Tea, Tales, & Unexpected Visitors
This is the beginning, isn’t it? My name is Jamie Lane Poole.
And you have found my secret diary. You must have gone to extraordinary lengths to locate it. I know, because I know how carefully I hid it with its companions. Perhaps one day you and I will meet. You can tell me what risks you took to uncover my secret. I trust you will preserve the knowledge within these covers.
Would you like to meet Jamie or the author behind the series? She’s popping up all over Halifax. She’ll be at Sawadee Tea House July 10.
She would very much like to meet you. The Jamie Poole series is presented in first person, primarily from her perspective. As a consequence, the reader is included as a part of the story.
This should prove to be an interesting afternoon considering the tea house is haunted and Jamie is called to help the Dead. Perhaps if you come, the ghost will sit beside you.
The Isle of Osiris is the debut novel in a series which revolves around Jamie and her companions. The story isn’t fixed to one location or even one time. That’s why the author, Ellen E. Sutherland, poses with Azanath’s mug as a Time Traveler. Did I mention Azanath is a ghost?
Thanks to Diana Gabaldon-author of the Outlander series-and her efforts, it’s easier to classify a series like Jamie Poole: Historical science fiction. Now that Outlander has been adapted for TV it’s easier to see how “normal” it can be for a person to slip through Time and find themselves somewhere else…some time else. And while the Jamie Poole series doesn’t cover Culloden or have a lead character clad in a kilt, the series won’t disappoint with its own unique, eccentric, and relatable characters.
This series begins in a small town in Indiana which happens to have the same name as a city in Egypt: Alexandria. And, hey, it's even a real town! The story will revisit Alexandria, Egypt, over several points in time.
Fun Fact: Did you know that Halifax’s 78th Regiment of Foot based at the Citadel spent time in Alexandria during the Napoleonic Wars? While that story isn’t included in this book, it is included in another.
The Isle of Osiris describes how Jamie comes to hear the Dead and the request they make to her to travel back in time to stop their murder. She discovers she has an unexpected gift. Despite this unusual gift, she grows up in a very ordinary town with a mom much like any of us might have. She visits a fair, as any of us have. That’s when things go a bit sideways. In the ordinary, extraordinary things can happen. She discovers a statue that poses a mystery she cannot solve on her own. She needs her dad’s help since he’s an Egyptologist. The only problem with this is they’re estranged. He disappeared when she was six months old.
First she has to find him. Then she has to convince him to come see the statue at the fair. Meanwhile, unknown to her, he has found his own anomaly: a sword in an Egyptian tomb. While it’s an ancient relic, it doesn’t belong in the tomb. How did it get there?
Jamie and her dad both hold a key to the same mystery. Will they be able to work together and piece it all together? She describes their newly formed relationship:
I met Dad when I was twelve. My dad is a complicated, secretive man. Not his smallest secret, but one of his most complicated ones, is the fact he studied as an paleontologist and somewhere along the way became fascinated with Egyptology and “converted” to an archaeologist. Related bedfellows, true. I wish I had an easy answer for his choice. That, amongst other things, has prompted me on a venture to uncover his many secrets. In doing so, I will better understand him. It will help me understand myself.
The mystery of the sword and the statue is only the beginning of Jamie’s journey which she hopes will end with her understanding her dad which she desperately hopes is possible. This journey will take her to several countries, several points in time, and more than once to other planes of existence. And much like Outlander, Jamie’s story makes it seem like such things are utterly possible.
Come hear the author read from The Isle of Osiris and get your own copy. Sip some tea and enjoy the ambiance of Sawadee Tea House. It will be a nice distraction from the ordinary.
If you cannot make this event, there will be more events throughout this year and next. If you haven’t done so already, visit Jamie Poole Books and subscribe to the blog to keep up with behind-the-scenes information!
If you live outside Halifax or Canada, you can also get The Isle of Osiris on Amazon.
