Wildewood: A Novel
an excerpt

Amalia’s journal
The year of our lord Sixteen Hundred and thirty five
20th April

'Too my dearest Amalia,
I have had this journal bound for you in the hopes that it will serve you well as a compellation of you daily thought and deeds in the Lord as you go forth into your brightest of futures.
Love to you most adoring Father.'
This is what the note read which accompanied this find creature of paper and leather when it was delivered to me Oxford apartments. I with all honesty cannot say which I am overcome by more; love or anger. You are a most beautiful book and I will surely write in thee often, and I have longed for you for years and Father knew of this; but … I knowth that he doesn’t want me to grow up as he has written. Still I guess human fathers are never prepared for their children to fly from the nest. They love us too much for that. Still sometimes I wonder if Father forgets for most of the year that we are even alive.
I guess this is where I should giveth you, my creature of paper and leather, the histories of my life so that you might know me better.
I have both the pleasure and the horror of being born to a right noble Dutch gentleman and his faintly English wife. My Father is a shipping Captain for the honorable Dutch East India Company. His life at sea had brought us great wealth, privilege, and responsibility. Our family had lived on three of the worlds continents, and now we are looking toward to the west, past the blue sea to the new world.
As England and My beloved Netherlands parcel up this new world in their race to be the first to conquer it, my father has decided to move my mother and sell the home we built in Angola. I shall miss the house and grounds, and all the wonders of Africa. It has for most of my life, been my second home. I am apprehensive about this grand new land that every man woman and child in England is raving about. To hear tale of it, the new world is a land out of Fairy or perhaps if I dare write this … the Land of Eden itself!