A Spindle Splintered: Retelling a Fairy Tale
By Laura McGill Sleeping Beauty has hundreds of versions, with new ones printed every year. Most readers know the glossy animation, perhaps a few scraps of older, darker folklore, and maybe a sprinkling of modern retellings. You can’t surprise an American audience. They know what to expect: first the curse, then the spindle, finally the […]
A Deadly Education: Getting Away with Info Dumps
By Charity West Naomi Novik’s brilliant twist on the magic school trope, A Deadly Education, explores the idea of what would happen if the magic school was trying to kill you. The story starts with our main character, El (short for Galadriel, much to her chagrin), having her life saved for the second time, and […]
Writing a Main Character that Readers Love – The House in the Cerulean Sea
By Kaitlyn Meyers Creating characters is fun, right? Yes? No? …Maybe? Creating and crafting a character is, unfortunately, vital to stories because they are the ones actually telling the story. So what makes a reader love a character, especially a main one? The same things that make a person care about another person. Think about […]
Tension on Every Page with Project Hail Mary
By Terra Luft Project Hail Mary is the latest science fiction novel from author Andy Weir. If you loved Weir’s first book, The Martian, I think this latest novel is even better. It has the perfect balance of exciting plot, interesting characters, and fascinating science set in space. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a […]
About Kids but Not for Kids – Across the Green Grass Fields
By Laura McGill Imagine a pre-teen Horse Girl. (No, not literally. I mean the sort of girl who doodles ponies in the margins of her homework. It’s a thing.) After fighting with her friends, she discovers a fantasy world full of Horse People. (Yes, literally. They’re centaurs.) There’s a quest, of course, lessons on friendship, […]
Six of Crows and Integrating Internal Thoughts with Dialogue
By Ashley Goodnow Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo bands together a motley group of thieves and criminals for a jailbreak heist set in a fantasy world that’s bleeding with magic and racial strife. As the story unfolds through different point of views, it creates a strong sense of each character’s individuality and allows readers […]
Upmarket Writing with Addie LaRue
By Callie Stoker In the ever-shifting trends of publishing, buzzwords pop up in the first lines of queries with the hope of grabbing attention and making deals. Words like “whimsy” and “quirky” have been around for ages, trends like “own voices” (which is hopefully more a move in the right direction, not a passing fad), […]
The Precious One: Hooking the Reader on Every Page
By Charity West The Precious One by Marisa de Los Santos is the story of two daughters: the precious one and the one cast aside. The story starts as the rejected daughter, the elder daughter, gets a phone call from the father—asking her to come home. This is the most recent book to keep me […]
The Characterizations of a Martian
By Kaitlyn Meyers The Martian by Andy Weir is a survival sci-fi novel that will keep you reading out of utter desperation. We follow astronaut Mark Watney, who is stranded on Mars after an accident that makes mankind believe he is dead. He is alone, trying to survive for an exorbitant number of days (called […]
Golden Son–Successful sequels
This post written by editor, Ashley Goodnow. In Golden Son by Pierce Brown, Darrow stands on ever-shifting ground, and in this sequel to Red Rising, it’s more unstable than ever. As Darrow tries to navigate the world of the Society that glories in betrayal and misbalanced power, his natural distrust for people can keep him […]
Educated–The Form and Structure of Memoir
This post written by editor Charity West. Tara Westover knew her family was different from other families in her community because she and her siblings do not attend school. Raised in Idaho in a large, Mormon fundamentalist family Tara spends her days working in her father’s junkyard, or helping her mother make essential oils and […]
The Goldfinch Captures the Essence of Theme
This post written by Terra Luft, Operations Manager. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel expertly weaves the theme of loss—both literal and figurative—into a contemporary coming-of-age story so beautifully that I couldn’t put it down. I loved it so much that I had to read it again, and again. In the opening chapter, Theo Decker enters a […]
Skyward and side characters that work!
This post written by editor Emma Farnsworth. Brandon Sanderson has done it again! In his newest novel, Skyward, Sanderson has created a fascinating alien world of complex and dynamic characters and an action-packed coming-of-age story filled with intrigue and lots of snark. Skyward is a YA sci-fi set far in the future on an alien […]
Children of Blood and Bone. A Lesson in Layering
This post written by Charity West, managing editor. The Story: When magic disappeared from Orïsha, its once-powerful practitioners were murdered by a ruthless king, leaving their children alone and oppressed. Zélie is one of these children, and she has trained secretly her whole life to fight the king she hates. But when the king’s daughter […]
Strange the Dreamer: Master of Metaphor and Simile
The Story: All his miserable life, Lazlo Strange has dreamt of folktales, fairy tales, myths, and legends. As he grew up in a joyless monastery, tales of the lost city of Weep kept his spirit alive. When warriors straight out of the tales arrive at his library, asking for help to solve the very mysteries […]
Worldbuilding with Havencross
Language. Economy. Crime. Myths. Natural Resources. How do you fit worldbuilding on all these subjects into a 217 page romance? You pick two to focus on deeply and weave the rest in subtley, as Julie Daines does in Havencross. Havencross is a regency romance. Books in this genre are set in early nineteenth century England, […]
The Knife of Never Letting Go–Writing Secrets
Updated: Jun 18, 2018 Writing your story’s secrets is hard. Here’s a book that nails it and keeps you turning pages. #writingadvice #writingtips #writingsecrets I love a book that grabs me from the first lines and doesn’t let me go. THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO by Patrick Ness is over 500 pages long and I […]
The Raven Boys–Third Person Voice
The Story: Blue Sargent is the only non-psychic in a family of clairvoyants. But on St. Mark’s Eve, Blue sees her very first spirit, the shade of a boy who will die in the next twelve months. There’s only one reason she would be able to see him: either he’s her true love, or she’s […]