Blood Rose Rebellion, Followed by Frost, and Shattered Snow are coming together with The Lilac Plague for a huge thrones+crowns summer reading giveaway!
Find out more about the authors behind these buzz-worthy, page-turning high fantasy novels with this fun Q&A!
Question #1: If you could go into any fantasy world, which one would you pick?
Charlie: Oooh that’s a tough one, because sometimes the magic is amazing but the world itself sucks, or the world is amazing but the magic isn’t as snazzy. Magic-wise, Mistborn or Stormlight Archive. World wise… maybe Howl’s Moving Castle?
Rachel: I have always wanted to live in Hobbiton. I would love to be a curly haired gardener in the Shire.
Rosalyn: Most of the fantasy worlds I love would probably be dangerous to actually visit. Besides the obvious (yes, I want to go to Hogwarts), I’d love to visit the alternative Regency-era London of Sorcery and Cecilia.
Question #2: What is the most surprising feedback you’re getting about your novel?
Charlie: Honestly, the funniest thing about this book is that it’s my highest rated novel, but also my least-selling one! It’s a quieter book than my Paper Magician series, but I’m always immensely surprised and pleased when I have someone tell me it’s one of their favorite novels. I even wrote it before any of my other published works, so that really means something!
Rachel: I based Shattered Snow off the real-life history of Margaretha Von Waldeck, a countess believed to be the inspiration for Snow White. A German scholar named Eckard Sanders discovered her story and I devoured his articles. After Shattered Snow’s publication, he heard about my book and reached out to me via an American colleague. It was amazing!
Rosalyn: The most surprising feedback on BLOOD ROSE REBELLION? That the book got an A- grade in Entertainment Weekly: “In this richly imagined 19th-Century historical fantasy–which teems with mystical Hungarian creatures–a young woman, banished from British high society, for her inability to cast spells, gets caught up in the Magyar uprising.” (I’m a longtime subscriber to their magazine and it was a total thrill to see my book listed in their book reviews).
Question #3: What was your inspiration for the novel?
Charlie: Oddly enough, it was scraping the frost off my windshield. I went down to do it and came back into my apartment to warm up my hands. I thought, wouldn’t it suck to feel like this all the time?And that’s where the novel began. It was just an idea in the back of my head until one day at work, while doing stair laps, the prologue just came to me. I got really excited for the book after that.
Rachel: I was listening to a time travel novel while cleaning a mirror and the thought struck me: What if the magic mirror in Snow White was a time traveler? Thirty days later, I had a finished manuscript. Four months later, I had a publishing contract!
Rosalyn: Blood Rose Rebellion started as a kind of reverse Chosen One story, with me asking: what would it be like to be born into a world where everyone has magic except for you? And so at the beginning of the story, the MC is a kind of outcast because while the rest of the nobility can cast spells, she only ever manages to break them.
Question #4: Why did you feel it was important to have this book out into the world?
Charlie: Followed by Frost was my first foray into young adult fiction. I feel like this novel is where I started to actually get the hang of my craft. Everything before it had been Sanderson-wannabe epic fantasy. In this book I found my voice.
Rachel: Because time travel + fairy tales = awesome! But genuinely, time travel and fairy tales seem to fit together so perfectly. I couldn’t NOT write it.
Rosalyn: I don’t know that I felt BLOOD ROSE REBELLION was important so much as it was a story I wanted to write–the kind of story I would have loved to read as a teen. It was important to me, however, that the main character be an ordinary teen girl of the Victorian era–so while she could ride horses and dance, she wasn’t trained to fight. She had to use ordinary abilities to do extraordinary things. (Okay, so she does have magic, but even that was something she had to acquire over time).
Be sure to enter to win this massive paperback bundle giveaway (including all the swag you see below), coming up June 10th, 2019!
