Cat-astrophic by Sue C. Dugan
What's It About?
“How can this be? I’m plain old Nick Dupont in Laketon, Michigan. I was born in Laketon Hospital!”Yet Nick keeps dreaming about the war in France. He dreams of Nazis coming for his school and the nearby Roma camp. And he keeps dreaming of a girl named Chaton.
These strange, vivid hallucinations are affecting his day-to-day life — his grades, his football performance, his relationship. It doesn’t help that there’s a new girl at school who seems to be the trigger of these frightening visions. Worse, no matter how much Nick wants to pull away from her, he can’t help but be drawn back.
In Cat-strophic (Wild Rose Press), Sue Dugan interweaves a story of two timelines and how the events of the past continue to reverberate today — sometimes in unexpected ways.
The Past and Present Collide
The son of a Methodist minister, Nick has never even considered the idea of reincarnation, much less believed in it. But all that changes when he meets Cat, a strange new student at Laketon High School whose presence upends Nick’s entire life. When paired together on a history project about World War II, Cat’s insistence on studying the battle of Saumur at the Cadre Noir military academy — a boy’s school in France that managed to hold Nazi soldiers at bay for two days — sets off a series of repressed memories. Suddenly, Nick remembers a boy named Jean Claude, a student at Cadre Noir who loved a Romani girl named Chaton.
The memories only get stronger when Nick sees a past life regression therapist. It turns out that the nonsense Cat is talking may not be nonsense at all — she and Nick may really be sweethearts from another life, finally reunited. But what does this mean for Nick’s current life? How can he balance living in the present when he’s constantly being pulled into snapshots of the past?
A Look Into the Darkness of History
Dugan works tirelessly to depict a realistic, in-depth depiction of Jean Claude’s experiences in Nazi-occupied France. Through Nick’s visions, dreams and even excerpts from Nick’s late grandfather’s journal from World War II, the author is able to draw readers into what was a waking nightmare for millions of people during the 1940s. History comes alive with descriptions of what the characters ate, wore and experienced — all accurate to the time. It was, in fact, an interest in the real story of Saumur that inspired much of this story — both the largely forgotten Roma internment camp near the school grounds, and the true story of the students who held off the Nazis for two days.
Cat-astrophic doesn’t shy away from the horrors of the Montreuil-Bellay internment camp; Cat describes her own experience perishing there in her past life. But this heart-rending realism drives the story’s messages home. The past can haunt us in more ways than one — not only in the way it’s impacted the world today, but how it’s shaped us as the people we’ve become.
What does this all mean for Nick and his current life in the modern day? How does he cope with his time in the present, all while overwhelmed by memories of Jean Claude and Chaton? You’ll just have to wait for book two to find out.
Warning: book contains alcoholism and an antiquated term for the Roma people.
Sue C. Dugan is a Michigander transplanted in Nevada. She has one foot in her Midwest roots and another in her adopted Western State. The two locals have served her well, and she has used them both in her work. She has two children, five grandchildren and two writing partners who wag their tails and bark.
She has been asked if she’s a reincarnated person. And if so, who would she want to be? As a writer, she is fascinated with the greats and their impact on American literature: Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. As a woman, she admired Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana.
When she’s not with her family or writing, editing or reading, she enjoys long walks with her writing partners by the golf course. Check out her website here.
