Some characters stay with you. They cross your mind while you make coffee or while you are stuck in traffic, and you wonder about their lives like you would an old friend. This morning I thought of Ronnie Parks, anti-heroine of Rebecca Cook’s new e-book Click.
Published by New Rivers Press, Click is an intense story that chronicles Ronnie’s mental unraveling after a devastating car crash kills her husband and young twin sons. The novel opens as Ronnie is released from a psychiatric hospital following her first breakdown. Now, she is determined to hide her suffering as she spirals further into delusions of her dead husband Boyd. During these out-of-body experiences she imagines herself as a bird and gives in to obsessive-compulsive tendencies to count everything in pairs. (“Because everyone must have a partner.”)
Recently, I sat down with Cook at a downtown shop. She sported a spiky blonde cut and puffed on a silver e-cigarette. Ronnie, I remembered, had been a smoker too. Ronnie also had short spiky hair, only hers was coal black. In the novel, Cooks describes her as, “Just to the left of lovely.”
We took a seat on the patio in a shady alcove. Cook smoothed her lap.
“So you read my book,” she said. “And the fact that it was one long poem didn’t bother you? Not everybody likes a sentence that goes on for 45 minutes.”