Indie Author Showcase: Patricia Mashiter Cooper November 26, 2012

Patricia Mashiter Cooper: Guest host for November 28, 2012

Patricia Mashiter Cooper was only five when World War II broke over England in 1939. Dear Cedric is her funny, insightful and poignant novelography of those war years. Novelography: Part autobiography and part novel. Dear Cedric is one of those stories based on the author’s experience, yet embellished with just enough whimsy or intrigue or composite characters to lift it over the bar from ordinary to extraordinary.

As WWII swelled over Europe, thousands of women and children from target British cities were curried away to the countryside for protection. Cooper spent the next five years at a boarding school in Wales in relative safety, seeing her mother only a handful of times and her soldiering father not at all. While Hitler was marching across Europe, Cooper and her mates at Normanhurst were learning arithmetic. As the Nazis were were bombing London, Cooper was memorizing poetry. Still, not all was rosy at Normanhurst. The children had war drills and rationing and carried gas masks in their knapsacks. Some children experienced devastating wartime losses, which Cooper reveals with gentle, yet firm, compassion.

When VE Day came, the boarding students returned to their families and the makeshift countryside schools were transformed back into fine country houses and manors. Dear Cedric is a both a romance to a bygone childhood and a keenly observed time-capsule of history that must be preserved.

Patricia Mashiter Cooper was born in Worcestershire, England. In 1968 she emigrated with her husband and four sons to Ontario, Canada where she still resides. She is currently writing another book in a totally different genre. Her first time-travel romance is due to be published in 2013.

Follow Patricia Mashiter Cooper on Twitter: @pendare