JOIN
Janice Carr Smith
ALLi Author Member
Location: United States of America (the)
Genres: Fantasy/SciFi/Speculative
Skills: Reading/Literary Event, Press/Media Interview, Performance/Spoken Word
Janice Carr was raised by liberal parents in ’60s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a short hike from Harvard Square. As a kid, she liked to read, write, and act out her stories with her stuffed animals, and sometimes her brother, Charlie, while Dad’s Wurlitzer Organ buzzed the corners of the ceiling, rocking the house. Mom would be out marching for some left-wing cause or candidate.
All that ended when Janice was twelve. Cancer struck, first her mom, then her dad. By fourteen, she was orphaned and living in Florida with relatives who had a very different world view. When they decided to move farther into their rural world, Jan rebelled and returned home to finish high school, living with a dear family friend to whom her first book is lovingly dedicated.
Itching to be on her own, no longer a guest, she left campus-rich Boston for a Radio-TV-Film major at Northwestern University. The college Outing Club opened her city-born eyes to the natural world with hiking, rock-climbing and spelunking trips, and she switched to a Geology major.
After years of wandering, she settled in Northern California, where she married John Smith and made a career of shepherding projects through California’s rigorous environmental compliance process, first at a private engineering firm and later for a rural county public works department.
Janice retired in 2017. One day, in her garden, she started hearing the voices of two twelve-year-old boys. One of them was an alien, and he was saying some pretty interesting stuff. Janice knew she wasn't cracking up. It was just time to realize her lifelong dream of writing, and so, the Look’N Up was born.
Janice Carr Smith's books
Look 'N Up Invasion
It’s Baput’s 12th birthday. In three years, he will succeed his grandfather as Akash, the absolute ruler of the known universe; a stone-age village of 100 green-skinned pomegranate famers. If he lives. One can never be sure, in a world attacked every three years by ravenous circadian predators. The battle begins today.
This time, instead of sheltering in the Great Hall while the men fight in the trenches with sticks and slings, the Akash takes his family to the Holy Cave, where he has discovered a mysterious weapon that might turn the tide. Instead, it opens a dimensional portal that transports the premier family to a pomegranate farm in 21st Century California, where they find themselves powerless, penniless and ignorant. When the Akash and his Apprentice try to meditate, the internet floods their primitive minds.
Jerry Musik, also twelve, is heir of the Look’N Up Pomegranate Ranch, thanks to the grace of one good man who plucked his great-grandparents out of the hoard of destitute farm workers displaced by the dust bowl. Jerry could have also inherited the Look’N Up gene, a misplaced left eye socket, cocked up and to the left, which visits one Musik in every generation. It spared Jerry and his dad, Elmer, but his Uncle Patrick and 10-year old cousin, Belinda, share the deformity.
Desperate for help and knowing how this world treats people who look different, Elmer, a grumpy, pragmatic farmer, and his wife Francine, an empathy machine, hire the oddly colored, undocumented aliens and hide them for three years until the portal might open again, and maybe they can return home. Or maybe, the predators will come through and attack an unsuspecting Earth.
Warm friendships form, and with tender empathy the two families explore each other's cultures in a richly woven story of religion vs. science; theocracy vs. democracy; women’s rights; racism; otherization; castigation and the shocking psychological effects of living in a world with no otherwhere.
When the predators at last appear, it takes all of their diverse talents to defeat them.