Boxing Day Books
“Books for any age group as long as the language is delicious and the book has a soul.”
Elaine Marie Alphin
Author: Ghost Cadet
Elaine Marie Alphin is the award-winning author of more than thirty books for children and young adults. Although she specializes in fiction, she has published many nonfiction titles. Ghost Cadet, her first published book, combines vivid imagination with meticulous research—and with changes in her personal life.
A history major from Rice University, Elaine married into a Southern family in 1982 and discovered that she would have to re-learn a lot of history she thought she already knew. But her husband, Ltc. Arthur B. Alphin, has always been her greatest supporter, believing that she would succeed as an author long before she ever had a novel published. With that sort of encouragement, Elaine was delighted to learn to see the War Between the States through Southern eyes, and Ghost Cadet was the first result of several ghost stories about the War.
Alphin is noted for writing historical fiction and psychological thrillers. Visit her at elainemariealphin.com.
An eerie anecdote from the author:
Sometimes history is even stranger than a writer's imagination. When I began writing Ghost Cadet, I wondered why a boy who died in the Battle of New Market might be a ghost. I decided that it would be because he had lost something at the battlefield--something so precious that he couldn't rest until it was found. What could be so precious? I asked my husband, who comes from an old Virginia family, and he immediately suggested a family watch. I liked the idea, and that became my fictional ghost's motivation.
I chose Cadet McDowell to become the ghost in my story because he died close to where I wanted to hide the watch, and because he was one of the youngest cadets who fell in the battle. The cadet on the book cover is an actual reprint of a picture of the real Cadet McDowell. Then I got a chance to go to the Virginia Military Institute and read Cadet McDowell's family letters, and I got a startling surprise.
Cadet McDowell's father wrote to the Virginia Military Institute grieving for his son and giving instructions for the return of his son's belongings, including his gold watch. The next letter said that the watch had not been returned. To my amazement, the real Cadet McDowell had actually owned a gold pocket watch, and that watch disappeared as of the Battle of New Market. It has never been found.
