#YellowRoom #ShelanRodger #BlogTour #Guestpost

I am delighted to be on the Blog Tour for Yellow Room by Shelan Rodger today and very grateful for the advance copy of the book in return for my unbiased and honest review! Before I hand over to Shelan who has written a guest post for me, here's a bit of blurb about the book!

Haunted by a tragic childhood accident, Chala's whole life has been moulded by guilt and secrets. After the death of the stepfather she adored, Chala is thrown into turmoil once again.

Volunteering in Kenya seems to offer an escape, and a way of re-evaluating her adult relationships, although violence and hardship simmer alongside its richness and beauty.

The secrets of the Yellow Room are still with her and she can't run away forever...

And here's an exclusive piece by the author, Shelan Rodgers about identity. Thanks so much Shelan. 

‘Between moments an ‘I’ walks.’  What is personal identity?

If you lose your memory, are you still you? If you wake up from brain surgery and hate the person you loved before the operation, what does this mean? If you live on a desert island, does the essence of you change? What is this thing called ‘I’ that burns at the centre of our haphazard path through the maze of life? This is a question that haunts me and my writing. 

Nature versus nurture: we are the sum of our genes and we are the sum of our experiences. We acknowledge that the world we live in is transient and ever-changing.  Yet we carry our stubborn belief that some kind of unique essence of ‘me’ exists through the various twists and turns of our own life. We use phrases like ‘I’m not feeling myself’ or ‘I want to find myself’ or ‘it’s not me’ or ‘I am at one with myself’ as if there is only one identity living inside us. And yet I often feel we are like a house that looks pretty much the same on the outside but with a whole bunch of different residents who take turns to look out the window or stoke the fireplace. A house inhabited, not by a hermit who gets up and goes to bed at the same time every day, but by a committee of different personas and alter-egos constantly chuntering away and making decisions about how to present ‘me’ to me. The committee is never idle; some items appear on the agenda again and again, some are always new. Whatever challenges this wonderful committee faces – be they personality traits caused by unchangeable genes or big life events that threaten the very foundations of the house – their task is always the same: turn it all into a story, a story that is cohesive and convincing - the story of me. 

In both Yellow Room and Twin Truths, I wanted to explore the boundaries of personal identity, what influences our sense of who we are, what happens when we are thrown by a twist in life’s journey, by revelations or events beyond our control. In Yellow Room, Chala grows up with her sense of self shaped by the guilt she carries from a childhood accident. Secrets take their toll and events intervene to challenge her notion of who she is and who she can become. In Twin Truths, Jenny struggles to come to terms with the loss of her twin and when she finally discovers what happened to her sister, the challenge to make sense of her own identity is stronger than ever.

When I was asked to write about the inspiration for my first novel, Twin Truths, the first sentence I wrote was ‘I love twists.’ In the last three years of my own life, I have lived with, am still living with, the impact of events that sometimes make me want to change that sentence to ‘I hate twists.’ I had no idea how prophetic my own words would sound to the me of my future: ‘Life’s road is full of unexpected turns. Some are exciting, some are appalling. These can change us completely or ground us even more firmly in the essence of the ‘I’ that we believe in, but they always cause some kind of evolution in our being, always create consequences in our own personal story.’ 

In the end, the story is all we’ve got…

Thanks so much Shelan.

Scroll on down for my review of Yellow Room! 

Yellow Room 

by Shelan Rodger 

I knew I wanted to read this book the minute I saw Dome Press talking about it on social media! You only have to read the blurb to feel your spine beginning to tingle and your imagination awakening! This is the story of Chala who has lived her life overshadowed by a harrowing childhood trauma. The first half of the novel explains the tragic event and shows the impact it has had on Chala, who has only really survived because the strong bond she has with her stepfather. When he then dies, she is thrown into further turmoil and decides to volunteer in Kenya. This experience is incredible and life changing, but can she ever really escape her past and the secrets of the yellow room?

I had to read the beginning of this novel twice. The first page is so shocking and told with such blunt language that I had to go back and reread it to make sure I had understood the scene being depicted. The frank and straight talking narrative adds tension and makes the scene even more powerful. What follows on is a story showing us the impact how something that happened when you were a child can affect the entire course of your life - and every single aspect of your life. There are some powerful questions about blame, innocence, guilt and responsibility. Rodger creates an atmosphere that reflects this sense of desolation and threat, of the damage caused by mis-remberings and half truths. There is also a lot about memories and how they can be false, how we can be made to believe things or how memories can manipulate our responses to situations.   

The change of location to Kenya halfway through the novel is interesting and by putting the main character in a totally different setting, with different characters and issues, allows the author to explore Chala's personal situation properly. This section of the book allows Chala to be more objective about who she is and what she needs as well as the decisions she needs to make. Different characters and an entire geographical and sociological shift ensures that the reader is caught up in a physical journey that actually represents a very psychological one too. 

There are lots of themes in this novel; adoption, belonging, the relationships between adults and children, the need to be strong and the need to move on. The use of childhood memories is shown to be painful, harrowing, confusing and disturbing but they are also used to create plenty of drama. The final twists and revelations raise the tension and suspense to a high level. There were times when I felt I could be reading a supernatural thriller, a ghost story and then at other times a family drama or a coming of age story. This novel has features of a psychological thriller and also contains lots of quite deep questions about secrets, perception, memory and families. It is very well written and the scenes with Rosie will haunt me for a long time. 

Yellow Room was published by The Dome Press on October 5th 2017. 

SHELAN RODGER 

Shelan's life is a patchwork of different cultures. Born in Nigeria, she grew up among the Tiwi, an aboriginal community in Australia, and moved to England at the age of eleven. After graduating in Modern Languages from Oxford, she travelled to Argentina, where she spent nine years teaching and setting up a language school. Another chapter in England was followed by six years in Kenya, where she got involved in learning and development, with an emphasis on anti-discrimination. She now lives in Spain, working in international education - and writing.