Only Child is her first novel.
https://www.rhiannonnavin.com
Twitter: @rhiannonnavin
Facebook: Rhiannon Navin books
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing journey?
My name is Rhiannon Navin. I am a stay-at-home mum of three children, living just north of NYC. I grew up in a small town in Northern Germany called Bremen in what I like to call a family of book-crazy women. My career in advertising brought me to New York City in my early twenties where I worked for a few large agencies before deciding to stay home with my kids full time. Only Child was my first real foray into the world of writing. I guess it took something that really rattled me to the core to open up the floodgates. It was like this story was already there, waiting for me. I don’t know how else to explain it. I sat down one day and wrote down the opening scene of Only Child where Zach hiding in his classroom closet in one sitting.
If you had to give an elevator pitch for Only Child, what would it be?
Ah, the dreaded elevator pitch!
Only Child is the story of six-year old Zach, told from his perspective. Zach survives a shooting at his school by hiding in the cupboard of his first-grade his classroom. His older brother Andy does not survive. In the aftermath of the shooting, Zach’s family and their community quickly begin to unravel. His parents grapple with their grief, each in their own, very separate way and soon his mother pursues a quest for justice against the shooter’s parents, holding them responsible for his actions. And in the middle of all of that, little Zach is left alone in trying to deal with his own grief and his many mixed emotions.
Only Child is quite a topical theme based on recent real-life events, where did your inspiration come from?
The shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, five years ago left me completely devastated. That morning, when the twenty-year-old gunman marched into that school and killed twenty children and six adults, I had dropped my oldest son Samuel off at school like I did every day. Samuel was in first grade then—the same age as many of the young victims of this terrible shooting—and until that horrifying day I had never worried about his safety while at school. Then, all of a sudden, school didn’t feel like a safe place anymore. Ultimately, it was a very personal experience that gave rise to my story: Shortly after my twins Frankie and Garrett started kindergarten, they experienced their first mandatory lockdown drill at school. That same afternoon, I found Garrett hiding from the “bad guy” underneath our dining room table. He was petrified.
