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Albert Camus

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

a whole new world - Midnight by Eve Eschenbacher

When ordinary girl, Karen, waits out her last year of high school, she hopes for magic. Her small town has nothing for her and she longs for adventure, which she finds at a party of all places.


Description:

Published: May 11th, 2015

Finally away from the small town minds she meets someone new. Someone, who with a few scratches of ink on her skin, awakens a part of her she never knew about.

All of a sudden Karen is shown a whole new world, and Gabriel wants her to make it hers. All she has to do is love him eternally. Her new life is magical and amazing, until her new powers bring a new threat. Can she do what needs to be done? The sacrifices and decisions that will need to be made--Is she strong enough?

GUEST POST
Do I believe in magic? 

Well, Karen certainly hoped for magic. Karen and I have something similar, in that we’re both from small, rural farming communities that were far away from larger cities. It was a setting that I hadn’t seen in many YA books, and I wanted to use it for mine. I grew up in an area that was a 1-square mile town surrounded by 20 square miles of farmland. My house was a quarter mile away from the next house, and it was one of two houses on that side of the road. You had to drive if you wanted to get anywhere, because the nearest grocery store was a 15 minute drive away, and there was no bus service out there. 

So Karen and I, we both felt like there was something out there. There had to be. When you’re that isolated, you almost feel as if you’re travelling between worlds whenever you go to school, or go home. Once you pass the “city limits” and suddenly it’s nothing but cornfields as far as the eye can see, you feel as if you’ve pierced the veil and passed over into a different world. I could sit in my backyard at night in the summer and see for miles in any direction by the moonlight. I could even watch fireworks from five different towns during the fourth of July. It really lent itself to the idea that I had passed over to the land of the fairies, and was hiding somewhere in Queen Mab’s domain. 

But there’s another feeling that comes from that kind of isolation, a feeling of longing for that populated world, or longing for something different. That quiet, safe, familiar, samey sort of background becomes more and more like a blanket, isolating you and smothering you until you want nothing more but to see something, anything different. For me, I made my something different by writing stories and exploring virtual worlds. Karen is at that stage where she’s just hoping for something different to appear, and *poof* there’s Gabriel. He’s her something different, and she’s drawn to that. 

That magical message on her arm helps, too. :) 

A book I’ve read several times is “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman. One of the central concepts of the book is that believing in something gives it power, and enough belief in something can make it real. I love this concept of magic, that the mind makes something real. While I can say that my attempts to think myself back to eighteenth century France have been thus far unsuccessful, I can at least make it real through my writing, and share that with all of my readers.


About the author:

Eve Eschenbacher lives in the Pacific Northwest with her son and a very fluffy cat. By day she’s a video game voice-over producer, and by night she writes books and freelances as a Japanese translator. Always with a book and a video game close at hand, she probably spends too much time looking at screens.


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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for hosting Eve with us, Cremona!

Appreciate you!

Laurie
Good Tales