By: Andrea Rocchino
There is a message running through The Book of Eternity that Jacqueline Pennewill doesn’t hide and doesn’t oversell. It lives inside the story rather than sitting on top of it, carried by a sixteen-year-old girl facing loss, the supernatural, first love, and a mother she doesn’t know how to talk to anymore.
The message is direct. Readers are stronger than they think. Nothing is permanent. What feels impossible today may not be impossible tomorrow.
Jacqueline arrived at that message from a real place. The book was written in hospital hours, co-imagined with a mother she was frightened of losing. The grief that runs through Grey’s story is not borrowed from someone else’s experience. It is Jacqueline’s own, shaped into fiction because fiction is sometimes the only container strong enough to hold certain truths.
How The Book of Eternity Explores Choice Over Circumstance
One of the questions Jacqueline finds most meaningful is whether people are defined more by their circumstances or by the choices they make. Her answer is clear, and she doesn’t hedge it. People are defined by their choices.
Circumstances, she says, are not necessarily permanent. People can choose to make things better. The road to better may be very long, longer than anyone wants it to be. But moving forward, even slowly, is always better than remaining stuck in place.
Grey’s entire arc is built on this conviction. She begins the story with circumstances that feel insurmountable. She ends it having made choices that revealed a strength she didn’t know was there. The circumstances didn’t define her. The choices did.
Three Books, Three Acts
Jacqueline is already working on the second book in The Copper Moon Series, with ideas forming for the third. She describes the trilogy structure as three acts within a larger story, each book complete on its own while also functioning as one movement within the whole.
The stakes will rise in the books to come. The world will expand. Characters will grow, face new challenges, and uncover truths that the first book only gestures toward. What won’t change is the emotional grounding. The characters’ inner journeys stay at the center, and readers will always be brought back to a familiar place.
The supernatural world exists to illuminate the human one. That was true in the first book. It will remain true through the last.
What Grey Taught Her Author
Jacqueline describes the characters she loves most as the ones who keep evolving as she writes them. Zale surprised her. The birthday scene surprised her. The ending surprised her. She followed every one of those surprises, even when they led somewhere she didn’t plan to go, somewhere she personally found difficult.
Grey surprised her too, in quieter ways. The character Jacqueline imagined as a wounded warrior with no time for romance turned out to be someone who needed love exactly as much as she needed strength, and who discovered, through the experience of both, that those two things were not in opposition.
For a book that began as a way to give a mother something to imagine during a hard season, The Book of Eternity turned out to hold quite a lot. An angel mythology drawn from real history. A setting that feels alive. Characters who stayed with their author long after the draft was done.
Underneath all of it sits a quiet, stubborn belief. People can do more than they think they can. They are more than where they are right now. The story is not finished yet.
Grey’s message- that readers are stronger than they think and that nothing is permanent- carries beyond the page. The Book of Eternity by Jacqueline Pennewill is available now on The Book of Eternity on Amazon. Book One is just the beginning. The Copper Moon has only just risen.
