SCI-FI-LONDON is thrilled to be the first stop on a blog tour by children's author Sarah Holding, author of the SeaBEAN Trilogy. For those that haven't had the pleasure, the SeaBEAN books are the story of Alice Robertson, a young girl in the year 2018 who finds a mysterious black box on the beach on her 11th birthday. Alice soon discovers it's called a C-Bean, and its extraordinary powers can transport her anywhere in the world. Together with her five schoolmates - the only children on the recently re-inhabited remote island of St. Kilda - and a stray dog and a garrulous parrot they acquire along the way, Alice finds herself immersed thrilling adventures, from Central Park to the Amazonian rainforest to the back-streets of Hong Kong, as they uncover dangers and subterfuge threatening the world’s eco-systems.
SeaRISE is the thrilling final part of The SeaBEAN Trilogy. Alice and her five classmates are - for reasons they have yet to discover - abducted to 2118 in the C-Bean, their time-travel device, only to find the world is a difficult and alienating place. How will they survive their terrifying ordeal? Who can help them figure out a way to get back to their own time? Will they escape before their captor Commander Hadron catches up with them? Who is he anyway and what’s his connection to the mysterious Dr Foster? Unsettled by the devastation they find everywhere in the future and armed with new knowledge about the C-Bean's ultimate purpose, Alice and co scour the planet, confronting many challenges in pursuit of answers to their questions. But can they finally figure out a way to restore the Earth's delicate ecological balance for good?
To celebrate the launch of SeaRISE, we're happy to host the opening piece in Sarah's guest-blog tour. Catch it below.
What’s the formula for magical realism?
(Alice in Wonderland x Dr Who x Secret Island)2 = SeaBEAN
Alice is living a perfectly ordinary life at the start of SeaBEAN, albeit a little into the future (2018), but when she comes across a bizarre black cube - the C-Bean - her life begins to change. The fact that it changes colour when she touches it (just like the unique black covers of the books themselves), is only the start of something that's 'too strange to believe'. Entering the C-Bean is the moment when my Alice falls down the rabbit hole and finds herself in a kind of wonderland. She comes to realise the C-Bean can transport her and her friends instantaneously to other parts of the world, such as New York, the Amazon or Hong Kong, picking up stray dogs, talking parrots and weird fruit along the way. So it’s surreal without being preposterous, where the C-Bean acts like a kind of T.A.R.D.I.S., however rather than one belonging to someone who’s a seasoned Time Lord like Dr. Who, my Time Lords are the children in the story who don’t even know at first what the C-Bean can do.
But the trilogy needed one more ingredient to produce its sense of magical realism: that 'highly detailed and realistic' setting. Instead of imagining a fantasy place, for SeaBEAN I chose a place that actually exists. In fact it’s the remotest part of the United Kingdom and a World Heritage Site - an archipelago called St. Kilda - which has a long and interesting past to draw upon, despite having been uninhabited since 1930. For example in the sequel, SeaWAR, Alice is accidentally shunted back to the eighteenth century in the C-Bean and meets Lady Grange, who was cruelly imprisoned on St. Kilda. Another time, Alice steps out of the C-Bean to find it’s 1957 and St. Kilda is caught up in the Cold War, both of which really happened on the island. All I had to do was invent a plausible reason for a community to be living there in 2018 (setting up a wave power plant) in order to bring this magical but real place back into circulation for the purposes of my story.
There's one final tweak to make my recipe for magical realism complete. It is also 'squared' - so what do I mean by implying you also need to multiply the ingredients of the story by themselves? Over the course of the trilogy, Alice sees a lot of change, and by the time we get to the final part of the trilogy, SeaRISE, there have been some disastrous shifts even on her own island. So the underlying message of this adventure story only comes out once when Alice realises she can do something that will make a difference not just in her own life but for everyone on the planet. That’s quite a challenge for an eleven-year-old kid, but one thing's for sure; with magical realism the stakes are set high, and the story has to deliver.
Sarah Holding, 2014
SeaRISE is the third and final book in Sarah Holding’s SeaBEAN trilogy (Medina). Available to buy online here.
Sarah's Blog Tour will pit-stop at the following wonderful destinations:
1st December – SCI-FI-LONDON
2nd December – Sci-Fi Bulletin
3rd December – Fiction Fascination
4th December – Feeling Fictional
5th December – Cherry Mischievous
6th December – The Overflowing Library
7th December – Book Passion for Life
8th December – Bookaholics Book Club
9th December – The Secret Writer
10th December – Addicted to Media
11th December – SeaBEAN Trilogy Official Website
SeaRISE is available from Available from Amazon and directly from Medina Publishing.