In the middle of this past summer,
I was in a huge rut. I was depressed, feeling raw and emotional, and I couldn’t
write to save my life. When I tried to either read or watch television or movies,
I would get this weird sense of anxiety whenever anything dark or violent
happened. Which is tough, because most of the stuff I’ve read and watched over
the years tended to be, well, dark and violent. And the same goes for my
writing. With the weightiness of real life coming down on me, I just didn’t
have the stomach for it.
All of which left me longing for
some way to escape. I thought of the last time I’d felt like this—way back in
2001—and remembered how, through happenstance, I’d picked up Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander”
at an airport bookseller. The feel of that book, the romance, and the depth of
its world helped distract and heal me during a trying time when I was dealing
with not only the fallout of a divorce, but the innate terror that came with the
September 11th attacks. I decided, right then and there, that I
needed that sort of escape again.
I’ve been lucky enough over the
years to be involved in a sort of support group of fellow authors, and among
those included in this group is Sarah Woodbury. I’d been aware of her for years—a
given as we’re in the same group—but I’d never even given consideration to her
work. But seeing as she writes time travel fiction that seemed to me to be
quite similar to Outlander, I decided to take a peek at the initial volume in
her After Cilmeri series, a
perma-free novel called “Daughter of Time.”
To say I was blown away by what I
read would be an understatement. I devoured every word of “Daughter of Time”—a book
that revolves around a modern young woman named Meg, her accidental transportation
to the 13th century, and the beginning of her relationship with
Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last prince of Wales—in less than two days. I fell in
love with the pacing, the plot, the characters … absolutely everything about
the book, I loved. So I immediately bought the next book in the series, “Footsteps
in Time,” and away I went.
(Note to add that “Footsteps in
Time” is actually the first book in the series; “Daughter of Time” was written
as a prequel, after Woodbury’s fans expressed interest in how the whole saga
started in the first place. Which makes anyone who comes into the series late
the lucky ones, since the character work in “Daughter” is superb, and the
information disclosed is quite helpful in understanding the narrative of later
books.)
What impressed me most about these tomes
was as much what they weren’t as what
they were. I was expecting some Gabaldon-type
time-travel romance when I first began, but as I read, I discovered that Woodbury’s
books are only similar to “Outlander” in the way that the main characters find
themselves displaced in time. (Well, actually, in another dimension, but let’s
not split hairs.) Sure, the After Cilmeri
books have their share of romantic themes, but they’re secondary to what I
find to be series’ main points—to teach the readers some little-known facts
about medieval Wales, and to act as a sort of exploratory thesis on the nature
of leadership, the effectiveness of governing principals, the importance of
history, and the virtue of integrity.
Each of these books are told from
different viewpoints, alternating first person and third person narration with
every other installment, which helps keep the tone fresh and immediate and,
well, different. All the characters we meet, both from medieval Wales and the
modern world—from Meg and Llywelyn to David and Anna and Callum and Bronwyn and
Ieuan and Math and Lily—are complicated, flawed, driven, yet wholly decent
people. I had no choice but to root for, and fall in love with, each and every
one of them.
There’s an innocence to the narrative
that I appreciated wholeheartedly, and a sort of hopeful optimism that some
might call naïve drips off every word Woodbury writes. In the end, it was this
optimism in the face of some rather harrowing events (war is a near constant
threat in this series, as are kidnappings, betrayals, assassinations, and
familial discord) that caused me to devour all fifteen books of the series in
the span of about forty-five days.
To say I adore Woodbury's work would be
an understatement. After Cilmeri might be my favorite series ever written, bar none. It’s
almost like I got to grow along with the author, as some of the earlier books
in the series display the telltale flaws of a young writer, one who grows and
improves and perfects her craft with each published work. In the end, I found
it to be my own version of literary nirvana—a series of comfortable yet
intellectually challenging reads that not only wholly entertained me, but had
me analyzing my own craft, wondering what, if anything, I can do to honor these
novels, and their message, in my own published works to come.
I can honestly say that Sarah
Woodbury and After Cilmeri has
rescued my own creativity. While my writing isn’t coming as quickly today as it
has in the past, the words are indeed coming, and that is due in large part to
what one particular author had to say, and how she chose to say it. So thank
you, Sarah, for the wonderfulness you’ve given the world. You have a fan for
life in me, and for however long you decide to further explore the lives and
adventures of King Daffyd and his merry crew, this one man will be right there
to go on the journey with you, wherever you choose to take them, whenever those
words arrive.
If you want to explore the
awesomeness that is Sarah Woodbury’s works, you can see write-ups on each
installment, as well as links to various outlets, at this link:
Go. Read. Enjoy. I did. You will too.
