About the Series
Anne spent her formative years on southern California beaches. And while she imprinted on a cowboy, she can't quite shake the sand from her toes.
The Quicksilver books have a lot of Anne's favorites in them — baseball and beaches, San Francisco and sand castles, The Strand in Manhattan Beach and the Channel Islands off the California Coast. There are a few old family stories dressed up in new clothes.
The books were a delight to write because they allowed Anne not only to go back to old haunts and reconnect with old friends, but to do lots of fun "research" into making sand castles, rehabbing a baseball player's broken arm, becoming a priest, being an umpire, finding one's roots on the Navajo reservation, restoring a Victorian house, getting a divorce in Alameda County, getting arrested for soliciting a prostitute, soothing the painful gums of teething babies, stealing a Porsche, being a hero in pursuit of losing his virginity . . .
Oh, there's no end to the amazing stuff writers get to learn — and no end to the kind and interesting people they get to meet while doing so!
The amazing thing is, these characters hung around. In GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT, the last of the five, there was a teenager in trouble and in need of a good role model. Joanna Hancock-Smith was determined that Chase Whitelaw was going to be that man. He was. And thirteen actual years later the boy, Charlie Seeks Elk, came back as the hero of a book of his own — A COWBOY'S PROMISE — in Anne's Code of the West series! Lots of the Quicksilver folks came back to visit, too. It was like "old home week."
