Olivia Petros

Olivia Petros  Character Post 49

Olivia Petros was born in the 1940s, only child of Peter Davis and his wife Florence "Mile-a-minute Flo" Ooster. Florence, a champion of women's rights, among other things, did a good deal of dashing about, but Olivia grew up happily enough. Both her parents were witches, but as far as Olivia was concerned that was just something they did, and were. She felt no more need to make an issue of it than she did to make an issue out of clipping her toenails. Two of the strongest influences in her life were her strange great-grandmother Elizabeth, who looked twenty-five and who didn't always bother to breathe, and her familiar Zinka, a Siamese of powerful personality. 

Olivia trained as a nurse, and worked in different hospitals and occasionally in the private sector. In her early forties, she nursed a singular man named Stephen Petros, a Greek who had been raised in Scotland. Stephen was funny, outrageous, and attractive, and Olivia married him. Their daughter Cordelia was born but to Olivia's disappointment she reacted against the family culture, moving out to attend a university far from where Olivia and Stephen lived. Having finally reestablished contact, Olivia learned she had a granddaughter, and also that Cordelia had falsified the circumstances of her child's birth.

Olivia let her daughter keep her secrets, because she was keeping some herself. On the surface, Olivia in her seventies is a placid, elegant lady with well-coiffed hair and a kindly tolerance for her eccentric husband. Her current familiar, Tabbita, is an old-lady cat. Both of them are easily underestimated. Under the scone-making, tea-drinking, sudoku-solving exterior Olivia is a powerful witch. She sees herself as the solid centre of the extant family; odd Elizabeth, distant Cordelia, young Catharina and her flamboyant husband who seems intent on aging disgracefully.  She finds her own resemblance to the ever-elegant actor Helen Mirren amusing, assuring anyone who comments that they are not even remotely related. 

Olivia appears in the Cat Mahal is Magic series. 

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. She runs  Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. 2017 is now behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of February 18th 2018 I STILL haven't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books to come, and I'll certainly showcase those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, just for a change. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!