Fall's Bright Flame

Coming of Age" as an idea pitches us into a magical time when summer lasts forever, and our bodies nudge our minds into turbulent backwaters. But wait, what age? If at fifty years old or thereabouts, the analogy holds; if the uniformity of life that precedes upheaval resembles those early rhythms, well, what then? Where we find Elise von Sturnheim as Fall's Bright Flame opens is surely another sort of coming of age, a thrilling and perplexing shape-shifting of all things familiar and predictable. The simple act of leaving her husband and home for a trip north to attend to the details of her mother's funeral carries Elise through the looking glass and into a vortex of conflicting loyalties. There she will test not only the depth of her own integrity but also her capacity for loyalty; not only her susceptibility to passion but also her ability to trust herself and the unfolding future.The story begins with a chance encounter with her mother's doctor, who ignites her antipathy and much more. The bright flame that grows illuminates a world inhabited by the generation born after WWII and endowed with cultural advantages, long held principles, and biases.Action sprints from Maryland to Massachusetts, Washington to New York, and hence to London, Cornwall and Paris. In the fall of the year and the fall of life - that bright flame before winter - Elise's tale is of family, friends and how coming of age is not anchored in chronology.
About the Author: An unrepentant New Englander, Cynthia Osborne Hoskin has had a long career in writing that has been an eclectic pastiche of journalism embracing profile writing; culinary and lifestyle columns; art-focused articles; and general business; as well as corporate public relations; co-writing client memoirs; and PR for corporations and not-for-profits. Despite a modestly kept footlocker of short stories, poems (well, several were published with obscure awards), and personal memoirs, this is her first full-length novel. It's gestation and birth would rival that of any dinosaur, but now it's here and contemporary, she is speeding up with more flights of history and fantasy that have been percolating in the wings. Hoskin's first poem was written at age seven on a blackboard just unloaded from a moving van in Cohasset, Massachusetts and was about heaven and angels, a subject she has never had the temerity to attempt again. Hoskin lives in Northern Kentucky with the charismatic star of the book, Abigail the Scottie, and her beloved, humorous, patient and very, very smart husband, Richard, author of the magnificent The Miner & the Viscount, a rousing tale of his native Cornwall, England.