New Book Spotlight
Twisted Expectations: A Twist In Time Book III
A mini-interview with Brent A. Harris
Tell us about your new book?
Twisted Expectations is a twist on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. His is a coming-of-age story of romance and unrequited love set against the social upheavals of Victorian London when the rich got richer and the poor grew more desperate. Mine is a similar story but I’ve added a steampunk vibe, time-travel, and a few other Dickens’ characters into the mix. Oh yes, and dinosaurs. I’ve added dinosaurs to it. Always add dinosaurs. It’s my secret ingredient.
Which aspect is the most fun to write?
While the dinosaurs were fun to write, my characters were funner. Fun-est?
I had a lot of characters who were quite similar but very different in this book. Pip and Oliver Twist are very much the same in origin: orphans, poor, good at heart, until chance directs their paths toward London and a better life. But both have very different outlooks on that new life, so it was fun to see where they might clash a little. Or a lot. Pip has no brain – mouth filter so he’s always saying something out there. Throw in both Dodger, a streetwise criminal who is very much unapologetic, and Stella, someone from our present day thrust into the past and isn’t too happy about it and you have a cast of characters that play off each other in fun and unexpected ways that even I could not predict.
If there is one emotion or theme that you would hope that the reader connects with, what would that be?
The book isn’t all fun and dinosaurs. There are themes of life, death, and there are relationships in this book and not all of them are positive. I think Oliver has a very complicated relationship with the antagonist of this book and some of that is reflected from my own relationship with my father who was diagnosed with late-stage cancer about a third or so of the way through this book. He passed away only a few months later. It came quick and it left him just a shell of the man he was. It happened so fast that we were never able to work out our issues out with each other. So a lot of that confusion and pain was shared by my characters who all had lost people they cared about, especially if that connection was a complicated one.
But, I don’t want to end this on a sad note. I think there’s some hope in this book. All my Twist books cling to the theme of hope and I hope that if you read the book, you’ll find some for yourself within these pages too.
