By: Victoria Smith
There are books that begin with a brilliant idea. There are books that begin with years of careful planning. And then there are books that begin in a hospital room, with a daughter watching her mother lie in a bed and thinking: she is so much more than this.
That’s where The Book of Eternity started.
Jacqueline Pennewill, author of the first installment in The Copper Moon Series, didn’t set out to write a young adult angel fantasy published by Indigo River Publishing and distributed through Simon & Schuster. She set out to give her mother something to do with her imagination while the world around them was frightening and uncertain.
Her mother had always loved to read. She had passed that love to Jacqueline when she was very young. And in those long hospital hours, Jacqueline found herself thinking: we can write a book together.
A Collaboration That Shaped Everything
What followed was genuinely collaborative in a way most books never are. Jacqueline would throw out ideas and her mother would weigh in. The names of characters. The locations. The angels. Elements of the storyline. The mother who had raised a reader became, in those hospital hours, a co-architect of a world neither of them had fully imagined yet.
Jacqueline wanted to choose a genre where imagination could run completely free. Young adult fantasy felt right, partly because the genre invites the kind of world-building that requires genuine creative play, and partly because she hoped it might let her mother forget where she was, even for a little while.
Whether it worked the way she hoped is a private thing. What it produced is a novel that carries something in it that purely professional projects rarely do. The particular warmth of something made for someone specific, out of love, during a hard time.
A Place That Became a World
The setting for the story came from a real place. A Key Jacqueline had visited, with a beachside and a bayside, tiny roads winding through areas of overgrown trees, beautiful flowers, and houses that all seemed to have a story to tell.
She describes it as having a personality of its own. At one end were little shacks with gritty motorcycles parked out front. In the middle were grand, majestic homes hidden by trees and overgrown shrubs. At the far end, older homes with vines crawling up their sides. The whole place felt magical to her, like something was always bubbling just underneath the surface.
She had always thought it would be a great setting for a story. When she needed a world for Grey to stumble into, the Key was already waiting.
The Theme That Chose Her
The novel explores grief, identity, destiny, and choice. When Jacqueline is asked which of those themes feels most personal, the answer is immediate and honest.
Grief. Simply because of what she experienced.
She doesn’t elaborate at length. She doesn’t need to. The book itself is the elaboration. A girl who loses her father and finds herself in a world she never chose, navigating forces far beyond her understanding, slowly discovering she is capable of more than she believed. That journey didn’t come from nowhere.
What Jacqueline hopes readers take from Grey’s story is the thing she may have needed to believe herself during those hospital hours. That nothing is permanent. That what feels overwhelming today may not be here tomorrow. That we are stronger than we think, and that the time we spend feeling what we feel is not wasted time. It is the time that eventually allows us to move forward.
If a story born from love during one of life’s hardest seasons sounds like exactly the kind of book you need right now, The Book of Eternity by Jacqueline Pennewill is available now on Amazon. Grey’s journey began in a hospital room. Where it takes you is somewhere else entirely.
