PORT ANGELES — She’s “saving the world,” according to her website, “one love story at a time.”
Wendy Lester of Port Angeles has just released Falling Under, her debut novel. Her publisher is the prestigious Penguin Group of New York City, so she’s now swept up in the promotional whirlwind that includes a website, a blog, worldwide online chatting and a Seattle book signing — all while she works her day job at Windemere Real Estate and cares for her two teenagers.
Yet Lester, a 1988 graduate of Sequim High School, isn’t terribly into all of the attention a hot young-adult novel about love can bring an author.
“She is shy,” said April Bellerud, owner of Odyssey Books in Port Angeles.
Lester is also a book lover who’s shopped at Odyssey for years — so it’s fitting that she’ll celebrate the arrival of Falling Under with a party there at 4 p.m. today.
Readers won’t see Lester’s name on the book, though: In keeping with her desire for a low profile, she uses the nom de plume Gwen Hayes.
On www.GwenHayes.com, there’s much for teenage-romance fans to devour: tantalizing text, a link to the Fictionistas, which Hayes calls “the coolest YA [young adult] blog in the whole universe,” and other authors hailing Falling as “a lush, dark fairy tale” that is “utterly enchanting.”
Now, Bellerud knows what this looks like: an imitation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga. And it is about young people madly in love and grappling with the paranormal.
But Lester/Hayes has her own tale to tell, Bellerud said; it’s about Theia Alderson, a 17-year-old in Serendipity Falls, Calif., who dreams of a boy named Haden Black.
He materializes before her one devastating day, and as they get to know each other, Theia feels a muscular magnetism — and away we go, “to hell and back again for love,” as Bellerud puts it.
Falling, see, is a mythological trip involving demons and the underworld.
There are no vampires in here, Bellerud added, though Theia winks at Twilight when she asks Haden, “You’re not going to tell me you glitter in the sunshine, are you?”
Falling slips to and fro between reality and dreams, pulling the reader inside Theia’s bizarre experiences.
To start, there’s the night she’s secretly reading an e-book in bed, and an apparition flies by her window.
“Everything changed the night I saw the burning man fall from the sky,” our heroine writes.
“Slowly, like a feather caught on a light breeze, he willowed past my window, turning his grotesque head towards me, his mouth open in a silent scream. He was more than on fire. He was fire.”
The book is selling briskly at Odyssey, Bellerud said, especially considering Gwen Hayes isn’t a well-known name.
She’s delighted for Lester, who burst in some 14 months ago with the news that she’d sold her novel to a major publisher.
Lester, for her part, has been too busy working at Windemere to go on much about Falling.
“It all went really fast” once Penguin snapped the book up, she said. “It’s very exciting.”
Lester’s daughter, Hayley Pearce, 18, has been promoting the book at Port Angeles High School. Falling could become quite a hit among the young women there, though not so much among their male classmates: Lester doesn’t think her son, Harrison Pearce, 15, has gotten around to reading it yet.
At the front of the book, however, Lester offers a well-worded tribute to a woman from her youth in Sequim:
“I’d like to thank my Sequim Middle School librarian, Jo Chinn, for nurturing my love of YA books. It was her passion for reading and her sense of humor and fun that got me through a few of those ‘iffy’ years,” she writes in the acknowledgments.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
