‘Snow Behind the Door’– the memoir of a child ghost with amnesia (book four of my ‘Bede Series’) has progressed to the first short list for the 2023 GERTRUDE WARNER AWARD for middle-grade fiction.
My Bede series was meant to be a trilogy but Snow, the young ghostly presence who floated silently along Bede Hall’s time portals to reunite her lost family, lost herself along the way.
Bede Hall fresh from victory hadn’t noticed Snow slip away to her old sanctuary, the cold spot at the top of the stairs where she barricaded herself behind the Winter Door to sleep herself a reality she could ‘live’ with. True to her nature, Snow had drifted into being and not-being so often throughout eons of time she had no clear understanding of her place – past, present, or future.
Happily, the Hall bedevilled me into listening to her lonely cries for help.
All Snow knew for certain was that she had been born thousands of years before the birth of her thirteen-year-old father. No wonder she’d suffered a breakdown. No wonder I eventually listened.
Every evening Bede Hall whispered an ancient truth in Snow’s ear: “if you really want something enough, a little thing like dying won’t stop you.”
But Snow’s restless threads from past lives resurfaced randomly as dreams are wont to do – a story she was too afraid to remember.
Veronica Knox 