He’s been shot and left for dead, he’s been stabbed, he’s broken 37 bones and two months ago 36-year-old Edmonds author Kent Roundhill was diagnosed with cancer — in his shoulder.
So when Roundhill says that the main character in his novel “Icarus Rising” is based on Roundhill himself, it isn’t at all surprising that the novel falls squarely into the classic, spy-thriller genre.
Roundhill entered “Icarus Rising” into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest (ABNA) in October where it has achieved some acclaim. The contest’s 5,000 entries have been winnowed to around 800, with “Icarus Rising” among them.
“I am thrilled,” said Roundhill, who has spent most of his life as a chef. “I feel like I am a kid who is walking with giants. To be even considered with some of these people? Wow.
“I’m a pasta jockey who got lucky,” he said Jan. 24.
The first chapter of Roundhill’s book is posted on Amazon.com. The 5,000-word excerpt rushes us through snapshots of the life of Naval officer James Bennett — and what seems to be a flash-forward to Bennett’s death.
In full, the book is 500 pages long. Roundhill started writing it in 2005, but had never submitted it anywhere until October, he said. Its success has been a validation of sorts.
The winner of the ABNA contest, which is sponsored by Amazon.com and other companies, will get a full publishing contract with Penguin Group USA to market and distribute the author’s manuscript.
Between now and then, Amazon.com customers and Publisher Weekly reviewers will read and rate each of the submissions. In March, 10 finalists will be selected for customers to vote on. The winner will be announced April 7.
Winning isn’t really Roundhill’s goal, he said. It would be great, but unlikely, especially after the Publisher’s Weekly review he got, he concedes.
“The idea of a tormented Naval officer has potential, especially in these militaristic times, but the problem here, as the protagonist says of his own stuck work, is not in the story, ‘but in the telling,’” the reviewer wrote.
There’s truth in that, Roundhill said.
The book hasn’t been seriously — or competently — edited, he said.
“I should fire my editor. But I cannot find a way to divorce myself from myself,” he said, laughing.
Until then, he’s still got his life — the cancer is apparently in retreat — and writing to fall back on.
A very proud father of a 4-year-old daughter, and the equally proud son of former Boeing executive vice president John Roundhill, Kent Roundhill said his book’s message is something that he still believes in.
When he started the book in 2005, he was going through a divorce and other “torments,” he said. Having been shot and left for dead in Pullman when he was in college, and lived a sort of rough-and-tumble life besides, there’s a lot of history to Roundhill.
Despite that, “Icarus Rising” is about love, Roundhill said.
“The emotions that (Bennett) is fighting through are about the loss of soul that cannot be reclaimed,” he said. “But when it comes to Icarus and Bennett, the message is to love and to love passionately.
“You have to embrace life,” Roundhill said.
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