Harriet Alida Lye

Featured Book

‘Clown is your state of wonder and surprise. Clown is your heart, and your heartbreak, laughing and crying at the same time. The clown is The Fool, the child-self, deep within you, who knows all, responds freely. While your soul is full of mad ghosts, your clown is your true self, the chaos, and the clarity.’

New name, new city, new identity: tired of life in her tourist ridden Niagara Falls border town, twenty-one-year-old Elise (formerly Elisabeth) is ready to embrace a new phase in the wake of her father’s death. She’s gained a place at the illustrious LeCoq, a physical theatre school in Paris with a focus on Clown. At LeCoq they don’t follow scripts, they follow their souls. The school is brutal, and it is the best.

Her mother, Catherine, longs for the creativity she sacrificed when she became pregnant with Elise at age nineteen. With her husband dead and her daughter gone, Catherine’s life in Niagara feels emptier yet more full of potential than ever before. She could do anything. But, in the new quiet, she is haunted by her secret: Catherine was planning to leave Elise’s beloved dad in the days before his death, and – what’s more – he wasn’t Elise’s biological father after all.

As the past threatens to resurface, Catherine travels to Paris with the intention to tell her daughter the truth, reuniting mother and daughter in the City of Lights.

Stifled by her mother’s intrusion on her burgeoning creative and personal awakening, is Elise capable of truly hearing her mother out? And, as Catherine falls under the spell of Paris, will she remember the real reason for her visit, or is she there – as Elise believes – to swallow her daughter’s chance at freedom whole?