Aunt Honey by Juliette Forrest
Aunt Honey by Juliette Forrest
Today I am delighted to welcome Juliette Forrest on to the blog with a brilliant guest post about Aunt Honey and her role in Twister!
Aunt Honey by Juliette Forrester
Poor Twister. Not much has gone right for her. Her dad has vanished, her mum is inconsolable and she is packed off to school where the bully, Clem Hussable, makes her life a misery. To make matters worse, there are whispers her dad started a fire which killed two of the locals.
Twister needed a figure in her life who was present, strong, had a big heart, was full of wise words and blessed with an outrageous sense of humour. And it couldn’t hurt to live with someone who baked the best chocolate fudge cake in the world. That person was Aunt Honey, and she was there to provide some comedy moments as well as help Twister make sense of what was happening to her.
Aunt Honey was feisty, proud of her Scottish roots, had kissed most of the bachelors in town and always tucked into her meals with the ferocity of a starving bear.
I based the character on my gran – not that she ran around kissing bachelors. When I was young, my dad used to tell me Gran was born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon, as if it would, somehow, explain everything. She was smart, eccentric, spirited, fun, witty, caring and didn’t give a hoot what others thought of her. Walk into her house and you were always greeted by the smell of something delicious cooking on the stove and a bear hug. Then you’d be introduced to the latest stray cat she’d adopted, which would usually arch its back and hiss.
Gran was young at heart, yet still had a touch of old-style glamour about her. The hats were exotic, the perfume expensive and the hair perfectly coiffured. She had her own expressions too: a walk along the beach was always a ‘rousing ramble’ and if she needed to go to the bathroom in a hurry, ‘a call of nature’ became a ‘call of the wild’. Full of more news than the local paper, her eyes would light up as she sat us down to tell us all the latest scandalous goings on in the neighbourhood.
Twister needed someone like Aunt Honey, otherwise things would have been terribly bleak for her. I count my lucky stars I had Gran in my life and I hope that in Aunt Honey, I’ve managed to capture a little bit of her fierce love and sass, which I miss so much.
About the Book
Twister’s father has gone missing and as she bravely embarks on a mission to find him, she stumbles across a witch called Maymay living in the woods. Twister is given a magical necklace that holds the souls of living things and can turn the wearer into a wolf, or a rushing river, or a rainstorm, with the promise that it will help her find her pa … but at a price. Maymay warns there’s a dark foe on the hunt for the necklace, a baddie who wears a coat crawling with creatures, who might have something to do with her father’s sudden disappearance. Will Twister be able to save her father from a fate worse than death, before it’s too late…?
A magical story, a curious cast and a gutsy heroine with true spirit, for middle-grade readers seeking a whirlwind of action and just-the-right-amount-of-scary.
About the Author
Juliette Forrest has worked as both an Art Director and a Copywriter for some of the best advertising agencies in the UK, picking up awards for her TV, radio, press and poster campaigns. In Twister, she wanted to create a firecracker of a heroine, who saw the world in her own unique way. Juliette lives in Glasgow where she runs her own freelance copywriting business..Do you have anyone in your life like Aunt Honey?
