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WORK TITLE: The Lost Ones
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.sheenakamal.com
CITY: Vancouver
STATE: BC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Trinidad and Tobago.
EDUCATION:University of Toronto, H.B.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, activist. Has also worked as a television and film researcher.
AWARDS:TD Trust Scholarship.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Canadian author Sheena Kamal immigrated from Trinidad when she was six. She grew up in Toronto and attended the University of Toronto, studying political science. Thereafter she spent a number of years in the film industry. “I spent about a decade in the film and television industry trying to break into acting and screenwriting,” Kamal noted in an Irish Times Online interview. “It’s a journey that began after university when I realised I’d been hiding my light for far too long in a creaky old institution. I thought, Lord save me from strained eyesight! I’ve had enough of these sensible shoes! I’m going to be an actress, darling, and nobody can stop me. It wasn’t smooth sailing. A tiny brown woman trying to make it as an actor? I was in for a rude awakening.” She worked as a stand-in or stunt double and ended up auditioning for roles as maids or secretaries, all of which took a toll on her self-confidence as she further noted in her interview. “I discovered that I’m ‘ethnic’.”
Those years spent around the film and television industry paid off, however, in unexpected ways. While working as a researcher for a television crime drama, she discovered that wanted to write a novel. “I’ve been involved in the film and TV world for many years; I tried to be a screenwriter, an actor, it really was the industry that provided me my bread and butter while I cut my teeth as a writer,” Kamal told Désirée Zamorano in the Los Angeles Review of Books Website. “For this particular job [as researcher for a crime drama] I had to pay attention to the criminal justice system. On a personal level, I was very affected by stories of gender violence. Then my imagination spawned this woman, who, when the daughter she’d given up for adoption many years ago goes missing, gets confronted by her past and her past trauma. My main character Nora Watts consumed me. Her story felt quite urgent.”
Kamal decided to follow this inspiration, leaving the film industry and eastern Canada, and moving to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she set her first novel, The Lost Ones (published in England as Eyes Like Mine). In a Writing.ie post, Kamal explained the background of her protagonist as a mixed-race woman. “Her mother was an immigrant and her father was an indigenous man who had been adopted and didn’t know anything about his birth family. Nora is an outsider who has no connection to her cultural heritage on either side. But she looks like an indigenous woman, and that affects how people treat her. This is a minefield. I chose this back story for her because my story is centered on a missing girl and you cannot speak of the disappeared in Canada without talking about the extremely high rates of indigenous girls and women that go missing in my country.”
Speaking with Big Thrill website contributor Sam Wiebe, Kamal remarked on a further benefit of her years spent in the film industry: “I’ve been told The Lost Ones is quite cinematic, which was entirely unintentional, but taking a step back I see that it is largely informed by my experiences in the screen arts. I’m also quite into outlining, which is the first step of screenwriting and where my research background comes in. I don’t always stick to my outlines, but they help me find a direction. In addition to that, I’ve taken so many acting classes in the past decade that it certainly bleeds into how I approach character. I think that’s why Nora’s voice is so strong. I owe that to my performance training.”
In a Huffington Post Website interview with Mara White, Kamal also commented on her choice of setting for this debut novel: “The Pacific Northwest is a rich setting. It’s as atmospheric as anything you’d find in Scandinavian fiction, so-called Nordic Noir. And, on the one hand, Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, surrounded by stunning natural landscapes. On the other, there is grinding poverty here. It is home to one of the worst high-risk drug areas in the region and is the epicenter of a serious opioid epidemic. The city itself is a bustling immigration center that lies on the unceded territory of three different First Nations… It’s a compelling place, one that I just knew I had to use for my book. I grew up on the east coast, in Toronto, but Vancouver called to me for this particular story.”
Norah Watts is a woman with a troubled past in The Lost Ones. A research assistant for a private investigator, she meets with Lynn and Everett Walsh, discussing the disappearance of the their fifteen-year-old daughter, Bonnie. Norah figures they want to hire her PI boss, but in fact they have contacted Nora because she is Bonnie’s birth mother who put her up for adoption as an infant. The Walshes believe Bonnie is trying to track her biological mother down. This brings up evil memories for Nora, as the birth of this baby was the result of a brutal rape. Finally, she decides that she needs to conduct her own search for this missing girl, an investigation that soon pits her against corporate interests that want the case quashed even if takes Nora’s death to make it go away.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer was unimpressed with The Lost Ones, noting that the plot is “unconvincing and overly dependent on coincidence.” The reviewer further observed, “Nora is too idiosyncratic to feel real, and none of her relationships rings true.” Others, however, had a much higher assessment of the novel. A Kirkus Reviews critic commented: “Though comparisons to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander are inevitable, Nora blazes her own shining trail. A gritty, violent read with a tough, idiosyncratic, dryly witty heroine
readers will root for even if they wouldn’t want to invite her home.” Similarly, Booklist writer Henrietta Verma felt that the author “has penned a believable survivor in Nora, a woman whose relentless struggles many readers will identify with.” Further praise came from online Washington Independent Review of Books contributor Jesse Seigel, who noted: “Nora Watts is a noir antihero, a true female counterpart to the male of genre. She’s tough, trusts no one, and will cut corners and break rules in order to get to the truth — whether that requires stealing cars, impersonating delivery people, hitting opponents with a tire iron, or taking advantage of people who may only be trying to help her.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2017, Henrietta Verma, review of The Lost Ones, p. 24.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of The Lost Ones.
Publishers Weekly, May 8, 2017, review of The Lost Ones, p. 38.
ONLINE
Big Thrill, http://www.thebigthrill.org/ (May 31, 2017), Sam Wiebe, “Debut Author Spotlight: Sheena Kamal.”
BooksPlease, https://booksplease.org/ (February 8, 2017), review of Eyes Like Mine.
Crime Pieces, https://crimepieces.com/ (January 26, 2017), review of Eyes Like Mine.
Criminal Element, https://www.criminalelement.com/ (July 24, 2017), Dirk Robertson, review of The Lost Ones.
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (July 17, 2017), Mara White, author interview.
Irish Examiner, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ (June 3, 2017), Sue Leonard, review of Eyes Like Mine.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (February 9, 2017), Sheena Kamal, “A Cautionary Tale about the Canadian Dream.”
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (August 7, 2017), Désirée Zamorano, author interview.
Sheena Kamal Website, https://www.sheenakamal.com (January 9, 2018).
Toronto Star Online, https://www.thestar.com/ (July 8, 2017), Jack Batten, review of The Lost Ones.
Vancouver Sun Online, http://vancouversun.com/ (July 25, 2017), Aleesha Harris, review of The Lost Ones.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (August 13, 2017), Jessie Seigel, review of The Lost Ones.
Writing.ie, https://www.writing.ie/ (February 13, 2017), author interview.*
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“
Sheena Kamal was born in the Caribbean and immigrated to Canada as a child. She holds an HBA in political science from the University of Toronto, and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness. Kamal has also worked as a crime and investigative journalism researcher for the film and television industry.
THE LOST ONES/EYES LIKE MINE is her debut novel. The sequel IT ALL FALLS DOWN will be released Summer 2018.
QUOTE:
I’ve been involved in the film and TV world for many years; I tried to be a screenwriter, an actor, it really was the industry that provided me my bread and butter while I cut my teeth as a writer. For this particular job I had to pay attention to the criminal justice system. On a personal level, I was very affected by stories of gender violence. Then my imagination spawned this woman, who, when the daughter she’d given up for adoption many years ago goes missing, gets confronted by her past and her past trauma. My main character Nora Watts consumed me. Her story felt quite urgent.
No Safe Space
Désirée Zamorano interviews Sheena Kamal
16 0 1
AUGUST 7, 2017
SHEENA KAMAL’S DEBUT novel The Lost Ones is primed to explode this summer in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and a dozen other countries. Early praise is comparing her protagonist Nora Watts to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander. A Canadian originally from Trinidad with a political science and researcher background, Sheena Kamal was a struggling actor and screenwriter before deciding to write this book. She took a pause between edits on the second in the series to speak with LARB. We chatted by phone and email; our conversation has been condensed for the reader.
¤
DÉSIRÉE ZAMORANO: The Lost Ones is the first novel of a planned trilogy. How did this begin?
SHEENA KAMAL: I got the idea for The Lost Ones in Toronto while I was working as a researcher for a crime drama television series, Shoot the Messenger. I’ve been involved in the film and TV world for many years; I tried to be a screenwriter, an actor, it really was the industry that provided me my bread and butter while I cut my teeth as a writer. For this particular job I had to pay attention to the criminal justice system. On a personal level, I was very affected by stories of gender violence. Then my imagination spawned this woman, who, when the daughter she’d given up for adoption many years ago goes missing, gets confronted by her past and her past trauma. My main character Nora Watts consumed me. Her story felt quite urgent.
At the same time her story came to me, I was feeling like I was in the wrong industry, that I was going nowhere. I wasn’t happy and I needed to grow as a writer. Along comes this idea that is clearly a novel, which I’d never written before. It compelled me, and I had to do it. And I knew this story had to unfold on the West Coast. It was moody, it was atmospheric, it was dark suspense that had the qualities of Nordic noir and Scandinavian crime fiction.
I packed up my life, and I moved across the country to write it. It was a struggle at times, but I felt like I was doing the right thing.
It seems almost as if Nora came to you fully fleshed out.
Yeah, kind of! One thing that cinched her for me was this idea that she was a singer. Because I tried to be an actor for so many years I have a real soft spot for artists and people who struggle in the arts and try to be seen, and who are never seen! I imagined her as a blues singer because she has that gritty, soulful sense about her. Then that was it! I saw her and I knew her.
Sometimes violence against women is almost a gratuitous plot device. How were you able to address this without ever appearing exploitative?
What I wanted to do was to make it personal. So instead of there being a detective that is investigating something devastating that happens to a woman, I started with the woman. I wanted to show her struggle, her after, and what that recovery was like. When you have people dealing with trauma, it’s an ongoing process. This story really is about a woman who has not dealt with her past in a very healthy way. That is also what happens when people experience trauma and violence. Their recovery takes a long time, and sometimes people don’t fully move past it. Nora has not recovered, and I wanted to show it from a personal point of view, from her perspective, in her head. That way the reader is not projecting violence onto somebody, but is actually there with her.
This is uncomfortable for some readers, and some of them don’t respond well to that, actually! Certain comments that I’ve gotten have been that people don’t like that kind of experience from the first-person perspective, even though they enjoy crime fiction. They prefer the distance — but for me it was really important to erase that distance and show that this is a person.
Explain a bit about the mixed heritage of your protagonist, and the choices you made. How does this fit in the world of crime fiction?
I love crime fiction and there are some amazing writers out there that write women, but nonwhite women are generally underrepresented in this genre. Because I was looking at themes of gender violence, I knew I couldn’t ignore how race and class also intersected for my heroine. I remember reading a crime novel that dealt with race, one where violence was inflicted upon a woman of color. The protagonists tackling the case delved into racial disparities, but were able to retreat back into their safe spaces when the mystery was solved. For Nora there is no retreat, no safe space.
With regard to Nora’s background, identity in Canada is more complicated than our benign international reputation might suggest, given our shameful colonial history and calls for assimilation for both indigenous and immigrant populations. I’d always thought of Nora as an outsider, so I made her cultural heritage an uneasy mix of these two — and largely unknown to her. This creates tensions with the way she interacts with the criminal justice system, but also feeds certain internal tensions within her. This way I could grapple with some of these tough issues without crossing lines of appropriation. It worked well because Nora being an outsider, feeling like one, is something that I needed for this kind of suspense narrative. She embraces it because it’s the only identity she feels she can claim.
The relationship between the sisters is fraught!
People who have substance abuse problems can drain their family resources. As much as Nora’s sister Lorelei wants to love her, and be there for her, when you’re dealing with someone who has serious addiction issues it is too much. Lorelei is trying to live an upstanding life, and Nora is the wrench in her gears.
There’s so much loss and pain in your book. How were you able to process all that emotionally?
I find this question very interesting because to be honest I don’t know how I did it! I did not realize how hard this writing process was on me until I was doing a connection exercise with a scene partner in an acting class. I’d never had trouble with these kinds of exercises before, but this time I just couldn’t bear the intimacy of it. It was just an eye contact drill, and I was so overwhelmed by simply making eye contact, keeping it, and stepping toward my partner that I simply couldn’t do it. To put myself in Nora’s head took a toll — I had distanced myself from people in order to take my imagination to this harrowing place and let it sit there.
Thinking about this journey to publication, what surprised you?
I discovered how much I need people, which is strange for a writer to learn about herself. Before my agent sold the trilogy, I was quite the misanthrope. I used to be, “Dogs only, no people!” and now I need people. I crave them, I want them to like me and my writing. When they don’t, I’m devastated. When they do, I want to move in with them and adopt rescue animals. Which is weird!
Who are you reading?
Lately Roxane Gay. I am obsessed with her work, as are many people. Megan Abbott and Alison Gaylin write thrillers with incredibly drawn female characters. Sam Wiebe is a favorite of mine when it comes to West Coast crime fiction. A few of my go-to authors who have written about the Canadian identity in the most moving, intricate way are Katherena Vermette, Richard Wagamese, Lee Maracle, and Eden Robinson. I also quite like Cockroach by Rawi Hage (his follow-up to De Niro’s Game), which is a striking and unusual immigrant story set in Montreal.
Speaking of immigration, that’s a story line familiar to many Americans. I’m wondering about your immigration story, if you don’t mind sharing, from the perspective of a Canadian.
I find that immigrant narratives are very similar the world over; you leave one place and you go to another for the chance at a better life. That’s what my parents did. They left Trinidad to come to Canada for more opportunities for their children.
I was born in the Caribbean but I’ve lived in this country for almost 30 years. It’s my home; it hasn’t always been easy being an immigrant, but I’ve had so many opportunities here. There’s a sense in Canada that immigrants are an essential part of the Canadian identity. Of course there are detractors from this, and the topic of immigration can be contentious when certain issues come up, but by and large Canadians are welcoming. I don’t know if I could live for an extended amount of time anywhere else. I travel as much as I’m able to, but there’s this sense I have that I always have to come home to Canada.
Without spoiling anything, what’s ahead?
I’ve always been interested in writing women who have complicated, messy lives. Who get themselves in and out of trouble. I will get more into Nora’s story, and Bonnie’s as well. In the second book, Nora goes to Detroit looking for a piece of her father’s history and she gets herself into some trouble there. I’m quite excited about it.
¤
Désirée Zamorano is the author of The Amado Women.
QUOTE:
Her mother was an immigrant and her father was an indigenous man who had been adopted and didn’t know anything about his birth family. Nora is an outsider who has no connection to her cultural heritage on either side. But she looks like an indigenous woman, and that affects how people treat her. This is a minefield. I chose this back story for her because my story is centered on a missing girl and you cannot speak of the disappeared in Canada without talking about the extremely high rates of indigenous girls and women that go missing in my country.
I Am Not Your Sidekick by Sheena Kamal
w-ie-small
Sheena Kamal © 13 February 2017.
Posted in the Magazine ( · Crime · Interviews ).
Hello, there, crime fighter! How are you? You feeling good? You feel like solving mysteries because of an innate sense of justice and some deep, dark driving force that will play throughout your storyline?
Awesome. Just wanted to say hi. It’s me, ‘woman of colour’—the brown lady in the background who will do everything I can to help you do your job while you battle your demons. I have no demons because I’m a professional. I’m also attractive, sincere, well-meaning and so very boring I might as well be a houseplant. Every now and then my sassy sense of humour will show through and we’ll have a good laugh to lighten the moment before you go off to do the important work that you do, in whatever mood you happen to be in when you do it. Because you are allowed to be human. I am not. The good, the bad, the ugly—that’s all you.
Does this sound familiar?
I was recently asked on a panel to talk about, hmm, being a woman of colour or writing a woman of colour? One of those two, I can’t quite remember. I was too busy tripping over my tongue to pay much attention to what I was saying. I don’t like to discuss this subject. Who does? It’s uncomfortable and I’m no expert. I’ve thought about being offended by these kinds of questions, but that’s just immature. There is very little racial diversity in the genre I write in, and people have noticed. They want to talk about it with me, but yeah. Discomfort. All around.
I write crime fiction, but I often need a break from reading it. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to love about this genre and I do love it a lot. But while gender is being addressed in a very real way, race is not. I’m not sure that anyone really knows how to do this but some people try. I read these stories and I see the helpful brown woman, or the hard-working Asian assistant and I think: this again? It’s very frustrating to read these same cautious characterizations time and again. You don’t often get a plucky heroine or a flawed one who is not white.
The simple answer is to write more women of colour, but that’s not as easy as you might imagine. Representations of women of colour in fiction are incredibly fraught. It feels as though you are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. There is no way to do it right, really, because there are so few examples that whatever you come up with can be torn down as easily as it is lifted up. Inclusion is nice, but meaningful inclusion means sensitivity – and that’s hard when you’re trying to create a fully realized human being.
Let me explain what I mean.
Nora Watts, the main character of my debut novel, Eyes Like Mine, is a mixed-race woman. Her mother was an immigrant and her father was an indigenous man who had been adopted and didn’t know anything about his birth family. Nora is an outsider who has no connection to her cultural heritage on either side. But she looks like an indigenous woman, and that affects how people treat her. This is a minefield. I chose this back story for her because my story is centered on a missing girl and you cannot speak of the disappeared in Canada without talking about the extremely high rates of indigenous girls and women that go missing in my country. To not have it in there would be like erasure, but I don’t want to appropriate culture or play into stereotypes.
This is as easy a trap for me to fall into as anyone else.
I am a woman of colour who wrote a different kind of woman of colour and questioned my intentions consistently throughout the process. I know how much it matters for people who aren’t often represented to be included, but it is important to be included thoughtfully.
I read everything I can on how to do this in a sensitive manner. I asked people I know (and some people I didn’t) for advice on what lines cannot be crossed by an outsider like me. Nora was never going to be plugged into her culture, so that worked for the story, but I still had to be mindful. I kept asking myself if this is why the flip side of representation is erasure. I kept asking myself if I would be okay with erasure. I wasn’t. I wanted to say something about the place that I live and I want my woman of colour to be front and center. To be flawed and human and not exist as someone else’s prop. I don’t want her to be a symbol of anything other than a complicated woman who must make some very difficult choices.
I don’t know if I achieved all this, but I did my best. And Nora? Well, she’s nobody’s sidekick.
(c) Sheena Kamal
Author photo (c) Malcolm Tweedy
About Eyes Like Mine:
It’s late. The phone rings.
The man on the other end says his daughter is missing.
Your daughter.
The baby you gave away over fifteen years ago.
What do you do?
Nora Watts isn’t sure that she wants to get involved. Troubled, messed up, and with more than enough problems of her own, Nora doesn’t want to revisit the past. But then she sees the photograph. A girl, a teenager, with her eyes. How can she turn her back on her?
But going in search of her daughter brings Nora into contact with a past that she would rather forget, a past that she has worked hard to put behind her, but which is always there, waiting for her . . .
In Eyes Like Mine, Sheena Kamal has created a kick-ass protagonist who will give Lisbeth Salander a run for her money. Intuitive, not always likeable, and deeply flawed, Nora Watts is a new heroine for our time.
Sheena Kamal is the author of Eyes Like Mine, published by Zaffre, out now.
QUOTE:
I’ve been told The Lost Ones is quite cinematic, which was entirely unintentional, but taking a step back I see that it is largely informed by my experiences in the screen arts. I’m also quite into outlining, which is the first step of screenwriting and where my research background comes in. I don’t always stick to my outlines, but they help me find a direction. In addition to that, I’ve taken so many acting classes in the past decade that it certainly bleeds into how I approach character. I think that’s why Nora’s voice is so strong. I owe that to my performance training.
Debut Author Spotlight: Sheena Kamal
MAY 31, 2017 by ITW 9 0
By Sam Wiebe
Sheena Kamal is one of the most exciting new voices in crime fiction. Her debut novel, THE LOST ONES (Eyes Like Mine in the UK), is a harrowing, fast-paced thriller that introduces Nora Watts, an assistant to a legal investigator in Vancouver whose personal demons led to her giving up her child for adoption years ago. When the adoptive parents get in touch to tell Nora her now-teenaged daughter has gone missing, Nora must confront all sorts of danger to find her.
I sat down with Sheena to discuss setting novels in Vancouver, balancing humor with thrills, and literary influences.
From Sheena: Hi Sam, thanks for agreeing to interview me! I was very nervous asking you, because I’d seen you on panels and at Vancouver crime fiction events, and was intimidated by your general air of busyness and your height. (I am intimidated by everyone’s height). So I’m very grateful that you had the time to do it–especially since you were recently Writer in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library and just launched your book Invisible Dead in the U.S.
Happy to do it, Sheena! Let’s start with the protagonist of THE LOST ONES, Nora Watts. She’s highly resourceful and tenacious, while also displaying tremendous vulnerability. How did you come up with her?
Nora came to me very organically. I started becoming serious about writing when I worked in the film/TV industry, so what I saw first was a logline about a woman who discovers the daughter she’d given up for adoption has gone missing, and she doesn’t trust the authorities to look for the girl. Who doesn’t trust the cops? Someone who’s had bad experiences with them, an outsider, a loner. Then I wrote a line about her singing the blues and I suddenly got her personality. I sensed she had a huge identity crisis that’s always hovering over her shoulders. Writing the story can be difficult, but understanding Nora never is.
How was it for you creating Dave Wakeland? Did you think about him a lot first or did he manifest on the page right away?
With Invisible Dead, I knew I wanted a protagonist who’d embody some of the old school virtues of classic detective fiction, but who wouldn’t feel anachronistic. I wanted to avoid the cliche of the heroic loner in a corrupt world; in some ways the novel is about Wakeland coming to grips with his own complicity in the social ills he investigates.
For me, the classic detective writers like MacDonald, Chandler, on through Walter Mosley and Sue Grafton, were my literary points of reference. In writing a thriller, were there thriller or crime writers who inspired you? Certain things you wanted to draw from or avoid in the thriller genre?
At the time, I was less influenced by the classic authors than I should have been (sorry, I know, I’m going to do better next book, I promise). But if I thought in terms of who I wanted to be like, I might never have done it. For me, the genre mostly helped me figure out what I didn’t want to write.
I remember the last crime fic novel I’d read before starting to write the book, in which the heroine was some kind of male fantasy wet dream. I thought, nah. I didn’t just want to avoid that trope, I wanted it to fall off a cliff and die. I recently read Sara Paretsky for the first time and immediately felt a connection. She probably would have been an inspiration had I read her earlier, but she certainly is now.
What I did draw from the genre is the sense of place and atmosphere that you get in Nordic Noir. The Pacific Northwest lends itself well to moody fiction and I thought I could tap into that.
Let’s talk about Vancouver and the Northwest as a setting. The city is unique in that it’s a colonial settlement on the unceded territory of three different First Nations, and it’s one of the biggest immigration hubs in North America. Yet it also has the same problems as a lot of big cities: gentrification, addiction, crime. Why set THE LOST ONES here?
It was the only option for me, really. When the idea came to me I was sitting in a production office in Toronto, imagining a dark story set amidst the startling beauty of Vancouver. Thrown in was the fact that so many people want to live here and almost nobody can afford to, and the city’s gritty, bleak side.
Plus, the novelty of the city played a large part in drawing me here. It allowed me to get out of my comfort zone as a person and a writer. The local crime fiction community in Vancouver has been incredibly supportive of me, but when I first got out here I knew no one and had to go it alone. It sucked on a personal level, but I think it made the book stronger. Plus, as you mentioned, it’s a complex place that’s grappling with its own identity.
There’s so much here that bears examining, and it can be quite an exciting place to write–as you know, since your books are set here. Why did you choose Vancouver?
I don’t really think it was a choice, at least not a conscious one. Vancouver is the only city I know well, and it never occurred to me to set my books anywhere else.
Sheena Kamal
I’m very ill-informed about “what the market wants,” but after I wrote Last of the Independents I learned there’s a stigma in the publishing world against books set in certain places. I’ve been lucky in that Random House Canada and Quercus USA have both taken a chance on Invisible Dead. Between us and writers like Dietrich Kalteis and Linda Richards, I think Vancouver is becoming a viable setting for crime fiction.
THE LOST ONES is a fast-paced thriller that deals with some serious subject matter, but it also incorporates moments of humor. How do you strike that balance?
It’s interesting that you mention that, because I think Invisible Dead has a great deal of humor in it. It’s part of why I liked the book so much, the sense that Dave Wakeland doesn’t take himself too seriously. It’s an endearing quality.
Thanks. The right tone is hard to strike. Raymond Chandler called it “a lively sense of the grotesque.” THE LOST ONES is awash with great one-liners that establish Nora’s character and comment on her world. One of my favorites is, “When you feel like having an enema without all that pesky shitting, try using the provincial ferry system.”
Oh, man, BC Ferries. I still have nightmares about having to take the ferry to work! That line came from personal experience.
With Nora’s story, I didn’t plan the humor, it came as an extension of her. I would say that humor is how many people deal with pain– and Nora has had a lot of it in her life. So to talk about the pain, I had to give her a sense of humor. A fairly inappropriate one, I must say. It allowed me to not take myself seriously, as well, given that this is my first novel– one that I left my flatlining career in film/TV to write.
You’ve worked in the film and TV industry as an actor, stand-in, stunt double and researcher. How has that shaped your writing?
I’ve been told The Lost Ones is quite cinematic, which was entirely unintentional, but taking a step back I see that it is largely informed by my experiences in the screen arts. I’m also quite into outlining, which is the first step of screenwriting and where my research background comes in. I don’t always stick to my outlines, but they help me find a direction. In addition to that, I’ve taken so many acting classes in the past decade that it certainly bleeds into how I approach character. I think that’s why Nora’s voice is so strong. I owe that to my performance training.
What’s next for Nora Watts, and for you?
Nora’s story will be a trilogy and the sequel will take place largely in Detroit. So I’m finishing up on some edits for that book and then I’m planning the third and final installment of the series. How about you? When can we expect to see Dave Wakeland again?
The second in the series is called Cut You Down. It’ll be out next year. I don’t want to give too much away while I’m in the throes of editing, but I wanted to play with the idea of the femme fatale, and what that might entail in a world where gender and sexuality are a lot more complex. I also wanted to address gentrification, which is rapidly pricing most people our age out of Vancouver.
This was fun. Thanks, Sheena!
Oooh, that sounds exciting. I can’t wait to read it. Thanks, Sam!
*****
Sheena Kamal’s THE LOST ONES is out July 25, 2017, from William Morrow, and was released in the UK this February as EYES LIKE MINE.
Sam Wiebe’s INVISIBLE DEAD was released May 2nd by Quercus USA.
QUOTE:
I discovered that I’m “ethnic”
I’d spent about a decade in the film and television industry trying to break into acting and screen writing. It’s a journey that began after university when I realised I’d been hiding my light for far too long in a creaky old institution. I thought, Lord save me from strained eyesight! I’ve had enough of these sensible shoes! I’m going to be an actress, darling, and nobody can stop me.
It wasn’t smooth sailing. A tiny brown woman trying to make it as an actor? I was in for a rude awakening.
Sheena Kamal: A decade spent working as a stand-in or stunt double, all the while audi
A cautionary tale about the Canadian dream
Canada may project an image as sweet as maple syprup but it has a lot of skeletons in its closet. Eyes Like Mine is about a complicated woman living on the fringes of society
Thu, Feb 9, 2017, 08:00 Updated: Thu, Feb 9, 2017, 10:50
Sheena Kamal
1
Sheena Kamal: A decade spent working as a stand-in or stunt double, all the while auditioning for maids and secretaries, had taken its toll on my self-confidence. I discovered that I’m “ethnic”
Sheena Kamal: A decade spent working as a stand-in or stunt double, all the while auditioning for maids and secretaries, had taken its toll on my self-confidence. I discovered that I’m “ethnic”
My muse is a loner, a sex-starved misanthrope, an unapologetic voyeur. She’s also a figment of my imagination and the heroine of my debut suspense novel Eyes Like Mine. I’m not quite sure how this happened, but it seems that Nora Watts has lodged herself underneath my breastbone and refuses to budge.
I came to crime fiction in a roundabout way. I’d spent about a decade in the film and television industry trying to break into acting and screen writing. It’s a journey that began after university when I realised I’d been hiding my light for far too long in a creaky old institution. I thought, Lord save me from strained eyesight! I’ve had enough of these sensible shoes! I’m going to be an actress, darling, and nobody can stop me.
It wasn’t smooth sailing. A tiny brown woman trying to make it as an actor? I was in for a rude awakening. I’m the hero of my story, but I’m not the hero of anyone else’s. Or his hot girlfriend, or his quirky sister. I’m the lab technician that brings the sister her test results, if anything at all.
When I set out to write Eyes Like Mine, a decade spent working as a stand-in or stunt double, all the while auditioning for maids and secretaries, had taken its toll on my self-confidence. I discovered that I’m “ethnic”, which is something that I’d never known before. After a time, I got used to being slapped with labels that I would never choose for myself. If I’d felt empty and alone at university, my foray into the arts pushed me to the point where I felt invisible. I was supposed to be living the Canadian Dream, and this wasn’t it.
The Canadian Dream, if you’re wondering, is a beautiful thing. It speaks of a place drenched in maple syrup, where healthcare is free, opportunities abound and every citizen is a valued part of the country’s cultural mosaic. Everyone has an equal shot, and everyone matters – even the people who are routinely erased from the page and the screen.
This false narrative is one of the country’s greatest exports, despite Canada’s shameful colonial past when it comes to its relationship with indigenous communities and other marginalised groups. Residential schools, forced adoption of indigenous children, the Chinese Head Tax, turning away Jews escaping Nazi Germany, along with the very real practice of racial segregation are just a few of the skeletons in our closet. Canadians don’t want to look too closely at these things because it diminishes the stories we like to tell ourselves. That we are nicer than Americans being the most important one.
These grey areas have always interested me, so it isn’t much of a surprise that my book exists in this space. I got the idea for Eyes Like Mine when I worked as a researcher for a television crime show. Part of my job was to keep abreast of the daily news. This was as depressing as you’d imagine it to be, but doubly so because at the time there were several high-profile headlines that focused on how the criminal justice system deals with violence against girls and women.
Though slut shaming and victim blaming are pervasive across the board, no one would dispute that indigenous girls and women bear the brunt of Canada’s negligence in this department. There are some incredible writers and activists currently tackling this issue and working hard to keep it at the forefront of the national conversation. Because of them, the term “missing and murdered” has become a rallying cry. Regardless of ethnicity, it struck me just how often the girls and women involved in the stories about violence were pushed into little boxes, ones with uglier labels, where they were explained away and shoved into a corner. Dredged out every now and then only to be used as cautionary tales.
That’s when my very own cautionary tale showed up and suggested that I’d been wasting my time. I had a novel in me, one that showed a different side to the Canadian Dream. I began to imagine a high-stakes suspense novel set in the moody and atmospheric city of Vancouver. The choice of location was quite deliberate. I’ve never been to a more beautiful city. I’ve never been any place as lonely. This, I thought, would be somewhere my troubled heroine would live. Nora Watts, one of the unseen.
I’d always envisioned Nora as an outsider, so I made her cultural heritage muddled and largely unknown to her. Though she has no connection to any particular community, she’s an uneasy mix of two very politically charged identities. Not only does this create internal tensions for her, it creates tensions with the way she interacts with the world. I will continue to explore these themes as the series continues but, at its core, Eyes Like Mine is about a complicated woman living on the fringes of society. A woman who must relive the darkest chapter of her life in order to find a missing girl.
To support myself while I wrote the book, I dusted off my old actor’s union card and worked as an extra on film and television sets. You can search through the screen projects that came out of the city back then, but you’ll never find me. I’m often somewhere in the background, just at the edge of the frame. Tucked away in a corner, reading or miming conversation with some other hapless extra. It wasn’t what I’d imagined for myself 10 years earlier – but this time my invisibility didn’t seem to matter. It had a purpose. So what if I wasn’t the hero’s girlfriend or his sister? Honestly, I was too busy building my own hero to even notice.
Sheena Kamal is the author of Eyes Like Mine (Zaffre, £12.99)
QUOTE:
The Pacific Northwest is a rich setting. It’s as atmospheric as anything you’d find in Scandinavian fiction, so-called Nordic Noir. And, on the one hand, Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, surrounded by stunning natural landscapes. On the other, there is grinding poverty here. It is home to one of the worst high-risk drug areas in the region and is the epicenter of a serious opioid epidemic. The city itself is a bustling immigration center that lies on the unceded territory of three different First Nations… It’s a compelling place, one that I just knew I had to use for my book. I grew up on the east coast, in Toronto, but Vancouver called to me for this particular story.
Mara White, Contributor
Avid reader, smut writer, former dancer, New Yorker and mother of two.
The Deep Current in Sheena Kamal’s Debut Thriller, The Lost Ones.
07/17/2017 08:57 am ET
Sheena Kamal’s debut thriller, The Lost Ones, releases this week. Kamal is a former crime and investigative journalism researcher for film and television. She has a background in political science as well as activism and community leadership. The Lost Ones, set in Vancouver, features a smart and fearless protagonist, and a breathtaking landscape as backdrop to a harrowing tale of darkness and discovery.
MW: First off, I have to ask, why does this novel have two titles? The Lost Ones (US) and Eyes Like Mine (UK).
SK: I often wonder the same thing myself! I mean, what an identity crisis. It’s simply because the original title of the manuscript, Deep Current, didn’t appeal to my publishers. The UK preferred Eyes Like Mine and the US suggested The Lost Ones. I like both and deferred to their respective expertise in placing the book for their markets. I thought about being a diva and insisting on just one, but that’s not my style. Plus, I was just happy that anyone would publish it so I said yes to just about anything.
MW: One of the most unique and sometimes uncomfortable traits of the protagonist Nora Watts, is that she often reads like an antagonist. She is the hero and at the same time, her own worst enemy—so fearless it’s scary. What was it like to create her and be in her head? Were there any heroes or heroines you looked to while creating her?
SK: In a way, we are all our own worst enemies, aren’t we? Nora is so self-destructive it hurts. When I first started writing her, I was trying to extricate myself from a toxic relationship and switching my career focus. I felt isolated and Nora is informed by a very jaded part of my imagination. She’s been compared to other badass women in crime fiction like V.I. Warshawski, Smilla Jasperson and Lisbeth Salander, but I didn’t consciously look to anyone else. I think if I tried to base her on a character that’s already out there, it would have fallen flat. I did want to throw away this notion of the femme fatale in crime fiction, or the hard-working female detective who’s also some kind of fantasy woman. Nora’s the opposite of all that, and has an uneasy relationship to her own sexuality—which gives a bit of a different perspective.
MW: Vancouver, BC makes for an extreme setting in The Lost Ones and it’s interesting because I don’t think most people think of it as such. But here the inhabitability of the land, is both pristine and harsh and it reflects Nora’s character who is mixed race. What can you tell us about Vancouver and creating this landscape?
SK: The Pacific Northwest is a rich setting. It’s as atmospheric as anything you’d find in Scandinavian fiction, so-called Nordic Noir. And, on the one hand, Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, surrounded by stunning natural landscapes. On the other, there is grinding poverty here. It is home to one of the worst high-risk drug areas in the region and is the epicenter of a serious opioid epidemic. The city itself is a bustling immigration center that lies on the unceded territory of three different First Nations… It’s a compelling place, one that I just knew I had to use for my book. I grew up on the east coast, in Toronto, but Vancouver called to me for this particular story.
In a broader sense, the history of this country fascinates me. I’m an immigrant and my family moved here with a certain idea of what Canada would be. We found out that the story is a lot more complex. I created a character that is hopefully as complicated as the land she lives in and tried to give her fertile ground to solve the mysteries that come her way.
MW: Maternity seems to be an important and reoccurring theme in the novel, as does gender violence. Nora, herself motherless, searches for the child she gave up. Any of the characters who attempt to nurture Nora are confronted with rejection. And yet the biological bloodline plays an important role, are you making a statement about parentage?
SK: Hmm, maybe I am—but I’m not sure how intentional that is. I knew a musician in college who’d been adopted at a young age. He looked South Asian to me, but actually had no idea where his parents were from. He indulged my questions about his experiences for a while, but I noticed that whenever we talked about family there was a wall he put up. He would never know certain things about his own history, as well as the part of identity that is inherited, that he wears on his skin—and he has to live with the fact that he has no knowledge of his own blood ties. It moved me a great deal, and some of my thoughts on this inform Nora’s character.
I think Nora’s fear of rejection is what makes her reject people in turn. In that way, she’s extremely fragile. As a child, she was rejected by her mother and had to deal with her father’s death almost alone. I don’t think she ever got over that. Nora never knew her parents and had to make her way in life without them. Yet she wears evidence of her bloodlines on her skin. Sometimes lineage, where we’re from and who we count as our family, is not always straightforward. As a parent herself, she doesn’t know how to be a mother because she never had one. She doubts her own importance in her child’s life, but the extreme circumstances set up in the book force her to confront these very tough issues as she delves into the mystery of her daughter’s disappearance.
MW: Speaking of statements, The Lost Ones is an incredibly diverse novel which includes both main and supporting characters from many different walks of life. The book also contains some politically toned environmental controversy over land development for mining. Are these elements conscious ingredients or casualties of the plot.
SK: Both conscious. The mining angle came to me as I was writing and was informed by the almost daily coverage it gets in Vancouver. Again, there is that duality here. That the Canadian government expresses concern for the environment while supporting extractive industries nationally and abroad interests me. I wanted to see how that would play out in this story.
Regarding diversity, I am very aware of issues around representation. I grew up in the east end of Toronto, one of the most ethnically mixed parts of the city, and went to school with people of all backgrounds. It’s normal for me to think broadly as I write. When I worked in the film and television industry, however, I became despondent at how many projects don’t reflect the diversity I saw in my daily life— and how underrepresented characters were used to prop up stories that were never about them. I wrote Vancouver as I saw it and tried to be as inclusive as possible of the kind of people you’d find here, starting with my mixed-race heroine and tapping into the Asian influence in Vancouver, as well as having characters who are part of the LGBTQ community. I’m from an underrepresented background myself when it comes to pop culture, so I know how important it is for people to see themselves reflected on screen and on the page.
MW: What do you hope readers take away from The Lost Ones? Should we expect a follow up with more from these characters?
It’s a thriller so, at the end of the day, I can only hope readers will be thrilled. This will be a trilogy that will see Nora pitted against some extreme obstacles at every turn. The second book is written and will take place largely in Detroit—a city that I’ve felt an attraction to for a long time. It will have mostly the same cast of characters around Nora, plus some new ones to spice things up. And a dangerous new mystery to get to the bottom of.
You can read more about Sheena and her work on her website: https://www.sheenakamal.com or on her Amazo
QUOTE:
Though comparisons to Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander are inevitable,
Nora blazes her own shining trail. A gritty, violent read with a tough, idiosyncratic, dryly witty heroine
readers will root for even if they wouldn't want to invite her home.
Kamal, Sheena: THE LOST ONES
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kamal, Sheena THE LOST ONES Morrow/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $26.99 7, 25 ISBN: 978-0-06-
256590-7
A Vancouver woman with demons to spare is asked to find a teen runaway in Kamal's searing debut.When
Nora Watts receives a 5 a.m. phone call from a man named Everett Walsh insisting that she might know
something about a missing girl, his desperation is palpable. Nora, who "help[s] look for missing people for
a living," reluctantly meets with Everett and his wife, Lynn, and finds out that their 15-year-old daughter,
Bonnie, is missing, but because she's run away before, the police won't take it seriously. Nora is their last
resort, they tell her, because she's Bonnie's biological mother--she'd given the girl up for adoption 15 years
earlier. At first, Nora doesn't want anything to do with the case, but something pulls at her, and as she digs
deeper, it threatens to pull her all the way under. Nora narrates her own story, and she doesn't care if you
like her. In fact, she keeps everyone at arm's length, taking comfort only in her beloved dog, Whisper,
stealing from those who show her kindness, and refusing help from the private investigator and journalist
who employ her. Estranged from her younger sister and a former child of the foster care system, she used to
seek solace in the bottle, and it always threatens right at the edge of her vision. Nora's Vancouver in winter
is one of endless natural beauty, but dark currents run beneath it that highlight the harsh treatment of
indigenous people, especially girls and women, and the ease with which they are swept away and forgotten.
It's a bracing reality that underscores Nora's painful, violent past, and debut novelist Kamal uses her own
background in community activism to great effect. As Nora searches for Bonnie, the trail of corruption leads
her to a wealthy family with ties to mining, but what would they have to do with a missing girl? The truth is
beyond terrifying, and if readers think they know where this is going, they'll likely be surprised. The brutal
finale tests Nora to her very limits. Though comparisons to Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander are inevitable,
Nora blazes her own shining trail. A gritty, violent read with a tough, idiosyncratic, dryly witty heroine
readers will root for even if they wouldn't want to invite her home.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kamal, Sheena: THE LOST ONES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934281/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=82141238.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934281
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517177782266 2/3
QUOTE:
unconvincing and overly dependent on coincidence. Nora is too idiosyncratic to feel real, and none of her
relationships rings true,
The Lost Ones
Publishers Weekly.
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Lost Ones
Sheena Kamal. Morrow, $26.99 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-06-256590-7
At the start of Kamal's convoluted debut, Vancouver research assistant Nora Watts meets with Lynn and
Everett Walsh about their missing 15-year-old daughter, Bonnie. Nora assumes that the couple want to hire
her boss's PI firm to locate the girl, but, as it turns out, Nora is Bonnie's birth mother, and the Walshes think
that Bonnie is trying to find her. Nora tries to put the matter from her mind, as Bonnie was born after a
brutal rape that left Nora comatose for six months, but she can't stop thinking , about the teen and eventually
decides to conduct her own search. Nora quickly discovers that she and the Walshes aren't the only ones
hunting for Bonnie. While Kamal uses Nora's investigation' to spotlight important social issues such as
homelessness, political corruption, and the mistreatment of Canada's indigenous population, the book's plot
is unconvincing and overly dependent on coincidence. Nora is too idiosyncratic to feel real, and none of her
relationships rings true, further sapping the tale of heft and verisimilitude. Agent: Miriam Kriss, Irene
Goodman Agency. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Lost Ones." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 38. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949064/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0a416965.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949064
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517177782266 3/3
QUOTE:
Kamal has penned a believable survivor in Nora, a woman whose relentless struggles many readers will
identify with.
The Lost Ones
Henrietta Verma
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Lost Ones. By Sheena Kamal. July 2017.352p. Morrow, $26.99 (9780062565907); e-book
(9780062565761).
Life's been rough for Nora Watts, a First Nations Vancouver resident who's survived foster care, a brutal
rape, and alcoholism. She struggles to get by, putting her street smarts to work as a research assistant to the
only employer who will put up with her--a private-detective friend who's also in recovery. Nora is not used
to caring for anyone but her worn-out dog, but when she finds out that the daughter she gave up for
adoption is missing from her troubled adoptive family, she's unexpectedly torn. Things quickly turn
dangerous as Nora fights corporate forces that want her missing-person mission to fail and that may even,
she realizes, want her dead. The rainy PacificNorthwest is a fitting setting for this sometimes grim tale that
also shows how determination and love can break through the grittiest facades. Actress and debut author
Kamal has penned a believable survivor in Nora, a woman whose relentless struggles many readers will
identify with. Give this to patrons who enjoy down-on-their-luck detectives, and mysteries by Tony
Hillerman.--Henrietta Verma
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Verma, Henrietta. "The Lost Ones." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 24. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495034912/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7d7bdf0a.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495034912
Book review: Eyes Like Mine
Saturday, June 03, 2017Sue Leonard
Caribbean-born writer Sheena Kamal went on a journey from acting to stuntwoman before she decided to write. She talks to Sue Leonard.
Sheena Kamal
Zaffre, €15.99;
Kindle, €5.04
THE first time Sheena Kamal lived in Vancouver she hated the city. Wanting the cheapest possible rent, she lived in the wrong part of town, an area she describes as the heroin capital of Canada, and the gloomy weather got her down.
She’d planned to live there for three months, but ended up staying just three weeks.
So why did she move there from Toronto to write her first book, and why does she live there still?
“It suited Nora,” she says, referring to the feisty but mixed-up protagonist of her debut novel, Eyes Like Mine. And yes, when you’re an outsider of mixed race carrying a ton of issues, who is set on solving crimes, an atmospheric city is a pretty good place to be. And Nora is all of that.
Born in the Caribbean, Sheena has lived in Toronto since she was small, but says she feels an outsider wherever she is. And her opinion of Vancouver has changed somewhat.
“I don’t love the city, but it is a gorgeous place. I write there, and it is very important to me to write from a sense of place. The second book takes place in Detroit, but over a limited time so I didn’t have to stay there so long; the third is set back in Vancouver.”
As well as lacking roots, it took Sheena a long time to find the right route to take in life. Yet each step she has taken has informed her debut. So what is it all about?
It starts when Nora gets a call telling her that her daughter is missing. Haunted by the photo of the teenager with eyes like her own, she sets out on a journey that will force her to confront her troubled past.
A taut, compulsive thriller, the novel comes to a climax on Vancouver Island, and makes full use of the ethnicity of the area. Beautifully imagined, it has been praised by the likes of Jeffrey Deaver and Lee Charles. How did she come up with Nora?
“I was reading a great deal about violence against women. My job as a TV researcher involved a lot about the criminal justice system and lawyers and journalists.
"I had to pay attention to what was happening in the news, and was appalled by the way girls and women were described. Men tend to victim blame somebody for their appearance, their status and their life choices as opposed to something bad happening.
“Over 5,000 sexual cases a year have been dismissed by police as unfounded: much higher than for other kinds of crime. Why is this? Recently a woman brought a case of sexual assault against somebody and the judge said, ‘Why didn’t you just keep your knees together.’ If you’re getting those comments on a judiciary level, then imagine how much trickles down to basic policing level. Nora just came into my head. And she came pretty much fully formed.”
Sheena came to that job by a kind of circuitous route.
“As a teenager I was an activist,” she says.
“I got involved with a youth organisation and became very plugged in, both working with the homeless and with child poverty and speaking at conferences. It changed my life.
“I won a scholarship to read Political Science at the University of Toronto, but I felt lost in my final year and didn’t know what to do.
"Political science usually leads to a law degree, but I wasn’t tapping into my creativity. I finished it then thought I’d find my creative outlet. I decided to try acting.
"I got a commercial for Tim Horton straight off; that gave me my actor’s union card before I knew how to be an actor. It was a steep learning curve.”
In order to keep working, Sheena got parts as a stunt double. It was twice the normal money, but could be harrowing at times.
“I had to do a sequence on a boat, on Lake Ontario in the middle of winter. It involved jumping over the railings to do a drowning sequence. I had to do it over and over.
"I didn’t have to pretend I was drowning because I felt that I was. It was shocking for me. After a few episodes like that, I hit 30, and thought, I can’t go on doing this.”
Sheena then tried writing screenplays, but found the budgetary obsessed restrictions imposed on her stunted her creativity. And that’s when, hoping to climb the ladder, she became a researcher on a TV show, the job that ignited her obsession with justice once more.
Giving up that job to write the book, Sheena had to work out Nora’s ethnicity and who she was as a person.
“That came to me as I wrote. I noted early on that she was a singer. It wasn’t planned. It just happened, but it was a good way into her character for me. And that’s where the Irish connection comes in,” she says with a smile.
“Nora was a blues singer and I didn’t know anything about the blues. Around that time Hozier came out with these covers of blues songs. I wrote the book, almost exclusively to the sound of his albums, and especially to his song, To Be Alone. It’s just brilliant. And chilling.”
This publicity trip is not Sheena’s first visit to Ireland. She came, alone, on a cheap Ryanair ticket from Paris, some years ago. She remembers taking a train to the coast somewhere, and communing with a seal.
“It was beautiful. And people had said, ‘You must have a Guinness.’ So on the last day I went into a neighbourhood bar, and everyone turned and looked at me.
"Walking to the bar I lost my nerve and said, ‘can I have a whiskey please.’ He said, ‘Which whiskey?’ and I felt deflated. I said, ‘A good one?’ Then I knocked it back like an outlaw.”
With the second of the series now completed, Sheena is getting back to Hozier to put her in the mood for writing the third. And it’s clear she will go to any length in her quest to make her character, and storyline authentic.
For her first sequel, anxious to experience crime first hand, she went to Detroit and hired a Private Investigator.
“He turned out to be an active police investigator, and was part of the violent crime task force with the FBI and Homicide State Departments. I got to go out with these people. It was wild.”
She reckons it will take the third book for her to be done with Nora; after that she’s contemplating a children’s series, set in the Caribbean. So, after all these years searching out her creativity, does she feel she’s reached her goal?
“I’m a full-time writer,” she says, “but I would like to do some acting too.”
Indeed, last summer she had two scenes in the movie, Okja; one with Tilda Swinton, and the other with Shirley Henderson of Trainspotting and ‘Harry Potter’ fame.
“But I haven’t been auditioning since. I moved away from being on screen because I found it too stressful.
“In my last audition I had to speak in broken English and end with a growl. The whole thing was insulting. Maybe I’ll take some acting classes and do some theatre.”
Meanwhile, what does she hope the reaction to her book will be?
“Someone said, ‘I didn’t love Nora, but I felt great compassion for her and was with her every step of the way.’
“That’s what I want. For people to look at someone they would not look at normally, and think, their story is important and I am with them.”
© Irish Examiner Ltd. All rights reserved
Review: Sheena Kamal – Eyes Like Mine
JANUARY 26, 2017 / SARAH
cover104801-smallI was sent Eyes Like Mine on Friday morning and was struck by its beautiful cover. By Friday night, I’d finished it. Regular readers of the blog will know how much I love translated crime fiction but I’m also a fan of the American PI genre. I read Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller and Sara Paretsky in my late teens and I absolutely loved them. Eyes Like Mine is isn’t an American PI book. It’s written by a Canadian debut novelist, Sheena Kamal, and is set in and around Vancouver. Neither is the protagonist, Nora Watts, a private investigator. Rather she works for a PI company doing research and acting as a personal assistant. However, there’s a feel to this book of the early Paretskys and Graftons and I absolutely loved it.
Nora March was subjected to a brutal rape fifteen years earlier and gave up the child, Bonnie, for adoption. However Bonnie’s adopted parents track her down to say the girl had been looking for her real parents and has now gone missing. Drawn into the lives of the family, Nora discovers it’s not as simple as a teenager who has gone off the rails but some serious security employees are also searching for the girl for reasons which are unclear.
Written in the first person, the reader engages with Nora from the outset although her story is only revealed in increments. The sticker on the front of the book compares her to Lisbeth Salander which I can understand but I feel sells the character short. Kamal has come up with an unusual and engaging character that is uniquely her own. Nora carries a plot which could veer into unbelievably with panache and there’s a page-turning thrilling element to the narrative.
The pace ramps up considerably towards the latter part of the book but, for a debut writer, Kamal steers clear of neat or soppy endings. There’s plenty of mileage left in Nora and it’s good to hear that a sequel is in the offing. This could be my book of the year and it’s only January.
Eyes Like Mine is out on the 9th February.
Eyes Like Mine by Sheena Kamal
Eyes Like Mine is an excellent psychological suspense novel. I loved it.
Blurb:
It’s late. The phone rings.
The man on the other end says his daughter is missing. Your daughter.
The child Nora Watts gave up for adoption 15-years ago has vanished and the police are labelling her a chronic runaway. No one is looking for the girl, she’s not blonde or white enough.
Once a starving artist herself, transient, homeless, left for dead in dark forest, Nora knows better than anyone what happens to girls that are lost to the streets. To the girls that the police don’t bother look for.
As she begins to investigate, she discovers a dangerous conspiracy and embarks on a harrowing journey of deception and violence that takes her from the rainy streets of Vancouver to the snow-capped mountains of the interior and finally to the island where she will face her greatest demon’¦
Intuitive, not always likeable, and deeply flawed, Nora Watts is a new heroine for our time.
My thoughts:
Eyes Like Mine is Sheena Kamal’s debut novel. She was inspired to write it by the plight of missing and murdered indigenous woman in Canada – an issue that kept cropping up during her research for the Canadian TV documentary looking into missing and murdered women along a 724 kilometre stretch of highway in northern British Columbia.
Everything about this book fascinated me from the characters and in particular the main character, Nora Watts, the gripping storylines that kept me racing through the book, to the atmospheric, gloomy setting in Vancouver and in beautiful British Columbia with its snow, mountains and plush ski resorts.
The plot is intricate, complicated and fast moving, highlighting various issues such as mixed race inheritance and differences in treatment based on skin colour, homelessness, and environmental issues. These never overpower the story, but form part of the book as a whole.
It’s narrated by Nora, in the first person present tense, interspersed by short chapters written in the third person, also present tense. I’m often irritated and distracted by the use of the present tense but I was hardly aware of it – I think it works well in this book, giving an insight into Nora’s mind and feelings.
Nora is a conflicted character, a recovering alcoholic, who works as a receptionist and research assistant for Seb Crow and his partner, Leo Krushnik, who runs a private investigation firm. Nora’s speciality is that she can tell when people are lying. Nora lives in their office basement with her dog, Whisper. There are plenty of interesting and well-drawn characters and I liked Nora, despite her somewhat suspect actions, and Whisper, who also has her own issues.
The main focus of the book is Nora, her traumatic background and her search for her daughter, Bonnie, now a teenager, who she gave away as a new-born baby. Nora is shocked by her reaction when she sees a photo of Bonnie – there is no doubt that she is her daughter, with her dark hair and golden skin. But it is her eyes that clinch it for Nora; Bonnie has the same eyes, dark and fathomless. And Nora feels as though she is in a nightmare.
Nora, working for Leo is also searching also for the witness to a murder, who has since disappeared, and for the killer of an investigative journalist, Mike Starling, the man from her past who had been investigating corruption in the mining industry. Her search takes Nora into many dangerous and heart-stopping situations. I was almost breathless as I read Eyes Like Mine.
My thanks to the publishers, Zaffre, for an advanced review copy of Eyes Like Mine, to be published tomorrow, 9 February.
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Zaffre (9 Feb. 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1785762567
ISBN-13: 978-1785762567
QUOTE:
Nora Watts is a noir antihero, a true female counterpart to the male of genre. She’s tough, trusts no one, and will cut corners and break rules in order to get to the truth — whether that requires stealing cars, impersonating delivery people, hitting opponents with a tire iron, or taking advantage of people who may only be trying to help her. Her vulnerabilities and doubts, though, remain just beneath the surface.
The Lost Ones: A Novel
By Sheena Kamal William Morrow 352 pp.
Reviewed by Jessie Seigel
August 13, 2017
This atmospheric Canadian noir about a hard-bitten, mixed-heritage detective will keep you turning pages.
Nora Watts has witnessed the aftermath of her indigenous father’s suicide, lived unloved in foster care, and been rejected by her more assimilated sister. An alcoholic and a rape survivor, Nora lives on the edge of society, working as receptionist, research assistant, and human lie-detector for an investigator and a journalist located in a down-and-out part of Vancouver.
Finding people is also part of what Nora does for her bosses. As The Lost Ones begins, she receives an early morning phone call from a couple who want her to find their runaway daughter. The catch: Their daughter, Bonnie, is adopted, and Nora is her birth mother. (Bonnie was the product of Nora’s rape 15 years before.)
Hearing this description of the book’s plot, I feared that this novel, though billed as a mystery, would turn out to be a maudlin, three-handkerchief mother-daughter reunion story. How happily wrong I was!
Nora Watts is a noir antihero, a true female counterpart to the male of genre. She’s tough, trusts no one, and will cut corners and break rules in order to get to the truth — whether that requires stealing cars, impersonating delivery people, hitting opponents with a tire iron, or taking advantage of people who may only be trying to help her. Her vulnerabilities and doubts, though, remain just beneath the surface.
This novel may well be compared with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Nora Watts with Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander. Each novel has a bleak, atmospheric northern setting that lends it a melancholy mood, and the two women each have a traumatic past that has shaped them. There is also an element of corruption at the center of each novel (though, the governmental and class causes are more central in Larsson’s book than in The Lost Ones). Certainly, if readers like Larsson’s book, they should enjoy this one as well.
But there are important differences. While Lisbeth is interesting because we don’t know how she thinks, one is intrigued by Nora precisely because of our direct exposure to how she thinks: her harsh view of the world, but also her doubts and insecurities.
Although Nora’s hardened worldview emanates from personal trauma, she carries the style of cynicism exhibited by Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the classic detectives of the noir genre. At one point, Nora observes, “Don’t trust people who are nice to you and ask nothing in return. These are the people who want something and usually you have to figure out what it is.”
At another point, when a pursuer tells her, “Don’t be scared,” she observes, “That’s the worst thing you could say in this situation. Fear is our warning system. It’s what keeps us alive. He should have said, ‘Be very afraid, the odds are against you.’ I would have respected that.”
Nora also exhibits her own version of the Spade/Marlowe dark, sardonic humor. When she leaves a betrayer tied up, she notes, “I stuff a pair of his shorts into his mouth. It’s a clean pair. I’m not a monster.”
Like Spade and Marlowe, too, Nora has her own moral code, but she also has heart. In a subplot, her bosses have her locating a missing witness to a gang crime. She finds him, but says that she has not. Why? Because, as she notes, “I can’t forget the look of fear on Harrison Baichwal’s face. Fear for his family. It moved something in me.”
The backdrop of The Lost Ones, with its references to Nora’s indigenous roots and the problem of Canadian police ignoring the disappearance of indigenous girls and women, is reminiscent of the unfriendly world black people traverse in Walter Moseley’s Easy Rollins novels.
Rollins is often pulled into investigations because, as a black man, he can reach people who won’t talk to white authority figures. He can go where they cannot. Similarly, Nora’s indigenous background and looks allow her to move amongst the rich and powerful because they assume she is a delivery person, a yard-worker, or a maid, and thus not worthy of notice.
The Lost Ones moves at a fast pace and is tightly written. That given, it still has its poetic moments: “Out on the streets, I have the advantage...I am transparent, like the rainwater that falls down on us now in a fine mist, and so I melt into the damp pavement and flow through the city, keeping to the dirty puddles and stench of human waste. The places no one else would think to go.”
If the book has any flaws, they are small and toward the latter part of the novel. The mystery’s resolution may, to some, seem somewhat constructed rather than organic. Some of Nora’s ruses tend to be similar, as are some of the minor characters she encounters, and a few of her pursuits may be thought unnecessary red herrings.
But the plot in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep is famously impenetrable. The plots of Walter Moseley’s Easy Rollins books often become convoluted and somewhat rambling by the end. However, none of that matters. The style and the strength of the characters carry these authors’ books. Likewise, Nora’s unique and intriguing nature — her way of seeing the world — carries one along and keeps one wanting to read on to the end.
Jessie Seigel is an associate editor at the Potomac Review. Her fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Ontario Review, Gargoyle, Peacock Journal, and the anthology Electric Grace. She also writes on writing at the Adventurous Writer.
Review: The Lost Ones by Sheena Kamal
DIRK ROBERTSON
The Lost Ones by Sheena Kamal is a dark, compulsively readable psychological suspense debut, the first in a new series featuring the brilliant, fearless, chaotic, and deeply flawed Nora Watts—a character as heartbreakingly troubled, emotionally complex, and irresistibly compelling as Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole.
When you are a receptionist and research assistant for a private investigator and his award-winning journalist partner, one could assume life would be straightforward and simple. But that’s not the case for Nora Watts, mostly because she is neither. She lives in the basement underneath her place of work, unknown to her employers. This means she has no rent to pay and, more importantly, no one can find her. She does the finding.
Her numerous skills, intuition, and contacts in various places means she is more than just an assistant or researcher. But Nora has a history that’s dark, toxic, and full of turmoil, which often leads her to find solace at the bottom of a bottle. Though she seeks out a support group and connects with a mentor, Nora’s only real companion is a dog named Whisper. Whisper shares Nora’s life, a life that gets more complicated and deadly by the page.
When a couple turns up, Nora can’t understand how they have found her. They went to great lengths to locate Nora since they believe she is uniquely qualified for the task of finding their adopted daughter, Bonnie, who has gone missing. They are right. Nora is Bonnie’s birth mother. And she decides to take up the case.
I am so interested in the sign that I almost don’t notice the man sitting in a dark sedan and watching the house. By the time I do see him it is already too late to turn back, so I adopt a casual, out-for-a-late-stroll pace. The man isn’t sleeping, so I know that he’s not a cop. Also he’s eating an apple. I have never before seen a cop eat an apple and, though I suspect it must happen from time to time, I can’t imagine it in a surveillance situation. Everett said that the police logged Bonnie as a runaway. Unlikely, then, that they’d maintain a presence.
I pass him with Whisper and, after an initial glance in which he has inventoried my features and strands of dark hair creeping out from beneath my hoodie, he dismisses me. I am clearly not a threat, nor whomever he is looking out for, so he returns his attention to the house.
It doesn’t bother me that he has seen my face because he’ll never remember what I look like come morning. If pressed, he might say “maybe native, average height, skinny.” If he was going to be mean about it, he’d add: “flat chest, no sense of style, ugly dog.”
Nora’s investigation quickly turns dangerous as she encounters men who spit bullets on both their own behalf and that of the corporate gods who have their own reasons for making sure Bonnie is not found. It brings Nora face to face with her own tortured existence in a way that requires her complete attention, yet she still has to dodge hot lead as she doles out her own street justice in the form of a tire iron and an elbow to the nose.
Everyone Nora encounters seems to have a piece of her past in their hands. It is as though she is putting together a very painful and complicated jigsaw puzzle. Not everyone is forthcoming in giving up the pieces, and Nora’s propensity for violence, when angered, comes in handy in making people give up what is intrinsically hers. However, the violence meted out by Nora doesn’t push you away, as it is deftly handled by Sheena Kamal. Nora has had so many wrongs perpetrated against her that you find yourself rooting for her when a boot finds its way home to a well-chosen place.
The Lost Ones is a crime thriller, and Sheena Kamal has managed to achieve something quite remarkable: a story that both plays with your emotions and has you sitting on the edge of your seat wondering what surprise is in store for you on the next page. The plot is tight from page one, and the pace continues to quicken throughout.
A plot as clever as it is sinister, The Lost Ones is a superb portrait of what people in power think they can get away with until retribution comes calling. And it always does. I was completely lost in the tale and did not come up for air until the final page. Pick up a copy for yourself, and I bet you'll find it impossible to put down.
The Lost Ones
Jack Batten
July 8, 2017
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/reviews/2017/07/28/action-new-voices-dominate-this-weeks-crime-fiction-releases.html
By Sheena KamalMorrow, 352 pages, $33.50
Nora Watts owns no property, has no friends, lives in a leaky basement and struggles to stay sober. “I’d get lost in a forest,” she says, “easier than a tourist with a malfunctioning GPS.”
Nevertheless, Watts, who inherited through her father a mixed First Nations heritage, is smart and tenacious at carrying out investigative assignments for a small Vancouver agency. In one very personal case, she sets out to find the daughter she put up for adoption years earlier. The case, fascinating on its own, leads to larger and more complex criminal enterprises in a well-written novel that never lacks for puzzles and dodgy action.
Jack Batten’s Whodunit column appears every other Saturday.
Lost Ones
Aleesha Harris
July 25, 2017
http://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/book-review-the-lost-ones-by-sheena-kamal
Book review: The Lost Ones by Sheena Kamal
If you're looking for a book with a heroine that you'll fall head over heels in love with, The Lost Ones may not be the summer read for you.
Aleesha HarrisALEESHA HARRIS
More from Aleesha Harris
Published on: July 25, 2017 | Last Updated: July 25, 2017 6:00 AM PDT
Canadian Sheena Kamal is the author of The Lost Ones. PNG
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The Lost Ones
By Sheena Kamal
Harper Collins
If you’re looking for a book with a heroine that you’ll fall head over heels in love with, The Lost Ones may not be the summer read for you.
The Vancouver (and broader B.C.)-based thriller tells a griping tale of loss, loss and more loss … as well as a bit of love, but its main character, Nora Watts, is so deeply damaged she’s a tad difficult to fall for.
But despite the lack of affection, there are a plethora of emotions in this gripping tale. Mostly suspense, disbelief and pity — not to mention anger, for the perils Watts and other women and girls in at-risk situations notoriously face.
Fairly early in the novel we learn Watts, an Indigenous woman living in the Downtown Eastside, was a victim of a horrific sexual abuse encounter that left her near death and pregnant.
Watts was forced to carry the child to term while under medical supervision and then put the baby girl up for adoption after delivery. Fast forward 15 years and Watts’ decision comes back to haunt her when her daughter, Bonnie, goes missing. In the dark of night, Watts learns of the disappearance when she receives a desperate call from the family that adopted the girl.
Watts, who also happens to be a bit of a tracker and truth-finder by profession, reluctantly agrees to meet with the husband and wife who have been raising her child.
But what first appears to be a tale of a teenage runaway and negligent parenting, unfolds throughout the 350-plus page book to reveal a twisted story of pain and violence. Watts, ever the reluctant mother, is pulled deeper into the dark truth surrounding her estranged daughter’s disappearance. As the network of people she trusts gets smaller and smaller (that number was pretty minimal to begin with), she discovers the disappearance has much more to do with herself than she ever could have imagined.
In her debut novel, Kamal touches on several issues that consistently, and rightfully, occupy headline space — and conversations — in this province: the DTES; mining; foreign investment; the disparity of wealth; the disappearance and murder of Indigenous women.
It’s a dark journey of abuse (mental, alcohol, sexual, emotional … the list goes on), but also perseverance. And, quite frankly, it’s one that’s not easy to put down — or forget.