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A Warm Welcome to Author Rosalind Minett


I’m very excited to welcome Rosalind Minett, author of A Relative Invasion.

Rosalind studied at Birmingham, Sussex and Exeter universities and enjoyed a career as a chartered psychologist. Her stories are always character-driven whether the genre is humour, historical or crime. She relishes quirkiness, and loves creating complex characters of all ages.

Rosalind lives in the South West and spends her time writing, sculpting and painting. Her writing blog is at http://characterfulwriter.com.

Rosalind has kindly provided us with a scene from her book below.

A Relative Invasion: My favourite scene is not a happy one. In Book 2 of my trilogy, A Relative Invasion, Billy, then aged eight is evacuated and placed with a kindly elderly couple. His antagonist, the manipulative cousin Kenneth has plagued his life all through Book 1 and is billeted some miles away. But then his father, Billy’s bullying Uncle Frank, is killed by a London bomb and Kenneth is sent to stay with Billy for two days while the adults attend the funeral. Billy has no experience of death or bereavement and tries to comfort, not very successfully. This scene is when the adults return after the funeral, together with a vicar with whom Billy’s mother and baby sister are billeted. In the front room things are incredibly tense, will poor Aunty cry? She has her arms around a limp Kenneth. He is desperate to find jobs in the kitchen, but is prevented. ‘You must stay in there with your family, dear.’

All the chairs are circled round the vicar as he leads them in prayers. Stiff with embarrassment, Billy sits behind the vicar’s coat to be inconspicuous. He mishears the ‘groaning words’, Ohs and Los and beseech, as he struggles to make sense of them, and when he opens his eyes after the prayers, all is dreadfully black. (His view is blackened by the vicar’s large coat). The vicar stands and intones, but at that point Kenneth throws up and in the confusion of clearing it up, Billy makes his escape to another room. When, later, he is called upon to come back, his father announces that he will honour his brother by accepting Kenneth as a second son. He invites Kenneth to call him ‘Dad’. Billy is so shocked and confused. If Kenneth, a nephew, is now to call Dad, ‘Dad’, should Billy call him ‘Uncle’? The adults are furious with his question, seen as ‘cheek’ and criticisms surround him. Distractedly he picks up the thick glasses of his host so that everything around him is now totally blurred. He uses them as some protection, a distance between himself and what is going on. He’s now in trouble for ‘acting the clown’ at so inappropriate a time. As the adults depart, Billy snatches a bunch of lavender and rushes to the car to thrust it at Aunty, ‘because I like you.’ (Is he redeemed by this act? No). At that moment, Kenneth leans forward and unrolls the picture he had been drawing all morning, refusing to show anyone. He puts it on his mother’s lap, over the lavender. It’s a really close likeness to his dead father.

For more of Rosalind’s books, please see the links below.

Rosalind blogs at www.characterfulwriter.com

Forthcoming novels:

Impact, the third in the trilogy, A Relative Invasion.

The Parody, a psychological drama featuring adult male twins and a Pandora’s box.

Speechless, a psychological drama about a family whose child stops speaking.

Links, (Amazon.com and all Amazon sites)

Crime Shorts: A Boy with Potential www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQTA1FK

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