NC bestselling author wrote tale of a deadly 100-year flood. Then Hurricane Helene hit.
Bestselling author Robert Beatty envisioned his latest page turner of a novel years before the tale tragically played out for real with Hurricane Helene.
“Sylvia Doe and the 100-year Flood” is a nature-based mystery adventure about a forlorn 13-year-old who saves people and animals during a “flood of the century” in the North Carolina mountains.
Helene killed at least 103 people in North Carolina as of Nov. 26, including 43 in Buncombe County, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Asheville is the Buncombe County seat of government.
The storm, which hit the state on Sept. 27, caused at least $53 billion in damage, Gov. Roy Cooper told the General Assembly in late October. Entire mountain communities vanished in floods.
Author, on horseback, rescued horses and goats
Beatty based the harrowing experiences of main character Sylvia Doe on his own, he told The Charlotte Observer in a Nov. 7 interview on Google Meet.
He, wife, Jennifer, and their three young daughters lived on a horse ranch and farm for 16 years in Cane Creek Valley, five miles south of Asheville. They moved a few years ago to north Asheville.
Just as Sylvia does in the book, Beatty said he rode horseback rescuing his family’s horses and goats when his land flooded every year or so at their previous home in Cane Creek Valley.
“Much of our farm was in a known flood zone,” he said. “And I often wondered, well, how bad could these floods get?”
Their previous home was on higher ground, beyond the 100-year flood line, but the barn and horse pastures flooded with “anywhere from inches to several feet of water,” he said.
“Generally, I got pretty good at sensing when it would flood,” Beatty said. “It would have to rain for eight or nine days straight for it to flood. That’s when I’d start worrying about, OK, I have to move the horses to high ground, make sure the goats were out of their little shelter. And I would do this from horseback.”
Floods were ‘a natural occurrence,’ author says
Cane Creek, normally about 20 feet across and a foot to a few feet deep, grew to 10 feet deep and a hundred feet across in the storms, Beatty said. Once, several of the family’s goats drowned.
Around 2016, the flooding “really got me to thinking and experiencing the power of the water and the river, and how this little stream, which was just this pretty little creek, how powerful it really was,” Beatty said. “And how it probably had been doing this for hundreds or thousands or millions of years.”
Cane Creek flows into the French Broad River, “which has been running for many millions of years,” he said. “It’s a very, very ancient river and has been flowing on this continent since before the Atlantic Ocean.”
Writing stories for his daughters
Three years ago, Beatty started on a concept for the book. He spent about two years writing the 310-page novel. His wife did the illustrations, and she and their daughters provided valuable editing, he said.
“It was kind of a family project for us,” Beatty said.
Young girls are the main characters of his novels because of his daughters, he said.
“I’m effectively writing stories for my daughters to read, and they help me write the stories,” Beatty said. “My daughters and my wife are my first editors and help me refine the story, help me create the plots and refine the details of the story.”
Beatty’s Serafina and Willa book series were New York Times bestsellers, all published, like “Sylvia Doe,” by Disney-Hypherion Books. His first Serafina book was published in 2015 and Willa in 2018. Each series features a brave teenage girl.
“When I first started (writing and publishing books) in 2015, my eldest daughter was 12, and now she’s 24,” he said. “So 24, 22 and 13 now.”
Helene canceled book tour
Creating the “Sylvia Doe” story involved looking at “where we are” and into the future, Beatty said.
“You could sort of see this coming,” he said about more frequent and powerful storms. “Things are changing. I didn’t know it would happen on the week I tried to launch the book and make me cancel all of my events, but you could sort of see the direction things were going.
“There’s agreement or disagreement on this, but it seems like storms are getting worse over time, and a lot of people have been suffering from these storms.”
As its publisher planned months before, the book was published on Oct. 8. Beatty’s book team had arranged appearances in early October at a different Barnes & Noble each day, in Charlotte, Asheville, Columbia, South Carolina, Johnson City, Tennessee, and Greenville, South Carolina.
“I am national, but I usually do my first week regionally, because that’s where the majority of my biggest fans are,” he said. “Literally thousands of people were signed up on Facebook to come to these events.”
“It broke my heart, but I realized I really shouldn’t be having these events,” he said. “For one thing, the Asheville mall, which is where we do the biggest event, was closed because the road was under water. Johnson City was hit really hard.”
Beatty is donating his royalties from sales of the book to flood victims through the Helene Rebuild Collaborative. The grassroots organization supports people rebuilding in multiple Western N.C. counties.
“We found my uncle 35 miles down the river”
Beatty said his family “was very lucky” during Helene.
Like tens of thousands of others, they had no water, power and cellular and internet service for days. They chainsawed fallen trees in their driveway, but their roof had only minor leakage from the storm.
“And yet, just a mile or two down the road, there were houses completely gone and people that had been swept away,” he said. “I know multiple people who have lost loved ones. They’ve lost aunts and uncles and brothers and sisters. I know people who have lost horses and pets. It’s really bad.”
An HVAC worker who fixed the system in their home after Helene told Beatty that he lost three family members.
“’We found my uncle 35 miles down the river, and we haven’t found the other two family members yet,’” Beatty said the man told him. “’I don’t know where to look for them or what to do or how to help them. So I just gotta go back to work and live my life.’”
Quite a few flood victims have read the book and discussed it with him, Beatty said.
The response has been “extremely positive, both from the professional reviewers but even more so by just the people who lived through the flood,” he said.
“Some people have indicated that it was sort of weird or uncanny because they were literally reading this book about the flood while the flood was happening.”
Teachers are using the book in classrooms “to help their kids kind of come to grips with what has happened and put it all in perspective,” he said.
“It’s an uplifting story,” Beatty said. “It does have a good ending.”
Who is Sylvia Doe?
The character Sylvia got her last name when she was found without a parent at age 3 or 4 and didn’t know her last name, Beatty said. “So they just gave her the last name Doe, like Jane Doe,” he said.
She lives in an orphanage in a river valley near Asheville. She’s a budding artist and naturalist who keeps a list of all the birds and animals she sees, and she sketches them.
The book is for adults, but also is suitable for young people, he said. “Ages 8 to 108,” he said.
Through Sylvia, the book “shows you what a good person does,” Beatty said. “It shows you how to be good and how important it is to be good. And when I say good, I mean, like, fair and kind and strong and resilient and so on.
“Those are very much themes of the books that I write, particularly this one,” he said.
While the story is “very realistic and grounded in this environment, there’s also a fantasy element to it,” Beatty said.
In the flood waters, animals pass Sylvia “that aren’t really possible,” he said, including a pack of wolves and extinct Carolina parakeets and red pandas, which once lived here.
Red pandas are found only in the Himalayas and southwestern China, but a close ancestor, the extinct Bristol’s Panda, lived millions of years ago in the Southern Appalachian mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, according to the Western North Carolina Nature Center in Asheville. Fossils have been found in Tennessee, center officials said.
The Carolina parakeet became extinct in 1939, according to the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, in Audubon, Pennsylvania. The bird was the only parrot species native to the East Coast, according to the center.
Like his other books, a main theme of “Sylvia Doe” is “stay bold, with an exclamation mark,’’ Beatty said. “That is basically what Serafina would say to her friends, just keep pushing on, so that theme is very much in the Sylvia Doe book as well.”
This story was originally published November 29, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "NC bestselling author wrote tale of a deadly 100-year flood. Then Hurricane Helene hit.."