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Naomi doesn't expect anything unusual from her annual family trip to visit her grandparents in Ireland. What she expects is to celebrate her thirteenth birthday, hang out with her friends Ciara and Shehan, and deal with her gran's Alzheimer's. What she finds is a country hit by an unexpected virus that rapidly infects the majority of the Irish population over the age of twenty-one.
Amnestic-Delirium Syndrome (ADS) starts off with memory loss, but the virus soon turns its victims aggravated, blank, or violent. Naomi and her friends must survive on their own, without lucid adults, cut off from the rest of the world, until a cure is found.
But there are whispers that ADS is not terrestrial, and soon Naomi and her friends learn the frightening truth: we are not alone.
Guest Post
In Chapter Sixteen Naomi and her friends encounter a guy in his early twenties suffering from ADS (amnestic delirium syndrome). He’s probably no older than twenty-two so would’ve been one of the last people to lose his memory as ADS infects older people more quickly. People under twenty-one or so carry the disease but are asymptomatic until they’re older. In Stricken Naomi doesn’t spend enough time with this particular character to learn his name, but for our purposes here let’s call him Ronan. Naomi spots Ronan wandering a Dublin street. Later he befriends him and brings him home to take care of him.
Here Ronan will recount his personal experiences with the virus.
Day 1
Violet is gas (thinks she is!). If you’re a North American reading this, gas means ‘very funny.’ Anyway, every time I cough V dolls out a polo mint and says none of her friends are allowed to get the virus. She says either I just have a cold or I’m being disloyal. Cold, I think. I haven’t forgotten to put the toilet seat down once. Girl flatmates give out to no end when you forget, believe me.
Day 2
But girl flatmates bring you soup when you’re not feeling well and when your parents in Wexford stop answering their telephone because they’ve wandered off sick or don’t know what’s ringing or why they would have to answer it. Girl flatmates say, “For God’s sake, Ronan, have a lie down. You need to save your strength to fight this thing off.”
“What thing?” you joke, like you’ve forgotten, but they don’t laugh.
Maybe they’re scared a bit.
Maybe I am too. A little. Because when I ask V and Eimear when they’re making the soup they swap chilly glances with each other and Eimear says, “V brought up the soup an hour ago.”
“Right,” I say. “Right, right.”
But at first I don’t remember the soup…and then I do. Minestrone with too many navy beans. That proves it. I must be okay, right?
Day 3
We don’t hear any more sirens outside. We hear other things. People ranting and throwing things, dogs barking wildly. Wolfmen howling at the moon. Joking, obviously. There’s no such thing as Wolfmen in Ireland. St. Patrick must have driven Wolfmen out at the same time as he drove out the snakes. If I was sick I wouldn’t be able to remember St. Patrick now would I?
The girls tell me to sit down. They tell me I’m pacing. Sometimes I don’t know I’m doing it really. I only realize when they tell me to stop.
I have to keep asking the girls for their names. They’re my friends, and I should be able to remember their names. I try hard to remember. Seriously. I write them down on bits of paper and shove them into my pockets. I reckon that must be what’s happened because when I find the notes the names are in my handwriting.
Day 4
The house is drafty. Then it’s hot. The lights won’t turn on and we can’t watch telly. I don’t normally live here. I’d live in a place that’s a proper even temperature and where the electricity works. But the girls who live here are sound. If you’re a North American reading this that means they’re genuinely nice people. Only thing is they don’t like me to go outside. They say I’ll get lost which is daft. Nobody’s ever really lost, are they? Ireland is too small a country to get lost in. Sure, I could turn the corner and run into two or three people I know. Granted, I wouldn’t remember their names, but names aren’t everything.
Day 5
One of the girls says she’s taking this down for me because my hands are tied (literally).
“Can you help me untie these?” I ask the same girl whose pen is leaping across paper. “My wrists feel restless. They want to be free.”
“You’ll run away and we won’t be able to find you,” the girl says accusingly. “And then maybe you’ll get hurt.”
“Did you do this to me?” I ask.
The girl shakes her head. Or maybe she nods. I don’t know what we’re talking about. She looks tired. She looks like she should eat something.
“Are you hungry?” I ask, wishing I could scratch my noise. “You’re very pale.”
“Are you hungry?” she echoes. She pads forward to scratch my nose.
I nod in appreciation. “Thanks. How’d you know it was itching?”
“You were wriggling it again.” The girl tries to smile but her eyebrows bunch together
“Ah. I know you, don’t I? We were in school together?”
The girl sets down her pen. She leans forward with her elbows pointed into her thighs. “We were in school together. ADS hits Ireland and spread like wildfire. You got it too. It’s why you can’t remember, but they’ll find a cure. Don’t worry.”
“You’re really sound, you know that,” I tell her, because I don’t know her name but I can tell that much about her. She’s a good person who doesn’t want me to worry. “But you look hungry. You look like someone who should eat something.”
“Do I?” The girl tilts her head patiently. “What should I eat?”
I wiggle my nose and think hard. Then I say the first thing that pops into my head. “How about some soup?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Long before I was an author I was a fan of books about Winnie the Pooh, Babar, Madeline, Anne Shirley and anything by Judy Blume. Throughout high school my favourite class was English. No surprise, then, that most of my time spent at York University in Toronto was as an English major—not the traditional way to graduate with a B.A. (Hons) in film studies but a fine way to get a general arts education.
After getting my film studies degree I headed for Dublin, Ireland and spent the majority of the nineties there in forgettable jobs meeting unforgettable people and enjoying the buzz. I always believed I'd get around to writing in earnest eventually, and I began writing my first novel in a flat in Dublin and finished it in a Toronto suburb. By then I'd discovered that fiction about young people felt the freshest and most exciting to me. You have most of your life to be an adult but you only grow up once.
Currently residing near Toronto with my Dub husband, I'm an aunt to twenty-one nieces and nephews, and a great-aunt to two great-nephews. I became an Irish citizen in 2001 and continue to visit Dublin as often as I can while working on novels about young people.
My first young adult book, I Know It's Over, came out with Random House in September 2008, and was followed by One Lonely Degree, The Lighter Side of Life and Death, My Beating Teenage Heart and sci-fi thriller Yesterday. I released Yesterday's sequel, Tomorrow, in 2013 and put out my first adult novel, Come See About Me, as an ebook in June 2012. My most recent contemporary YA books, The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing and Delicate, were published by Cormorant Books' Dancing Cat Books imprint in 2014 and 2015.
Giveaway Details:
- Signed copy of Stricken by C.K. Kelly Martin (INT)
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Grats on tour, very nice
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