The one you love to dislike.
In this SPOILER SERIES, I’m telling EVERYTHING you want to know about The Rhino Keeper. Don’t read these without reading the book! (WARNING: SPOILERS)
Listen, I know.

I KNOW! A lot of readers have told me via reviews or in book clubs or DMs…WHY did I have to write this second timeline with this modern female character that they just. Don’t. Care. For.
Here’s the whole confession. Ready for it?
Because I had to. I know some of you just plain dislike Andrea Clarkson, bless her heart, and I’m here to defend her.
WHY the second timeline? Imagine reading just Douwe’s POV. You would have a LOT Of questions after that. What happened to Clara’s remains? What happened to Douwe after Clara? What happened to all of the art made from her? What happened…to everything!? Well. The answers of that could only come from someone in the future. Someone like (cough cough) ME who has a wildly curious and strangely accurate brain for history, as well as a passion for unknown stories, even if I have absolutely no connection to them.
But beyond that, a lot of readers are not familiar with the 18th century. They might be with the later events (French and American revolutions, for example), but that middle part? The 1740s? There are few non-history-obsessed people who really know much about it. And in order to avoid a lot of history smashing into my prose for Clara and Douwe’s timeline, I felt it best to have this time period explained through a modern lens.
Andrea offers you: the reality of colonialism, rhino remains, history through a lens of a person similar to you.
And there lies the rub. A lot of readers could NOT connect with why Andrea fled Jake’s beautiful southern plantation home.
Let’s dissect that first scene of the book and give you some background that didn’t make it into the book:
Andrea is a lower-middle-class bordering on poverty-level college student. Her mom has been a single parent most of Andrea’s life. Her mom has epilepsy and a service dog (specifically a Japanese chin). Andrea is a scholarship and student loan kid. She’s a thrift-shop shopper, a ramen-for-dinner girlie, a I-have-twenty-dollars-in-my-bank-account student.
Jake, on the other hand, is a very wealthy, trust fund dude who is handsome, smart, well-off, well-spoken, and completely oblivious to life outside of the way he lives it.
When you live in the dorms in college, things tend to equalize. No one can really tell if you come from wealth or poverty, with a few clues of course it’s easily figured out. But most college kids, in my experience, tend to be the same level. All trying to figure out who they are and why they’re there, and what they’re going to do with all of these new humans around them.
Jake and Andrea? Cute match. They’re both history majors, Jake probably had the intention of going on to law school, Andrea had the intention of satisfying her unique card-catalog-like brain. Which is similar to mine, dear reader.
Here’s my author intrusion, here are MY red flags:
When she gets to his insane mansion, a PLANTATION, which means they had slaves there, she gets the ick. Major ick. Those hunting dogs braying? They are in former slave quarters. That confederate flag clinking around the pole? To Andrea, and to me, that’s a major red flag. So are hunting dogs that are only kept for work and are not socialized. Dogs brains are designed to connect with people, and the practice of secluding working dogs has always seemed cruel and wrong to me.
Jake’s mom answers the door already sloshed. (I don’t drink)
They bombard her with questions and don’t let her answer any of them. (Sigh)
The house is overwhelming. (I get easily overstimulated)
The trophy hunting room represents hundreds of thousands of dollars spent hunting exotic animals for sport. Some conservation groups advocate for this practice because hunters can pay hundreds of thousands to go to preserves to kill an animal. That money is crucial to paying for the operating funds of those places. Isn’t that just awful? That hunters can pay to kill a beloved animal on a preserve so that the preserve can keep going? Why can’t they just donate to keep a species alive!?
Anyway, when Andrea sees all of that, and knows that for the entire existence of her family legacy, there’s more money in that room than all of her ancestor’s combined, and its represented by dead exotic taxidermy… NOPE.
But that’s not the final straw.
That’s not it.
I’ve brought it up during book clubs and no one has realized it.
The final straw is Primrose.
The tiny fox-colored dog is a Pomeranian. And when Jake sweeps that little precious pea pod off the couch with a whump and a cry…. That was it for Andrea. She realized then that cruelty was unnoticed in Jake’s world. And how could someone who was so mean to innocent animals, exotic or not, who lived in a place haunted by slavery, that kept the confederate flag in a place of honor, be her spouse!?
I’m so glad she ran.
And when she did, and fled to Holland, which is a total dream come true, she fulfilled a dream of mine. I would have loved to study abroad, but I never had the money to do it. And that’s okay. I got to live through her, uncovering a historical mystery about beloved Clara.
Andrea did good. She left a situation she couldn’t control. She took it slow with Lucas (who gets his own blog post, but Jake won’t), who was a match both intellectually and morally. It’s okay to move on from bad relationships. It’s okay to say no to a platinum heirloom ring.
Even though she’s fictional, I’m really damn proud of her. You go, Andrea Clarkson.
Fun side note: she’s named after one of my good friends who I met online via our connection with Gunne Sax dresses.
People dislike Andrea?? Baffling to me, but I guess that stemmed from lack of understanding. I'm glad you're explaining it here, and I hope readers finally get it.
I connected a lot with Andrea too. I didn't come from money either, but I did get to study abroad (which was a drain on family resources, and wasn't easily sustained like Jake's college tuition would've been, no doubt). So I always have an affinity for those with humble roots.
I know there are good rich people out there. People with kind hearts who do come from money. But I also feel like those individuals are few and far in between, because as a whole they have little exposure (and by extension,…