Jill Chard
Author
November, 2022
The Relic Thief
When it comes to relics, there is no better thief than Nila. After all, she's the only one who can get past the wards guarding them. Being a Null is handy until she finds herself embroiled in a plot to restore magic from the embers of its once great and oppressive fire. Escaping the clutches of a cult, a torturer and the slavering jaws of a demon beast, Nila races to stop a cloaked figure from gaining control of the most powerful weapon ever created.
The Other Side of Darkness, Book 1
Trigger Warning: descriptions of violence, gore, torture, reference to child sexual abuse
Querying For Agents
North of 7
(Book club fiction)
"This is not a Sunday drive around the idyllic countryside of rural Ontario but rather a journey through dog-strangling vine, buckthorns, and secrets buried in the soil."
ELLEN (68) is frustrated. She never wanted to end up a bored farmwife with an idle lump for a husband, but that was her lot and it was too late to change, or so she thought. When a visitor from England, a charming botanist, ignites in her a new thirst for life, Ellen is swept up in fantasies of deep conversations and exotic locations. She can’t see that her infatuation is just another way to turn her back on reality, as she did after the tragic suicide of her younger sister and as she was taught to do much earlier.
BIRDY (34) is angry. Her husband left for Europe without her, sending her and the kids home to her family farm in Ontario for the summer. With little to do since her parents retired, she jumps at a chance to help an old friend on his dairy farm. A rekindling of old feelings and a new-found pleasure in rural life makes her wonder why she ever left. She is abruptly reminded when her uncle suddenly arrives with his new woman and 9 year-old ward in tow. Birdy soon sees that a secret can hurt more than just its keeper.
ELLEN and BIRDY have each been shaped by abuse, hiding it, knowing that exposure means to forever carry a blight in their small community. Neither sees the pattern reinforced by their silence until a gut-wrenching situation finally brings them face to face with the consequences of their secret-keeping. Will Ellen finally see the pattern? Will Birdy be able to break it?
I acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
In the works!
Rats!
A YA Pirate Adventure
Lotte, a girl plucked from the bosom of her loving but hapless family, and Amadi, a boy plucked from the belly of a slave ship, never imagined themselves commandeering a ship to hunt down the pirates who attacked them. But, those pirates have sailed off with precious cargo and Lotte and Amadi will not let their youth and inexperience stop them from getting it back.
(Image courtesy of Wallpaper Flare)
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About Jill Chard
Jill Chard is a High School English and Drama teacher and author of The Relic Thief, the first in her Fate Drives us Forth series, North of 7 and Rats!, a YA pirate adventure series. A glutton for stories, her greatest love has always been sci-fi/fantasy, especially when characters fall somewhere in between good and evil. She is a lifelong multipotentialite, a self-deprecating jammer and cooks a mean curry despite growing up on a dairy farm in rural Ontario. Jill lives in Hudson, Quebec with her burr and mud-tangled dog, two children and a man she just might marry someday.