Author Interview and Giveaway

 All About the Author (#2)

Spotlight on Sonia Gensler and The Revenant

      I was so excited when I heard this book was coming out.

I recently met Sonia Gensler at an   

Oklahoma Writer's Conference, and she is

 such a nice and genuine person. She is in the same

 critique group as someone I teach with at the high

school. Besides the cover,

what drew me to this book was that it

takes place in Oklahoma (where I live!) and

the main character pretends to be a teacher (what I do, but for real!) This book had everything: a creepy haunting, beautiful prose, and a great love story.  

Read below for Sonia's thoughtful answers to my

questions and for a chance to win a signed copy of her book!

"When Willie arrives in Indian Territory, she knows only one thing: no one can find out who she really is. To escape a home she doesn't belong in anymore, she assumes the name of a former classmate and accepts a teaching job at the Cherokee Female Seminary.

Nothing prepares her for what she finds there. Her pupils are the daughters of the Cherokee elite—educated and more wealthy than she, and the school is cloaked in mystery. A student drowned in the river last year, and the girls whisper that she was killed by a jealous lover. Willie's room is the very room the dead girl slept in. The students say her spirit haunts it.

Willie doesn't believe in ghosts, but when strange things start happening at the school, she isn't sure anymore. She's also not sure what to make of a boy from the nearby boys' school who has taken an interest in her—his past is cloaked in secrets. Soon, even she has to admit that the revenant may be trying to tell her something. . . "

-Good Reads

(On your book The Revenant:
1. How did the original idea for The Revenant come to you?

It started brewing in my imagination when friends Brandi and Martha gave our critique group a tour of Tahlequah, OK (Brandi had recently relocated there). Part of the tour took us by the Northeastern State University campus and its beautiful centerpiece, Seminary Hall. When Martha explained that the building was once a Cherokee girls' school, I HAD to know more. My research inspired the setting and conflicts of The Revenant.

2. What genre would you classify this novel as since it has elements of historical fiction and paranormal romance?

It's definitely a mish-mash of genres. I personally like to call it a Gothic mystery, but booksellers usually classify it as paranormal romance.

3. Some readers may find it hard to believe that Willie passes for a teacher at 17 years old. What details did you provide for readers to make the situation plausible?

These days teachers must be college grads to get hired, but have you seen 22-year-olds lately? They look 17! Seriously, though, I tried to focus on Willie's dramatic flair to show that she was playing the role of a teacher. Mrs. Crenshaw comments on how young she looks, and how younger teachers have trouble holding themselves apart from students who are near their age, as if it's a common problem. Seminary graduates often returned to the school to teach (like Olivia Adair did), so young teachers wouldn't have been unusual at all.

4. Why did you choose to make one of Willie’s most prized possessions a volume of her father’s Shakespeare books?

It goes along with her dramatic flair. Her father was an actor, and her strategy for dealing with new and uncomfortable situations is to perform her way through them. She also sees the world through the lens of Shakespeare's characters and conflicts, so it seemed natural that she would treasure those books.

5. What do you like most about Eli Sevenstar?

I like how he switches back and forth between gentlemanly and dangerous behavior. He's a rule-breaker. He certainly keeps Willie on her toes!

6. The details about the haunting were quite descriptive. Did you have fun writing the suspenseful parts of the book?

It was hard work and required a lot of tweaking and revising. I guess it was too technical of a process for me to actually scare myself, but at times it was quite entertaining.

7. The style in which the book is written suits the time period well. It reminds me of Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte type prose. Who are your favorite authors and were they inspirations to you in the writing of this novel?

Austen and Bronte will always inspire me. Bronte's Villette, which is about a young teacher in a foreign city, was a huge inspiration behind The Revenant. Other 19th century writers who shaped my style include Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder. More recently I've been inspired by the historical fiction of Jennifer Donnelly, Libba Bray and Saundra Mitchell.

8. Among the issues this novel brings to light is the discrimination toward full-blooded Cherokee girls by girls who were half-Cherokee, half-Caucasian. What part of your research led you to believe this prejudice existed?

Devon Mihesuah, a professor in the Global Indigenous Nations Studies program at University of Kansas, wrote a very detailed account of the school and the various conflicts the girls experienced. I made extensive use of her book, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909 in my research. The school admitted girls who were as little as 1/128 Cherokee, so it wasn't just a half vs. full blood quantum situation -- in truth, there was a lot of diversity, including some students whose cultural heritage included other tribes in addition to Cherokee. Mihesuah found evidence that the girls who were fairer-skinned and more acculturated often considered themselves superior to their darker-skinned, more traditional cousins, and this fostered resentment within the school. However, Richard Allen, policy analyst for the Cherokee Nation, reminded me that tensions didn't arise solely from racial discrimination -- there also were various socioeconomic biases, same as you see in schools today. I tried to touch on these issues in The Revenant, but hopefully in a manner that was sensitive and didn't overpower the mystery.

9. Have you visited the actual seminary that is portrayed in The Revenant?

Oh yes. I attended a Haunted Seminary Hall tour in 2008 and have returned to explore the building since then. As it's now a part of Northeastern State University, the building has been renovated quite a bit, but there's still a cool historical feel to it.

10. I heard rumors of a second book related to The Revenant. Can you tell us what it’s about?

I wonder who started that rumor? I do have a second book coming out from Knopf, but it won't be a sequel to The Revenant. I hope it will be another Gothic mystery, but the similarities end there. Several readers have expressed interest in a sequel, but I'm not sure that's going to happen. Maybe someday I'll write a short story -- one that gives us a peek into Willie's future.

For more information on Sonia Gensler and her writing, check out her blog by going to http://soniagensler.blogspot.com/

For our 100 Followers Giveaway, Alex Sokoloff, author of The Space Between, is providing one e-book copy for a lucky reader. We are now adding an additional prize to the pot for that same reader: an autographed copy of Gensler's book The Revenant.

If 50 people enter, I'll throw Stephanie Perkins' new book in the mix:

  

Please leave a comment on this post for the author then click HERE to officially enter the giveaway. The deadline is October 14th at midnight.

Review: The Space Between

"Sixteen-year old Anna Sullivan is having terrible dreams of a massacre at her school. Anna’s father is a mentally unstable veteran, her mother vanished when Anna was five, and Anna might just chalk the dreams up to a reflection of her crazy waking life — except that Tyler Marsh, the most popular guy at the school and Anna’s secret crush, is having the exact same dream.
Despite the gulf between them in social status, Anna and Tyler connect, first in the dream and then in reality. As the dreams reveal more, with clues from the school social structure, quantum physics, probability, and Anna's own past, Anna becomes convinced that they are being shown the future so they can prevent the shooting…
If they can survive the shooter — and the dream.
Based on the short story 'The Edge of Seventeen,' winner of the ITW Thriller award."

-Good Reads

 Stats: 

• Format: Kindle ebook
• Release date: June 29, 2011
• Unique elements: suspense that moves the story quickly
• Would appeal to: fans of Hate List, people who appreciate logic 

Favorite Quotes:

"And her father in the middle of it, stuck to his chair like a huge spider in webbing, the chaos of his mind overflowing into the room, spilling into the house, cluttering the rooms around him."

"Thinking it, Anna feels a pang. She has never had a best friend; she only is familiar with the concept from books, and from seeing the happy pairings of students who seem more like twins than friends. Opposites, usually; you rarely see best friends who look alike, for example. They are rather pairs of dark and light, serious and comical, tall and short. A mirror who completes you."

"'My house,' Tyler says distantly, nodding up the street. She knows where his house is, actually; she's made up errands that would make her take the bus by it, or sometimes she takes an extra bus on the way to work. Stalking, they call it, she's aware."

"Music is blasting, it had started when the car did, Evanescence, scarily appropriate, because she needs to wake up, they both need to wake up...and maybe they are, but maybe they're falling deeper and deeper into sleep."

"She shades her eyes and looks up into the sky, and suddenly she can see hang gliders, bright spots of color diving off a nearby hill in their suicide spirals. It's reckless, insane, especially on a day like today, but she understands the impulse, to let the wind take her, to be free, weightless, invincible for just ten minutes, an hour, a minute."

Never has it been so hard to narrow down my favorite quotes! I had a TON of them. From ten to eight to seven to finally five that I couldn't bear to leave out. I did want to leave some surprises for you as well, so some of the fabulous love scenes were omitted.

This book held my attention from start to finish. Thank you to the lovely author who requested my thoughts on her novel.

Alexandra Sokoloff has a brilliant way with words. I could relate to so much that she was saying. I loved all the polysyndeton (repetition of conjunctions) for effect. The suspense was excruciating.

Imagine going to bed every night and knowing you will dream about your school being shot up. You know the shooter. You have to tell someone.

Your crush, Tyler, is on the stairs in your dream, staring straight at you. When you wake up, the usual panic and sweat registering with your conscious mind, you realize he called your name.

Then at school, you can read each other's minds. He was there. He saw you in the dream. He had the same dream you had.

Craziness that I love! The big questions: how do you stop it and who do you tell? That's what Anna and Tyler must face in The Space Between.

The other reviews I've read say this book has a lot of science in math. Even though I'm an English nut, I really got into the equations and logic. Ms. Sokoloff has a very analytical mind. I loved watching Anna put together all the pieces. The equations helped her figure out the mystery. And there is an added mystery of her mother and why she left when Anna was little. Every time a lightbulb went off in Anna's head, the pieces clicked for me as well (maybe a little sooner once or twice, but this book kept me guessing).

There was some noticable repetition, a lot of people crouching behind desks or in corners, many mentions of nails or fingers digging into skin, and waves of ________ (nausea, shock, sensation, students, panic). But overall, I had a feeling of urgency as I read. The syntax helped with that, lots of commas and conjunctions to emphasize immediacy: "He leans in to her, and his lips touch hers, and the wind surrounds them like a blanket, and she lets herself not think."

I was surprised at how quickly the romantic plotline developed. However, I guess if you share something with a person that is so particulary unique, you kind of feel they get you. I liked Tyler and the fact that he had shoulder length hair. It was so cool that sometimes they talked only with their minds to each other; Anna never knew what thoughts he was listening to. I liked that he was in the "in" crowd but didn't always participate in their student bashing. I was worried at first when he didn't seem to stick up for or talk to Anna around his friends, but he redeemed himself later.

I also liked the end. Oh, and there's a little person in the novel who is constantly teased, but she's very well described. I definitely felt sympathy for her, but Sokoloff's writing reads true to how high schoolers would act.

There's also Anna's veteran father who is an alcoholic and is really messed up as a result of the Gulf War. That's originally what drew me to the story since I have many family members in the military.

Final verdict:

A suspenseful read with unexpected plot twists, Sokoloff mixes mathematics, science, fantasy, and romance with beautifully flowing prose.

 

Review: The Chosen One

"Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated community without questioning the fact that her father has three wives and she has twenty brothers and sisters, with two more on the way. That is, without questioning them much---if you don’t count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with Joshua, the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her.
But when the Prophet decrees that she must marry her sixty-year-old uncle---who already has six wives---Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family forever."
-Good Reads





Stats:

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Release date: May 12, 2009
• Page count: 213
• Unique elements: suspense, convincing narrative
• Would appeal to: fans of The Other Side of the Island, religious wonderers

Favorite Quotes:

"On the temple, right over the tall double doors is one large stone eye. It's hand-carved and big as a car...That eye sees us all the time."

"He's so warm that the front of me feels sort of calmed down, pressed like I am to Joshua. At last the words have thawed."

"Why are we here? How did we get here? How do we get out of here? What have our father and mother done to us?"

"Sometimes I even dream in Mozart or Beethoven scores. In the dreams, people speak out black musical notes, not words."

On the heels of watching "Sister Wives" on TLC, I picked this up in the library and was instantly intrigued with the blurb (see my related post on polygamy). I cannot begin to imagine being forced to marry a man at 14, much less your uncle in his sixties who's strict and possibly abusive. Carol Lynch Williams puts the reader in the place, in the compound, and I felt so connected to protagonist Kyra's feelings and dreams. She does fall in love with a boy a little older than her named Joshua. They make the perfect couple, but the apostles of the Chosen Ones don't care about the women's wants or what is morally right. Prophet Childs always has the last say. And Kyra's three mothers aren't arguing. Her father tries to stand up for her, but people who stand up to the prophet often regret that they did.

Kyra hasn't been able to touch a book in such a long time, and one of her favorite things is secretly checking out books from a bookmobile that stops at her tree off the compound. I love this aspect of the story, since books are the ultimate escape!

The story was full of suspense and emotion all the way to the last few pages. I cried at least once. It's a great book to make you think beyond your own life and to those who have no choices. After reading, I looked up several websites that talked about kids trying to escape such compouds, some stories succesful, and others not.

Some of my favorite reviews of this book:
"Unsettling and courageous...beautiful, compassionate, and full of hope." - Sara Zarr (Story of a Girl)
"A powerful and heartfelt novel of love and hope. A poignant journey as (Kyra) struggles to find herself and, ultimately, the truth." - Meg Cabot

Book Review: Where She Went

If you know me, you know I reading love young adult.  In fact, I write young adult lit.  This is one of those keeps-you-up-'til-four-a.m. novels which makes life worth living.  Honestly. 
Aspiring cellist Mia is in a car wreck with her family in book 1. She is in a coma, and has the power to decide if she stays or leaves earth. The story is mostly what she experiences while floating around out of her body. Where She Went is told from her boyfriend Adam's perspective three years later. He's a paparazzi-stalked rockstar and she's a rising clasical musician at Julliard. They're no longer together, but one night in New York, they cross paths.
-Me






Stats:

• Sequel to If I Stay
• Publisher: Dutton Juvenile
• Release date: April 5, 2011
• Page count:  264
• Unique elements:  Almost every chapter starts with a verse from his band's album.  This mostly has to do with Mia ripping his heart out (not mentioning her name, of course).  Also, the suspense and sexual tension constantly build.
• Would appeal to: If I Stay enthusiasts, anyone who likes a guy's point of view, anyone who likes music 

Some of the descriptions in this book are phenomenal.  My favorite one is about the stretching fingers of dawn, but I can't find it right now.  Check out some of these great lines.

Favorite Quotes:

"You were so busy trying to be my savior that you left me all alone."

"I look at her there in the shadows of the shut-down city, her hair falling onto her face, and I can see her trying to figure out if I’ve lost it. And I have to fight the urge to take her by the shoulders and slam her against a shuttered building until we feel the vibrations ringing through both of us. Because I suddenly want to hear her bones rattle. I want to feel the softness of her flesh give, to hear her gasp as my hip bone jams into her. I want to yank her head back until her neck is exposed. I want to rip my hands through her hair until her breath is labored. I want to make her cry and then lick up the tears. And then I want to take my mouth to hers, to devour her alive, to transmit all the things she can’t understand."

And Gayle Forman writes things that resonate with the reader:

"That’s the thing you never expect about grieving, what a competition it is."

"Standing here, in this quiet house where I can hear the birds chirping out back, I think I’m kind of getting the concept of closure. It’s no big dramatic before-after. It’s more like that melancholy feeling you get at the end of a really good vacation. Something special is ending, and you’re sad, but you can’t be that sad because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there’ll be other vacations, other good times."

I find it refreshing to read a story, especially one involving love, from a guy's perspective. Adam is totally believable and totally hot. I stayed up so late to finish this and recommended it to each of my English classes for the pure sake of its descriptions.

I like this MUCH better than If I Stay. A lady at Barnes and Noble said If I Stay would make me cry. It didn't. I think this second book was much more powerful. It deals with so much raw, human emotion.