When it comes to her cohort of close cousins in my novel What’s Left, I don’t want to give away too much. Let’s just say there are a lot of them, and they come to prominence in the last half of the story. You just might have reason to be envious.
As an author, this presents a challenge. How can I narrow the focus for the reader yet maintain an awareness of the scope involved by the time we get to a fourth generation of this family in the New World?
In this case, I chose to concentrate on a handful of Cassia’s cousins, at most, and deal with the rest of them in quick glances, often as part of the pack, sometimes simply a cluster of names in a single brushstroke. I hope it’s sufficient.
Perhaps it also helps that apart from Cassia’s best friend forever, Sandra, the cousins don’t step into the spotlight until we’re well into the story and some of the other earlier characters have already stepped offstage.
~*~
As a passage I deleted from the final version suggests, her upbringing was quite different from her father’s.
He must have been very lonely, always on best behavior, without any of the competitive mischief that runs through my family.
~*~
One of the things that amazed me about my college girlfriend’s family was the number of cousins she had and how often they visited each other — second- and third-cousins included. They seemed to know where everyone lived and what they were up to. Mine was nothing like that.
Do you have any close cousins? Do you find any of them to be special? Annoying?
Or if you’re from a big family, how close are you to your brothers and sisters? Which ones more than others?
Who would you turn to if you were in trouble?
~*~
Jnana's Red Barn 