Byron/Shelley circle in nineteenth-century Italy. Her fiction has earned starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, as well as a gold medal for historical fiction in the Florida Writers Association's Literary Palm Awards.
Ambrose applied the Page 69 Test to Forever Past and reported the following:
When I flipped to page 69 of Forever Past, the final installment in the Claire Clairmont historical mystery trilogy, I gasped (yes, literally) because this page is very revealing of the major theme in my novel: personal perceptions are often built on shifting memories from the past. Truth and lies. At this point in the story, my protagonist, Claire, has a significant shift in her view of someone near and dear—her niece’s supposedly steadfast lover, Raphael—as she states, “... for the first time I found myself questioning the honesty of his heart...” Has he played them false?Visit Marty Ambrose's website.
It’s an emotional turning point for Claire, which defines the rest of the book.
As the stepsister of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) and paramour of Romantic poet, Lord Byron, with whom she conceived a child, Claire has spent a lifetime trying to sort through her bitterness over her lost daughter, Allegra. Byron had been a fickle lover and deceived her about their daughter’s fate. And, when Claire is finally closing in on solving the mystery of Allegra’s supposed death in Forever Past, she becomes distressed to learn that Raphael is hesitant to marry her niece, much like Lord Byron was reluctant to wed her all those years ago. Feelings of shame and regret rise up inside of her as she becomes determined that her niece will not suffer her same disgrace.
Yet Claire has often been wrong in her judgments about the people in her life, and she must learn whether history truly repeats itself or is merely a shadow of the present.
My Book, The Movie: Forever Past.
--Marshal Zeringue
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