Aura of Nostalgia

Laura has grown up in a home rife with secrets and mental illness, and craves a normal family. More than anything in her young life she wanted normal, but the secrets invaded the normalcy she tried to create.

And at age twenty-six when she thought that she had finally achieved the measure of normalcy she craved, and had put all the family secrets away in their pigeon holes, a monumental secret was dropped in her lap when her tea leaf reading grandmother is dying and gives Laura the family journals. The journals date back to the early 1600s and include a family secret that trumps all the other secrets that she has learned, along with family stories that needed to be told. Stories of choices that were made that changed lives and created victims. Secrets that could cost happiness and freedom. Her life would become wrapped up in those secrets in ways that she could never imagine.

The journals tell the story of eleven generations of Laura's maternal family from New England, the Phipps, and prompt visions of the past as she reads them, sending her on a journey through history.

But the end of the journals reveals yet another secret. One that will change everything Laura thought she knew about herself.

In this epic historical fiction, Laura must decide if her visions are a symptom of the mental illness that plagues her father's family, or simply a newly discovered paranormal gift. As she begins to read the Phipps family journals, she is transported back in time via her visions to view historical vignettes concerning;
The early settlement of America.Native American depredations in Maine 1676 and 1689.Sir William Phips, 1st native born Royal Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1st "American" knighted.Mysterious occurrences at Oak Island, Nova Scotia.A treasure hunting expedition complete with a mutiny.Piracy of Richard Phipps and Thomas Hawkins at Tarpaulin Cove.The 1690 Quebec expedition.The Salem Witchcraft trials, Sarah Towne and Peter Cloyes.The French and Indian War, massacre at Fort William Henry.Captivity by Native Americans, and redemption. Jemima Sawtell Phipps Tute.Colonial and modern effects of Tuberculosis (Consumption). The "Vampire" theory in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut.The Revolutionary War with secrets involving George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and Nathan Hale. The Shot Heard 'Round the World. The story of Valley Forge. Post-Revolution depression.The Phipps Loyalists (family of Spencer Bennett Phips, Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts)Love found and lost (explicit sexual content).The Year Without a Summer (1816).The Parkhill legendA haunting, alchemy, and spirit writing.The Underground Railroad. Gerrit Smith.The California Gold Rush, The Watermelon War.The Great Depression.WWII.