By Linda Seida, Staff Writer
LAMBERTVILLE — A West Amwell author whose debut novel is set in Lambertville and the surrounding area will hold a reading tonight at the Lambertville Free Public Library.
Daphne Woods will begin reading from “Meggie Brooks” at 7 p.m.
”Meggie Brooks” is the story of a young girl growing up in a small rural township on the outskirts of Lambertville, and readers can make the leap that her home is in West Amwell.
”References to Lambertville, New Hope, Tinicum Park, etc., make it a fun read for people who live here,” Ms. Woods said.
”Meggie lives an almost idyllic life, bicycling on country roads and along the canal, going to July 4th fireworks at Tinicum Park or Philadelphia, taking day trips to Ocean Grove and visiting her grandmother in New York State. She enjoys the warmth of her extended family, despite their often hilarious, dysfunctional and even mysterious behavior. But it becomes clear to the reader, if not to Meggie, early on, that there is a mystery. Some things just don’t add up, and Meggie eventually becomes embroiled in the mystery that has held the family in its grip for over 20 years,” the author said.
The book isn’t easily classified as belonging to one genre or another because of various threads, including romance, political intrigue, a family mystery and the heroine’s coming of age. Ms. Woods classifies her novel as literary fiction because of its language, style and themes.
She said, “I have often been told that the language is beautiful and the vocabulary impressive. I think stylistically, therefore, it qualifies as literary fiction. The novel does not fit easily into any one category. While it contains passionate romance, it is far more than a romance. It contains political intrigue and even takes the reader to Iraq, but it goes way beyond a political thriller. It deals with childhood, but moves into young adulthood, and the ideas and themes are beyond what one would find in a young adult novel
”It evokes for me memories of Maggie in ‘The Mill on the Floss’ as it chronicles the development of a little girl into a young woman. Nobody would read that and say it was a young adult novel. For that matter, ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘David Copperfield’ and ‘The Thornbirds’ are all novels that start out with children and childhood and move the characters into young adulthood. My intent was to write a novel that defies categories and transcends boundaries,” she explained.
There’s also another side to the story that revolves around the heroine’s school life and her career path. “ I wanted to explore some issues regarding political correctness in the schools, and that is one reason I chose to take Meggie from childhood into adulthood — to show her dealing with some of these issues and learning how to confront them as she gets older.”
Ms. Woods just returned from a trip to Italy, where she and her daughter celebrated her daughter’s high school graduation and the successful completion of 10 years of homeschooling. Ms. Woods began homeschooling when her daughter was diagnosed with a health problem at the age of 7.
”Meggie Brooks” is Ms. Woods’ first work of fiction, although she previously published articles and photos in several magazines.
”I began writing children’s stories and articles for magazines in my early 30s,” she said. “But this is my first novel, and it took me eight years to write, and then two more to edit. I was homeschooling all the time I wrote it and sometimes only had summers to work on it. I finally just spent about six months working on it around the clock until it was finished, then began the arduous task of editing it. I worked sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day editing it.”
Ms. Woods holds a doctorate in 19th century studies with a concentration in English literature from Drew University. Her family moved to the area about 17 years ago from Chatham. Previously she lived in Rochester, N.Y.
”We were very attracted to the fact that we could be two minutes away from the quaint little towns of Lambertville or Pennington, and yet still be in the country here,” she said. “The Bucks County area is just gorgeous, and the canal path has been a major part of our lives since moving here.”
She said the idea for her novel came from an incident that occurred in her own family. She declined to discuss it for fear of giving away part of the mystery.
. “I wrote it in some ways as therapy, to get that family situation out of my system,” she said. “That is the glue that holds the novel together, so to speak. I fictionalized it, of course, and made a mystery out of it, but I thought the whole situation with the family was interesting enough to make a good narrative. Using that family situation, I wanted to show a contemporary Christian girl really grappling with contemporary issues and rising to the occasion. So many coming-of-age stories in our own time show the characters experimenting with sex and drugs and treating that as fine. I wanted my character to come of age and choose differently, to choose based on her Christian principles, but yet, to show the struggle with loneliness that would cause her. I wanted to show what it’s like to be a Christian in a post-Christian age.”
Ms. Woods also explores through her main character what she sees at the destructive nature of political correctness.
”I’m really depicting the creation of a socially and politically conscious character in Meggie,” she said. “She goes through the trauma of trying to speak out early on in school with regard to global warming and decides to do what I know many conservative and Christian kids do in such situations — clam up and shut up, because after all, they’re just kids — and she finally comes to a decision to speak out and to refuse to be silenced only after years of repression.
”Depicting this gave me a chance to show the discrimination I think many Christians and conservatives experience in public schools, secular colleges and universities, and the public arena. I must clarify here, though, that I am in no way castigating the public schools in this area. While many of the actual incidents are lifted from news stories and accounts from organizations like The Rutherford Institute, a legal institute that defends the religious and political rights of students across the nation, these incidents did not take place here in our schools — at least, not as far as I know,” she said.
Ms. Woods is working on another novel, “The Redemption of Father Drew,” set in Texas. “It opens with a murder and involves the evolving relationship between the young widow and her priest,” she said.
In addition to the reading at the Lambertville library, Ms. Woods will exhibit her book at FreedomFest in Las Vegas July 14-16.
”Meggie Brooks” is available on Amazon.com in paperback and as a Kindle, and on BarnesandNoble.com. The novel is also available through the author’s website: www.daphnewoods.com, where excerpts also are available.

