Although Caramel Hearts is
about a girl trying to cope with her mother’s alcohol addiction, there are
plenty of other relevant issues weaved into the story; friendship, sibling
relationships, first love, taking responsibility, making wrong choices, absent
fathers and bullying. I wanted anyone who has
experienced any of the issues that Liv and her friends/family go through to
have all the feels; that the story felt real was my number one priority.
I decided to touch upon bullying because it
is a very real issue for teens – and it’s something that has far-reaching
consequences for the victims in their future. In addition, the bystanders and
loved ones who don’t know how to deal with or stop the bullying are affected
too, with lifelong repercussions in many cases.
How exactly do you get a bully off your
back? How do you protect someone else that’s being targeted? Is fighting back,
or ignoring, the correct route to take? Do you tell someone in authority, or
perhaps a friend or family member, or do you pretend it’s not happening? Every
possible action and inaction can have such huge consequences, with the
potential to make matters worse. Bullying creates anger, resentment,
helplessness, and in some cases, the cycle is repeated.
Bullying comes in many forms and can be
difficult to detect or prove, which makes it even harder for the victim to
fight back. There’s group bullying that can be openly violent, but then there’s
also friendship switches, backbiting and bitching, forced isolation, verbal
cruelty and peer pressure – all equally damaging. There are also bullies who
target alone, sometimes openly and sometimes secretively; they can seem really
nice to the rest of the word, except for their victim, increasing the victim’s
isolation. Cyber-bullying is another huge issue, both open and private – and
with our increasing reliance on social media, this means it can be difficult to
escape the attentions of a bully, even in solitude or the safety of home.
It is during our teenage years that we form
our opinions and personalities, and so it’s no surprise that it’s a really
difficult time to navigate. As teens, we feel adult enough for more freedom and
responsibilities, and yet, people aren’t quite ready to listen to us – we don’t
really have a voice, or at least one that is taken seriously – and this leads
to all kinds of frustration and emotional anxiety. And as if these times aren’t
difficult enough, when you add bullying into the mix, it’s a whole new level of
awful.
In Caramel
Hearts, the main character, Liv, is initially confronted with the problem
of seeing one of her old friends turn against another; Liv’s best friend Sarah becomes
the target of Maddy ‘Mad Dog’ Delaney’s bullying and Liv tries to help the best
she can in her way. Later, when Liv becomes a victim, we see a shift in her
understanding of bullying, of its consequences and how it feels.
The bully is not a nice character, but Mad
Dog has a story of her own and I hope that readers can tap into that. Many
factors affect people’s personalities such as poverty, life experiences,
medical conditions and trauma. People are complex, rather than good or bad; they’re
multi-faceted and changeable. And so, just like all the other characters, I wanted
to show Mad Dog in different lights. I doubt the reader will accept Maddy’s
behaviour, but I hope they can see where it stems from, and perhaps feel some
sympathy.
Another important aspect of Caramel Hearts was a sense of hope.
Having grown up in a family affected by addiction, and attended a school
fraught with bullying, I know that in these often traumatic situations, your
one true weapon is hope. Hope lets you see that life can be different to your
present circumstances, that challenges can be overcome and changes can be made.
Hope helps you understand that there is more to the world and that you can
strive for it.
For Liv, hope lies in her friendships and
in the handwritten cookbook that she discovers. The recipes provide her with a
chance to be good at something; they’re a focus, but they also provide a
connection to her absent mum who’s trying to deal with an alcohol addiction in
a recovery centre. For Maddy, it’s a very different situation. Does she feel
hope? Can she see a way out? Does she want to change? I’ll leave that for the
reader to decide.
About Caramel Hearts:
Liv Bloom’s life is even more complicated than that of your average
fourteen-year-old: her father walked out on the family when she was young, her
mother is in a recovery centre for alcoholics, and her older sister is
struggling to step into Mum’s shoes. Structured around real cake recipes, Caramel Hearts is a coming-of-age novel about love, disappointment and hope, and
discovering the true value of friends and family, no matter how dysfunctional
they are.
About E.R. Murray:
Elizabeth Rose Murray
lives in West Cork, Ireland, with her dog Franklyn. As well as writing, Elizabeth loves to travel
and has worked bathing rescue elephants and scooping up their poo. On her travels Elizabeth has eaten crickets,
kangaroo, chicken feet, water beetles, frogs, ostrich and snake. Elizabeth has had poetry and short fiction
published in journals in both the UK and Ireland. Her debut novel for children, The Book of Nine Lives, was chosen as
the 2016 Dublin UNESCO City of Literature Citywide Read for Children. You
can contact Elizabeth via her website www.ermurray.com, Twitter @ERMurray, instagram and Facebook.
