It Began With A Song

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Let’s do an experiment. Let’s see how you like the first sentence of this synopsis. Raise your hand if you are swooning with delight, and cannot wait to read it.

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known that the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured commonplace book.

I knew it! I see everyone’s hands!

Wow.  IN THE LOST BOOK OF ELEANOR DARE, The fabulous and brilliant Kimberly Brock has drawn on a story we all know and have all wondered about (right?), and has drawn on the (fictional) story of a young woman at the end of World War Two who gets the deed to an abandoned family home called Evertell.

(How totally hooked are you now? Yup, I see all your raised hands again.)

And today, Kimberly tells us how she has also drawn on…music.


Your Mother Called You Something Sweet
      By Kimberly Brock

When I began to imagine Eleanor’s Tale, the fable that has been passed down through sixteen generations of Eleanor Dare’s descendants, I knew the most important thing would be to tell a story that would have somehow mattered to each of the women in her line. 

I began with the scant few facts I knew of Eleanor herself, but I had to imagine so much for the women who followed her and as I wrote, the story became a patchwork of what might have been, what they hoped and dreamed for her, for themselves, for their own daughters. I was writing a story for a ghost, for all lost girls, leaving a trail of proverbial breadcrumbs that I hoped would help us all find our way home in one way or another.

That’s when I first heard a song that struck at the heart of the novel I’d worked on for almost six years. The title of the song was Fulton County Jane Doe. The artist was the incomparable Brandi Carlile.

If you’ve never heard the song, it was written for an unidentified woman, sadly given the placeholder name of Jane Doe. All her stories were lost. Even her name. If you know the history of the Dare Stones, the obscure and incredible history that connects my state of Georgia to the Lost Colony of Roanoke, then you know that the story engraved on the rocks found between 1937 and 1942 claim that Eleanor Dare died in a cave in Fulton County, Georgia, the county where I now live. Another woman whose name and stories have been lost to history, lost to Fulton County, Georgia. Until now. Could that be you, Eleanor? Could that be me, I wondered?

The parallels in this song’s story raised the hair on my head. I played it over and over again. I would drive and lose myself in the lyrics and melody. It haunted my dreams. I recognized a truth in these two very separate works of art that rang out like a declaration and it made me cry. She was here. She was here.

That simple fact was important enough that I spent years trying to capture it in this novel and here it was so beautifully encapsulated in a song. To me, it seems like a kind of message from something greater than myself, something in the ether that needs to be expressed about women’s stories, our value, our history and how love means we are never lost if we’ll name one another something sweet.

I listened to that song for inspiration, for confirmation, for sisterhood and because it spoke to everything I was trying to express in my own work, maybe in my own life. And I believe it made my novel stronger, more focused. I believe it was a gift to me in ways that Brandi Carlile could never have expected. She put a song into the world and it found me. It makes me hope that maybe that message will find others in the reading of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, and even this little essay. She was here. We were here. She had a name. She was loved.

Do you find inspiration in the work of other artists? Do you feel connections to a greater story in your own work?

HANK: Oh, what a wonderful question…and here is a link to that song again. Have you ever heard it? 

What do you say to Kimberly's question, Reds and readers?

Kimberly Brock is the bestselling author of The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare and The River Witch. She is the founder of Tinderbox Writers Workshop and has served as a guest lecturer for many regional and national writing workshops including at the Pat Conroy Literary Center. She lives near Atlanta with her husband and three children.

The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare

The fate of the world is often driven by the curiosity of a girl.

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known that the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured commonplace book. Brought from England on Eleanor’s fateful voyage to the New World, her book was passed down through the fifteen generations of daughters who followed as they came of age. Thirteen-year-old Alice had been next in line to receive it, but her mother’s tragic death fractured the unbroken legacy and the Dare Stone and the shadowy history recorded in the book faded into memory. Or so Alice hoped.

In the waning days of World War II, Alice is a young widow and a mother herself when she is unexpectedly presented with her birthright: the deed to Evertell, her abandoned family home and the history she thought forgotten. Determined to sell the property and step into a future free of the past, Alice returns to Savannah with her own thirteen-year-old daughter, Penn, in tow. But when Penn’s curiosity over the lineage she never knew begins to unveil secrets from beneath every stone and bone and shell of the old house and Eleanor’s book is finally found, Alice is forced to reckon with the sacrifices made for love and the realities of their true inheritance as daughters of Eleanor Dare.

In this sweeping tale from award-winning author Kimberly Brock, the answers to a real-life mystery may be found in the pages of a story that was always waiting to be written.