Camosun College English and Creative Writing instructor Kari Jones knows all about betrayal, responsibility, crisis, and community. After all, her new young-adult novel, At the Edge of the World, explores all of those themes and more.
The book is set in a fictional small town along the west coast of Vancouver Island inspired by Tofino and other small towns on the island. Jones says that she enjoys writing about characters living on the west coast.
“It’s local but fictional,” she says about the new book’s setting. “I think when I describe the place I have a very clear picture in my mind where it is, so to me it almost seems real because I’ve been writing about it for a while now.”
Jones feels that the small-town setting of the west coast of Vancouver Island plays an important part in the story.
“They are a little bit isolated,” she says about the people of her fictional town, “and I think that just creates a different kind of dynamic with people.”
Jones wanted to look at the idea of community and responsibility to friends as well as the line between when to get involved and when not to get involved in other people’s business.
“We live in community, and in some ways our community is broken, but we can still help each other,” says Jones. “What I was trying to do is explore two sides of the same situation, where one person is in crisis and the other person has to decide how to help that person. For the main character, Ivan, his growing up was trying to figure out what was okay in his life. Was it okay living the way he was? Did he need to make some kind of change? And then the other main character, Maddie, she had to figure out her role in helping her friend.”
The idea for the book came to Jones when her son, now 19, was younger and a few of his friends came into their lives and ended up living with them, on and off, over the course of a few years.
“It struck me that there is a lot that goes on in people’s houses that we don’t know about,” says Jones. “I kind of realized there is this whole underground network that goes on of people taking care of each other that’s not official. We don’t necessarily know about it, but when you get into that world yourself, you realize how much of that is going on.”
Orca Book Publishers fall launch (with Kari Jones)
7 pm Wednesday, November 9
Munro’s Books
munrobooks.com