Meagan Mahoney has always been a writer. After she published her debut, Meranda and the Legend of the Lake in 2023, she was reacquainted with where it all began. 

“My mom brought over some writing from when I was in elementary school. They’re ‘self-published novels’ that I wrote when I was in grade 5, sitting down on my dad’s typewriter in the basement,” shares Mahoney. “I cut out the typewritten pages to the size of a book and then published them with bristol board and wallpaper.” She also wrote poems, a couple of which were published in the local newspaper in Ottawa. But Mahoney set writing aside to become a pediatric intensive care doctor.

After devoting years solely to medicine, Mahoney finally reconnected with stories through her children. It was not only a way for her to centre literature in her life, but also spend quality time with her young family. 

“My son fell in love with listening to rhyming picture books, Shel Silverstein in particular. For his birthday one year, I thought I would see if I could write a poem for him, about him,” Mahoney recalls. “I had found this thing from when I was really young that I loved to do. It became a tradition: I write a poem for each of [my children] for their birthdays.”

What started off as a family tradition evolved into something bigger. The result was Meranda and the Legend of the Lake. And, in working on it, Mahoney realized writing a middle-grade novel wasn’t the daunting task she thought it would be.

Her sophomore novel, The Time Keeper (DCB, out now), set in 1902, was written for her son. It follows 12-year-old orphan Malcolm on his quest to uncover who murdered his mentor, clockmaker Jack Alexander, and find a miracle cure for his dying friend, Peter. 

“He loves stories,” Mahoney says of her son. “He loves being read to. He’s the one who loved all the poems when he was younger. I wanted to write something that was more appealing to him, faster-paced. I wanted it to be intriguing and a puzzle; he was reading Encyclopedia Brown and things like that.”

The majority of The Time Keeper was written during the pandemic, which afforded Mahoney time for extensive online research. She confesses there’s a file on her laptop of maps, a blueprint of Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary, and pictures of the streets of the Scottish capital, the setting of the book, which she has walked countless times in her mind. For the places where Mahoney couldn’t fill in the details, Gemma Henderson, curator for museums and galleries for the City of Edinburgh Council, was her guide. “She wrote back, answering my questions, sending me links. She fact checked, language and dialect checked, and historical fact checked my manuscript,” Mahoney recalls. “Correspondence with somebody with boots on the ground and an expertise in the location was super cool.”

Even more gratifying was the opportunity to pay tribute to women in medicine; Dr. Fiona Issac’s character, who is caring for Malcolm’s dying friend, represents the battle women have faced in establishing medical careers. It was also important to Mahoney to showcase the tension between faith and medicine, as well as giving her kids a window into her life. “They don’t get to see what I do. It’s a very closed-door job,” says Mahoney. “So I try to show where some of my quirks, paranoias, worries, or insecurities come from.”

The Time Keeper at its heart is a story about family wrapped in a mind-bending adventure. It takes a fun and engaging approach to embracing family in all of its forms, which, for Malcolm, is found family. “It sounds like a fairly overused phrase, but it’s that anybody can be your family,” says Mahoney. “You can create your family from the people that mean something to you.”

Photo Credit: Sally Adams.