Secrets are fetters that shackle us to the past. Marcella Masters has spent her life trying to keep everyone she meets from discovering her past. When she and her husband, Theodore Masters, the artist, move from Vancouver to the small town of Cumberland on Vancouver Island, she meets an assortment of town characters who revel in their eccentricities. After her difficult husband dies, Marcella is left as curator of a fine-art gallery in a town that is best known for loggers, bikers, and free spirits. The characters in the town are unconventional, yet they try, in their own strange but compassionate ways, to help Marcella fit in. The only one who is having a problem with that is Marcella herself. Shy and fearful of exposure, Marcella clings to her husband even after his death and even though at best he is unkind and has secrets of his own. She feels at once inadequate for the task of being a gallery curator yet just a bit superior to the rather common folk of the town, but that sense of superiority is short lived as she discovers the wisdom of her neighbours. Marcella's ties to her dead but surprisingly present husband keep her self-conscious and under his control, a position in which she is too comfortable. Two questions demand answers in this work: What must one do in order to fit in, and when does one know when they've been accepted? The answer is the same for both questions-when everything is laid bare and all pretentiousness gone. To arrive at this place is harder than Marcella ever imagined.Marcella's story is funny, poignant, frightening, and satisfying for any reader who has ever had the misfortune of feeling inadequate.
About the Author: Marlet Ashley, has been a career educator with an M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing. As a sessional instructor, she taught creative writing at the University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario and was a tenured instructor of literature and composition at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surry B.C. Along with the children's books series Revelry on the Estuary-The Interlopers, Trumpeters' Tribulations, Penelope Piper's Great Adventure, Henri Sings the Blues, and A Pirate's Life for Gabby-as well as a children's Christmas book-Must Be Christmas-and a new Robin and Ruthie series, her short stories and poetry have been included in a variety of literary publications. She is the author of the Canadian edition of Literature and the Writing Process, Pearson Prentice Hall, Toronto. Marlet leads a fiction writing group, and has been a guest lecturer at Elder College at NIC. She also conducted a fiction workshop for the Comox Valley Writers Society writing conference at North Island College. A finalist for the 2012 John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award, Marlet Ashley lives in Comox, BC.