...and she's also wirtten a really good rural fantasy triology (yeah, I know, that's not a genre -- I'm talking about an urban fantasy (our world with magic), but taking place in a small English village, not a big city): Lynburn Legacy, starting with
Unspoken.
She writes about it:
Quote:
So, I wanted to write a Gothic mystery. But I wanted to make it new: I wanted to make it mine.
...
I started thinking, though, that children have to move where their parents bring them. And, since I love the reversal of a trope about as much as a gothic heroine loves a house, I decided to make my gothic heroine … a boy.
Now, I don’t mean I wanted to make him a gothic hero. Gothic heroes are always in the know about everything and keeping quiet, apparently to be annoying mofos, and also are always wenching around Europe (a fine time to be sure, but the poor lad’s only seventeen). I wanted to give the usual business of a gothic heroine, alone, unloved, transplanted into a sinister Gothic manor and kept in the dark about many a shady family secret, to a boy character. And well, yes, okay, I threw in a little brooding gothic hero business too for good measure. And lo, I got Jared Lynburn, lunatic, secret romantic and twitchy dude ready to deck you at a moment’s notice for asking the time.
But since he was going to be an outsider to the little English town which the Gothic manor overlooks, I wanted to write about an insider, someone who knew Sorry-in-the-Vale and all its inhabitants. (Think about it: the villagers clearly know there’s something up with Count Dracula. ‘He tips really well when he brings the castle linen to the drycleaner’s, but we are so tired of him kidnapping the children and feeding them to wolves.’)
And the heroine should be someone capable of unravelling a Gothic mystery. This is the point where two genres collided in my head with a glorious smash: Gothics and lady sleuths.
I like me some Lois Lane: I like me some Miss Marple. I like me some Nancy Drew, and the women behind these creations, and the women these creations were based on.
Girls who are indomitable, who like mysteries, who go toward the creepy sound in the cellars or the dark doings in the woods because they want to report on it.
The more Gothic mysteries I read, the more I thought we needed someone like that around.
Enter Kami Glass, brand new editor of the school newspaper, intrepid girl reporter, goofball (because what sinister mystery would not be improved by a little humour, this stuff is funny, you all read what someone did with a house…), becoming very concerned about a) actual screaming going on in the woods outside her town, b) everyone in town, including her own mother, acting fifty shades of shady, and c) how it all links up with the Lynburn family, who just arrived back in their ancestral manor after a 17-year absence.
Murder. Magic. Petty crime in the cause of great justice. Love, fear and live burial. Very embarrassing psychic links. Really suspicious architecture.
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Two free prequel short stories (PDF):
The Spring Before I Met You and
The Summer Before I Met You