Fall Flying Starts

-- Publishers Weekly, 12/22/2008

This past season saw a bumper crop of first novels. We spoke with the authors of three standouts: a riveting fantasy about a girl “graced” with the skill of killing, a tale of a 16th-century clockmaker's daughter who attempts to retrieve her father's enchanted eyes, and a coming-of-age story about a teen who petitions the Vatican to make her a saint.

Kristin Cashore

The author of Graceling (Harcourt, Oct.) is nothing like her heroine, Katsa, whose mixed eye color (one is blue and the other green) signifies in her particular world that she is “graced,” born with a unique skill. Katsa's grace is for killing.

Cashore, one of four daughters of a religion professor at Kings College, a small Catholic school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., has quieter talents. Though it took her a while to figure out precisely what she wanted to do, she's known since childhood that it ought to have something to do with books.

“We would go to the library and the number of books you were allowed to take home equaled your age. That way we could make sure we got the right number of books back,” said Cashore, now 32 and living in Jacksonville with a younger sister. “But that meant, when I was 12, I was reading 12 books every two weeks—Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Katherine Paterson, Madeleine L'Engle, then on to 19th-century British literature.”

Her undergraduate degree from Williams College was, naturally, in English literature, and she went on to Simmons College for a master's in children's literature, thinking she might become a librarian. A creative writing course, during which she completed a contemporary, realistic middle-grade novel (which “still needs a lot of work,” says Cashore) kickstarted her desire to write. After graduation, she supported herself by freelancing, mostly writing elementary-level educational material.

Novel #2 was Graceling. The characters—Katsa, the gold- and silver-eyed Po, Prince Raffin—arrived before the story did. “Right away I knew they weren't regular human beings and that they lived in some sort of vaguely medieval, pre-Industrial Revolution, pre-feminism world,” Cashore said. “But the plot did not come naturally. The plot had to fit all the different ideas I had about the characters.”

A first draft took a year and a half. A college friend knew agent Faye Bender. But Bender's Web site said: “No fantasy.” Cashore queried to see if she would make an exception, and was given permission to send 50 pages. “Then I got a call from Faye saying she wanted to work with me. She was the only agent I contacted and a few weeks later we had an offer. I had 10 years of fight in me and suddenly nothing to fight!”

The offer came from Harcourt editor Kathy Dawson, who had never acquired a fantasy before taking on Graceling. “I didn't read [the manuscript] for a long time because it was so long and because it was fantasy,” Dawson recalled, “so I finally got the polite nudge [from Bender]. “I took it home and that night I called her to say 'I'm 50 pages in and I'm really loving it.' Katsa—violent, conflicted, independent Katsa—she was the best character I'd met in a manuscript in a long time.”

Graceling has been out for two months and Harcourt has gone back to press twice already, with 110,000 copies in print. Rights have been sold in 12 languages.

Cashore has also finished a prequel, Fire, due out next October; she is now working on a third volume, centered on Bitterblue, another character from Graceling.

Cashore's eyes are blue, by the way. Both of them. —Sue Corbett

Marie Rutkoski

A lifelong bookworm, Marie Rutkoski always wanted to write a book of her own, but discouraged by her attempts at fiction, she focused on academic success instead. Then in 2006, just as she was finishing her Ph.D. in English from Harvard, studying Renaissance children with reported special powers such as the ability to breathe fire, she got the idea for The Cabinet of Wonders (FSG, Oct.).

Rutkoski spent the next summer working on a magical novel set in the period. “I felt like this was my last chance to become a writer,” she says. “I had to do it now or never.”

Cabinet of Wonders is filled with imaginative details—and darkness. At the start, Rutkoski's heroine Petra discovers that the prince of Bohemia has stolen her father's eyes after he built him a magical clock. The story was inspired by legend as well as personal history. During Rutkoski's first trip to Prague, her cousin had told her about the clock in the city's center: “There's this legend that the man who commissioned the clock had the eyes of the man who made it gouged out so that could never build anything like it again,” she recalled. The story haunted her. “My mother had been blind as a child,” she says. “And so, blindness was something that has long fascinated me, but also it's something I find really, really scary.”

Even while writing, Rutkoski stayed true to her academic roots. She admits a “geeky” joy in working facts into fantasy, like referencing a real portrait of Queen Elizabeth wearing a dress dotted with eyes and ears. “It's so amazingly weird,” she said. Who would believe that there’s a portrait of a queen wearing a dress covered with eyes and ears?” she said. “It’s kind of a fun little pleasure to include gems of actual historical detail into the book.”

She was thrilled when Charlotte Sheedy agreed to be her agent (Sheedy also represents Lemony Snicket, a writer Rutkoski admires for his bravery). Two months later, The Cabinet of Wonders sold at auction to FSG as part of a two-book deal. Rutkoski called her editor, Janine O'Malley, “very gentle and considerate,” whether discussing big issues in the book or working on line edits.

The Cabinet of Wonders is the launch of the Kronos Chronicles, which will be a four-book series. “I pretty much always wanted to write a series, because I love reading them,” says the author, who is a fan of Snicket and of Philip Pullman. “I love seeing a story evolve over several books, and watching characters develop.” Fans can expect her second installment, The Celestial Globe, next August. “It involves adventures on the high seas, a murder mystery, sword fights and some romance,” she said.

Right now, Rutkoski is on leave from her teaching job at Brooklyn College while she writes the third book and works on her other big project: her newborn son. She says that becoming a published author has had a profound impact on her life. “For many, many years I thought that I wasn't good enought or that I would never be able to create something that could touch other people the way books have touched me,” she said. “There's nothing better than having a lifelong dream come true.” —Kate Pavao

Donna Freitas

As a professor of religion at Boston University, Donna Freitas (pronounced FRAY-tis) does a lot of writing—essays, articles, nonfiction—but what she most likes to read are children's books. She uses The Giver, Skellig and Tuck Everlasting as “core texts” in her undergraduate classes because they get her students thinking and talking about life's Big Questions.

“Children's books are willing to pose the big philosophical questions that humans ask—what is the meaning of suffering? Of life? Of love?” said Freitas. It was Louis Sachar's Holes that made her want to write a novel herself. “What I loved most were all the quirks—the characters' odd names and the interesting backstory. When I finished it, I started to wonder, if I wrote a book, what would my main character's quirks be?”

The heroine of The Possibilities of Sainthood (FSG, Aug.) arrived in Freitas's imagination soon after, pretty much fully formed. And she had a quirk, all right. The boy-crazed daughter of Italian immigrants in Providence, R.I., Antonia Lucia Labella had been writing to the pope for six straight years, seeking to become Catholicism's first living saint.

“There are so many novels about teenagers who become famous but it's because they are royalty or celebrities,” Freitas said. “I thought this offbeat path to fame would be a strange but fun quest for a teenage girl.”

Freitas had never taken a creative writing course but Antonia's story “poured out. I wrote like a person possessed.” A regular contributor on religion topics to newspapers and magazines (including Publishers Weekly), and the co-author of a book which examines the religious themes in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, she finished a first draft in three weeks. “It was the most fun thing I've ever written,” she said. “I'm often writing about dark and serious topics in my work as a scholar, and it was so liberating to just write a story and go wherever my imagination wanted. And I didn’t have to write any endnotes! Sometimes one footnote can take a whole day.”

Indeed, she had already lived the background. Growing up in Bristol, R.I., as part of a large Italian immigrant family, she recalls that “everything in my house was always a big drama, loud and passionate. And there's always people pushing food on you and praying to some saint or another. It was crazy, in a good way. Italian Catholics are just made for comedy in terms of family dynamics.”

Like Antonia, Freitas's mother grew up in an apartment above an Italian market, one with fig trees in its yard. “She would tell me all about how she would steal figs, and how the clippings [for new trees] came over from Italy, and about this whole process of having to bury the trees so they would survive the Rhode Island winter.” Writing Antonia's story then became a way of processing grief—both Freitas's mother and her grandmother passed away shortly before she started. “I was really sad about my mom, especially, so it was important that the book be lighthearted, because she was. I was trying to write my way out of my sadness.”

With a finished draft, Freitas returned to Holes—to find out who had published it. She then asked her agent to send the manuscript to Frances Foster at Farrar, Straus & Giroux before she sent it to anyone else.

“I'd met Donna at Children’s Literature New England conferences and she is such a presence,” Foster said. “She has a great mind and is really an exciting person. But what I loved was the voice. I thought Antonia was just so fresh. I fell head over heels about it.”

That seemed a bit, well, miraculous to Freitas, who told her agent if Foster was interested there was no need to shop the manuscript anywhere else. Foster asked for a meeting with Freitas before officially acquiring it.

“She showed up with a picture of two nuns, in full habit, roller-skating in Central Park and said, 'I saw this and I thought of you,’ ” Freitas recalled. “That is when I knew she really understood me.” —Sue Corbett

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