I write books to make sense of the world — this glo­ri­ous­ly weird, some­times heart­break­ing, mar­velous place we call home. Years ago on a vis­it to a St. Louis muse­um, I heard a talk about char­la­tans (peo­ple who inten­tion­al­ly deceive oth­ers for their own per­son­al gain). It stirred up all sorts of ques­tions for me:

Why would a per­son choose to trick oth­ers? Why do we believe the things that we do? What might we be will­ing to try to “fix” the things about our­selves that make us unhap­py or even afraid?

Explor­ing these ques­tions led me to Mirac­u­lous, a nov­el that Pub­lish­ers Week­ly described as “a his­tor­i­cal thriller [and] chill­ing adven­ture” and that Kirkus Reviews called “a deli­cious­ly sin­is­ter read.”

Here’s a synopsis:

Thir­teen-year-old Jack knows what cured his baby sis­ter when his fam­i­ly thought she might nev­er get well — Dr. Kingsbury’s “Mirac­u­lous Ton­ic.” Guar­an­teed to relieve mal­adies known to man or beast, Dr. Kingsbury’s potion can cure every­thing from pim­ples to hear­ing loss to a bro­ken heart, and Jack him­self is a wit­ness to the mirac­u­lous results and the doctor’s kind­ness. When he had no mon­ey, the doc­tor didn’t turn him away but gave him the ton­ic for free along with a job — to trav­el with him from city to city sell­ing his cure-all elixir.

When Dr. Kings­bury and Jack arrive in Oak­dale, the town at first feels like any oth­er they’ve vis­it­ed. But it’s clear Oak­dale is a town with secrets, and its cit­i­zens are slow to trust strangers. 

Then Jack meets Cora, and a friend­ship nei­ther expect­ed starts to bloom. Togeth­er they uncov­er some­thing else they didn’t expect — not only secrets about the town but also Dr. Kings­bury. As they race to dis­cov­er the truth, they’ll have to decide who and what to believe before it’s too late.

What I didn’t know when I first start­ed writ­ing Mirac­u­lous was how per­son­al the book would become for me.

Almost twelve years ago my hus­band, Dan, was diag­nosed with ear­ly-onset Parkinson’s Dis­ease a few weeks before his thir­ty-ninth birth­day. Parkinson’s is a move­ment dis­or­der char­ac­ter­ized by tremors, stiff­ness, dif­fi­cul­ty mov­ing the body, and prob­lems with bal­ance. Most peo­ple with Parkinson’s are in their six­ties or sev­en­ties or eight­ies, not dads with young children.

A few months in, Dan’s neu­rol­o­gist asked if we’d talked about Parkinson’s with our boys (who were nine and eleven at the time). We told her we’d explained to them that Parkinson’s wasn’t a dis­ease some­one died from but some­thing they lived with. We said we didn’t know what the future would look like, but that Dad would get worse as the years passed. Most impor­tant­ly, we told them it was okay to feel wor­ried or con­fused or mad or scared or embar­rassed, that those were nor­mal feel­ings and they could talk to us and ask ques­tions any time they need­ed to. We talked to their teach­ers, too, to let them know what was going on at home and asked them to be in touch if they saw any changes in our sons.

Good, Dan’s neu­rol­o­gist said, because I once had an ear­ly-onset patient who decid­ed he’d hide the dis­ease from his children.

I’ve nev­er for­got­ten those sad words. What would make some­one feel this was the best (or maybe their only) option? How could some­one hide a con­di­tion where their body worked to betray them?

Years lat­er, as I start­ed Mirac­u­lous, the sto­ry of this father came back to me. Because a char­la­tan sell­ing a cure-all ton­ic wants cus­tomers who feel needy or weak, the sort who are will­ing to try any­thing. So I gave Wal­ter Ogden, the young teacher in my book, the shak­ing pal­sy (what Parkinson’s was called long ago). He’s con­vinced he’ll lose his job if any­one notices and sets all his hope on Dr. Kingsbury’s mir­a­cle cure.

I hope read­ers who pick up Mirac­u­lous con­sid­er the pow­er of per­sua­sive per­son­al­i­ties like Dr. Kings­bury. I’d like them to see that while adver­tis­ing tech­niques of the past might seem extreme or less pol­ished than what we see today, there are still many sim­i­lar­i­ties, espe­cial­ly when it comes to prod­ucts that promise to “fix” us. And ulti­mate­ly I hope read­ers real­ize there is no shame in being imper­fect. (Spoil­er alert: No one is per­fect.) All of us have worth, no mat­ter our abilities.