Fifteen year old Katrina had always felt her family and life were perfectly normal. Her loving father worked as a software engineer and her mother's amnesia of her own childhood was little more than a topic of conversation. They were happy. Then it all changed, starting with a frantic, midnight car trip, a large black SUV, and a head on collision that wiped it all away. She was left with only the memory of her mother's dying words. "Oh, Katrina, I have remembered my childhood and I was not an orphan. Go to Tinkers Ford, Oregon and find my family; a very special family, a magical family. I was known then as Moonbeam Broadwing." Katrina's adventure begins one year later on the anniversary of her family's death when she runs away from her failing foster home and goes to Tinkers Ford as she had promised. She occupies an abandoned house and enters school while she searches for her mother's lost family. But her frustration quickly builds as she finds no clues about her family, becomes involved with the tensions in school, and is increasingly lonely. In her loneliness, she is drawn to an older couple living in her neighborhood and Katrina's life takes sharp turn when she is introduced to their grandniece, Tori, who is recovering from a lingering illness. She and Tori look like sisters and because Tori roused briefly from her coma like sleep, when Katrina was near her, she is asked to visit again. She begins spending all her non-school time at Tori's, needing that sense of family she feels there. Katrina's visits eventually totally rouse Tori who improves rapidly, returning to school with Katrina after a couple of weeks. They become very close and when Katrina learns that Tori will be leaving and returning home, now that is is nearly recovered, she is devastated. With tears and a great hug, she wishes Tori a full recovery, and Katrina's life takes another sharp turn as a pair of translucent multicolored wings sprout from Tori's shoulders. Katrina's best and only friend, turn out to be a Fairy. From there, her discovery continues with a large Fairy community, Fairy Vampires, Vampires, battles with a government agency looking for invading space aliens, and issues with bullies at school. Finally Katrina and Tori look forward to an uneventful, responsibility free summer, full of great times. But summer will prove to be anything but uneventful as will be seen in "Katrina's Journey: Evolution".
About the Author: Hampton Carmine has been writing stories since high school in the early sixties when he completed three sci/fi novels that still exist in red ink on pulp pencil tablets, kept as instruments of humility. He was born in the small college town of Oakland City, Indiana where his dad was in music school. His youth was spent in the mid-west but he went to college in North Carolina at East Carolina University achieving a degree in Psychology and advanced degrees in Speech and Language Pathology and Special Education. This was followed later by a degree in Computer Science, a career in state service and retirement to help raise a first grandchild. He continues to write Fantasy and Sci/Fi as well as compose music for band and orchestra while living in Raleigh, NC.