Thursday 1 March 2018

Aurora Quinn

Aurora Quinn from Aurora (1995) Character Post 12


Aurora Quinn was the eldest of the three children of Keith and Polly. At fourteen, she's been big sister to Patrick and Cass for almost as long as she can remember. She lives with her family on an off-shore island where her parents are caretakers. For some years, Aurora has known she's adopted; a chance acquisition by Polly and Keith as they travelled across country to the island when Polly was pregnant with Pat. Aurora's adoption was informal, and her papers are clever forgeries. The family's isolation from the mainstream is partly to disassociate them from Polly's disreputable father Bernard "Ice to the Eskimos" Taverner. It's also to conceal the truth about Aurora.
Although she looks like a fourteen-year-old human girl Aurora isn't human. Polly and Keith found her crying in a crashed UFO and, apart from her abnormal density (she weighs far more than any human would) she was so human-looking that they simply added her into their potential family.
As a child, Aurora faced some problems. She had to avoid being weighed at school, and she could never play contact sports for fear of harming someone else. She can't swim. She also has the ability to perceive colour in a way unlike most humans. She loves her family, and feels human, but she has to accept she's not and at fourteen she not only feels mildly guilty for depriving her brother and sister of a "normal" childhood, but also fears loneliness in the years ahead. How can she ever have a normal relationship with anyone beyond her own small family? What will happen to her when she's an adult? The advent of a nosy cousin who has worked out that Aurora can't possibly be the natural child of Keith and Polly accelerates her fear. Joshua Quinn is coming far too close to the truth. Aurora finds herself faced with the choice of losing her life as she knows it or somehow stopping Josh in his tracks. She's not a murderer, but how else can she shut his mouth?
Aurora is a thoughtful, intelligent girl faced with a unique set of circumstances. She has to choose between her own wellbeing and someone else's rights but she doesn't feel equipped to make the decision. Aurora Quinn is one of the first non-terrestrial characters I created. She is still one of my favourites.

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. She runs http://www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. 2017 is now behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of February 18th 2018 I STILL haven't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books to come, and I'll certainly showcase those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, just for a change. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for reading