Mundie Moms

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Author Interview with Stephanie Burgis, author of A Most Improper Magick

We are very excited to have recently talked with author Stephanie Burgis, who's book A Most Improper Magick is set to release in early 2011, by Simon and Schuster. I absolutely love the cover! Here's a little bit about the book (taken from Stephanie's site):

"I was twelve years of age when I chopped off my hair, dressed as a boy, and set off to save my family from impending ruin. I made it almost to the end of my front garden..."

Magic may be the greatest scandal in Regency England. But that's not going to stop Kat Stephenson when there are highwaymen to foil, sinister aristocrats to defeat...and true loves to capture for her two older sisters.

What was your inspiration for writing A Most Improper Magick?

I've always been a huge fan of Regency romances, especially the ones written by Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. In some of my favorite romances, the heroines have younger sisters who only pop up briefly, just long enough to make some really snarky comments about their older sisters. I always enjoyed those brief scenes and wished they were longer. Then one day, as I was chopping onions for lunch, I heard Kat's voice in my head, speaking the first few lines of A Most Improper Magick...and everything just came together! I loved getting to make a snarky younger sister the true heroine of my books, rolling her eyes at her older sisters' romantic tribulations (and managing them neatly!) even as she pursues her own magical adventures.

This definitely sounds like a must read for all Mundie Moms! How would you describe your main character, Kat?

Reckless, loyal, radical, funny, smart, loving, and courageous.

What can you tell us about A Most Improper Magick, or about the series?

The series follows Kat's magical adventures in early nineteenth-century England, as she finds true loves for all three of her older siblings, comes to terms with her full magical powers, and fights to restore her late mother's ruined reputation. In Book 1, her brother has gambled the whole family into debt, and Kat has to battle highwaymen and dig up her mother's most scandalous secrets to save her oldest sister from a terrible arranged marriage with a sinister aristocrat. What she's not counting on, though, is the secretive magical Order of the Guardians, which has identified her as a promising new recruit...whether she wants to join them or not!

Which character did you enjoy developing the most and why?

I love Kat and all three of her older siblings so much! I could just write about them all day, because I have so much fun watching them spark off each other. Her brother, Charles, doesn't appear much in Book 1, but her two older sisters, Elissa and Angeline, are both major characters. All three sisters are equally strong-willed and smart, all three of them think they know what's best for the family and for each other...and that means they get in each other's way an awful lot!

Their mother died when Kat was born and Elissa, the oldest, was still only seven years old, and their father retreated into an emotional shell after her death, so the three sisters grew up taking care of each other in a lot of important ways. But the fact that they love each other doesn't stop them from driving each other completely crazy! And I am a mean author, because I love watching it happen. ;)

Do you have a play list you listen to while writing? If so, what are some of your favorite songs?

I have a different playlist for each book. For Book 1, the theme song was Adam and the Ants's "Stand and Deliver!", which totally captures the high spirits of the book. I also listened over and over again to the soundtrack for the new Doctor Who TV series (seasons 1 and 2), not just because I love that TV series, but because the music in the soundtrack really conveys the combination of fun adventure AND strong emotion that I felt in the book.

Was it challenging writing a book in the historical fantasy genre?

It was a really fun challenge to mix Jane Austen's early Regency era with the magical world that I made up. When I was worldbuilding in my notebooks, I came up with some big changes to earlier British history, back when magic was openly used (and, in my version of history, helped to cause the English Civil War!), but by 1803, when Book 1 takes place, magic has become the greatest social scandal of all, and magic workers have to keep their talents hidden and secret. So I worked hard to make all my day-to-day historical details accurate to the real Regency period, but I also had a great time figuring out how magic would secretly work alongside reality.

Being moms ourselves, we sometimes find it hard to find time to write. How do you work in writing, with the busy mom schedule?

It is really hard! My son is still too young for preschool, and we only have two mornings a week of childcare...so that doesn't leave me a lot of writing time! Basically, I've just had to become extremely disciplined about making the most of his naptimes every day, along with those two mornings a week when a childminder looks after him. It's amazing how much you can accomplish just by writing during naptimes, though. In the old days, I used to write much more slowly, with lots of pauses to check the internet or daydream...but no longer! I've been forced to become a lot more efficient with my writing sessions, knowing that he might wake up and end them at any minute.

What is one piece of writing advice you would share with aspiring writers?

Be stubborn! I decided that I wanted to be a writer when I was seven, and I finished my first full-length novel when I was fourteen. I was thirty-one when I sold my trilogy - so you can guess how many novels I had to write in-between before I finally made that sale! Just keep writing, keep working to improve your skills, and don't let agent or publisher rejections discourage you. If you really care about making your writing better and better, and you learn to cope with the stings of rejection along the way, you will succeed in the end. Good luck!

And a special note: the title of the book (and the series!) may be changing soon. I'll share the new titles with everybody as soon as I can. (My editor and I are still brainstorming right now! Please wish us luck...)

Great advice! Thank you so much Stephanie for taking the time to chat with us. We are very excited to read A Most Improper Magick. Kat sounds like she'd fit in perfectly with Mundie Moms. Best of luck with the title of the book and the series, if the name changes. We're looking forward to hearing more about it.

You can read more about Stephanie and A Most Improper Magick, here at Stephanie's site
You can read the 1st chapter of A Most Improper Magick here:

Book Review- The Returners

By Gemma Malley
Published by Bloomsbury Children's Books
Released March, 2010
Source: from Bloomsbury
4 stars- I enjoyed it and recommend picking it up

Will Hodge is miserable. His mother is dead, his father's political leanings have grown radical, and his friends barely talk to him. To make matters worse, he's having nightmares about things like concentration camps. Then Will notices he's being followed by people who claim to know him from another time in history. It turns out they are Returners-people who have been reincarnated and whose destiny is to recall the atrocities they have witnessed in the past. Will, too, is a Returner-only something about his memories is different: he wasn't just a witness to the events, he may have made them happen. Now Will must choose to confront the cruelty he's known in his past lives or be doomed to repeat it....again.


This is one of those books I picked up, not excepting to be completely lost in an amazing story, and yet I find I was hopelessly lost in the book. Returners was not what I was excepting at all. Gemma Malley wove together perfectly historical facts, with her amazing world of Returners. People who come back reincarnated over and over again. They serve a purpose, to remember the lives they have lived.

Will Hodge is a character who has many layers and one I felt a range of emotions for. I felt bad for him, sympathized with him, wanted to hug him and tell him it would be alright, got really mad at him and yet towards the end, I really rallied behind him, hoping he would make the change he wanted to make. Will is a self-loathing teen boy, who's still coping with the death of this mother who was killed a few years ago. He is caught in the middle of his father's radical ways. Set in England, in the year 2016, Will finds that he's in the middle of a movement. Not only does he have to deal with an abusive, drunken father and not having any friends but, he's started to have very vivid disturbing dreams about parts of history other's would like to forget and he's being followed.

Will witnesses something, that could change not only the accuser's life for good, but it's the center of a bigger radical movement that his father is part of. Will finds he's a key player. He's the only witness to what he thinks he saw. His father wants him to lie about it, and his old friend Claire wants him to tell the police what he saw. Will feels as though he's going crazy. The people that are following him won't leave him alone and he's having a hard time remembering things, except for flashes of memories from various points from history's past.

When Will confronts the people who are following him, he finds he's a Returner, and they've been looking for him for 50 years. Returners have existed through out time, and come back again and again. They remember the worst things that humankind does to each other and are humanity's conscience. They are the protectors's of the insanity of humankind in times of distress. When Will is told he's destined to suffer, to remember these things (like he has done times before) and to feel the desperation and agony of humankind's choices, he chooses to believe he can change his destiny. It's not going to be as easy as he thinks. He finds out he's the cause of these horrible events. If he doesn't change the course of his destiny, he's going to be the cause of an even greater catastrophe.

With the help of Claire, Will knows he can make the change, but when his father forces him into his extremist ways, Will finds his determination for change shattered. Will is running out of time to save his one time friend and accuser of a crime he may or not have committed. Telling the police what he saw is going to cost him, but it can also be part of the change Will is determined to make.

Gemma brings to light, and has done so in a very tactful way, the horrible atrocities our world's history has played out over and over again. As a teenager, Will starts to remember being apart of that history. He caused some of it and other times he stood by, not wanting to be apart of it anymore. Her underlining message in the book is that we can all change. Will finds that standing up to his father, changing the course he's destined to repeat over and over again is going to be very hard, but can he do it? Will he make the change in time? Can one person's change alter the course of history?

Twitter Tuesday - Tricia Rayburn

Okay, how could I resist a tweet that mentions "Mystic Pizza"? I immediately tried to remember details about that coming-of-age movie. But more importantly, it reminded me that Tricia's book, Siren, will be released soon.

This was one of those books that at the start of 2010, I placed on my Pre-Order-Looking-Forward-to-Reading-Must-Have-Now List. And it was all because of this synopsis (from EgmontUSA) :
Seventeen-year-old Vanessa Sands is afraid of everything--the dark, heights, the ocean--but her fearless older sister, Justine, has always been there to coach her through every challenge. That is until Justine goes cliff diving one night near the family's vacation house in Winter Harbor, Maine, and her lifeless body washes up on shore the next day.

Vanessa's parents want to work through the tragedy by returning to their everyday lives back in Boston, but Vanessa can't help feeling that her sister's death was more than an accident. After discovering that Justine never applied to colleges, and that she was secretly in a relationship with longtime family friend Caleb Carmichael, Vanessa returns to Winter Harbor to seek some answers.

But when Vanessa learns that Caleb has been missing since Justine's death, she and Caleb's older brother, Simon, join forces to try to find him, and in the process, their childhood friendship blossoms into something more.
Soon it's not just Vanessa who is afraid. All of Winter Harbor is abuzz with anxiety when another body washes ashore, and panic sets in when the small town becomes home to a string of fatal, water-related accidents . . . in which all the victims are found grinning from ear to ear.

As Vanessa and Simon probe further into the connections between Justine's death and the sudden rash of creepy drownings, Vanessa uncovers a secret that threatens her new romance, and that will change her life forever.
Creepy drownings? Secrets that change lives forever? Oh, yeah, I'm there. And you can be too, pre-order the book before it's July 13th release date and then sit back on those hot summer days and enjoy what is sure to be a twisty mystery.


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