytelling were re-awakened by that first attempt, and since then, I have gone on to write eight full-length novels, all the while working on my style and literary abilities.

I found that what most interests me is the interrelationship between a man and a woman. It’s a subject which has tested writers and storytellers for eons and is truly inexhaustible, for each situation is both unique and timeless, as well as compelling.

During my rather short career, my emotions have been awakened, and I attempt to give my readers the intensity of my feelings through my words. Two of my novels (Beware The Exit and Memory Gap) were inspired by dreams, and after recalling the fragments that remained the next morning, I put the essence down on paper and began the laborious task of creating an exciting book.

Writing has made me grow as a person, not only because of attention to the emotional content of my books, but also attention to detail, both environmental and personal. Writing is like photography in that it brings the world around you into your consciousness, occasionally for the first time.

Instead of being exhausted, my writing is just getting started, because everywhere I look, I can see the outline of yet another book which needs telling, another exciting tale or tender moment which can be created in ink and paper.


Alexander Francis

Reviews

[Vanessa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yikes

[Alexander McAuliffe]

Alexandre’s authorial debut is an ominous blending of our own world and a dystopian Other, unfolding two parallel lives a half-century apart. Sam is a college student living through the onset of last spring’s pandemic; Emily is a high school student in a command society rigidly organized by the pandemic and its aftermath. Alexandre relies too heavily on his audience’s visceral personal experiences of the past year, painting the conditions of his characters only in allusive strokes; nevertheless, I am impressed at his ability to reckon with his own feelings throughout the beginning of our plague year fully enough to venture such a story so soon. As this year progresses and we overcome the suffering and fear that COVID and the public response to it wrought, I am optimistic that his pandemic duration will be “wrong” by at least fifty years. Yet his book will remain an admirable attempt to capture the dreads and sinking disorganization of the moments when all our easy assumptions of normalcy and the pursuit of happiness evaporated into calculations of risk, safety and “social distance”.