Hello my lovelies!!
Today I have the wonderful opportunity to share with you a great guest post from Lexa Hillyer, the author of Spindle Fire and its sequel, Winter Glass!!
First, some info about the books if you haven't heard of them.
ABOUT
Title: Spindle FireAuthor: Lexa Hillyer
Series: Spindle Fire #1
Release Date: April 11 2017
Goodreads
Synopsis:
A kingdom burns. A princess sleeps. This is no fairy tale.
It all started with the burning of the spindles.
No.
It all started with a curse…
Half sisters Isabelle and Aurora are polar opposites: Isabelle is the king’s headstrong illegitimate daughter, whose sight was tithed by faeries; Aurora, beautiful and sheltered, was tithed her sense of touch and her voice on the same day. Despite their differences, the sisters have always been extremely close.
And then everything changes, with a single drop of Aurora’s blood—and a sleep so deep it cannot be broken.
As the faerie queen and her army of Vultures prepare to march, Isabelle must race to find a prince who can awaken her sister with the kiss of true love and seal their two kingdoms in an alliance against the queen.
Isabelle crosses land and sea; unearthly, thorny vines rise up the palace walls; and whispers of revolt travel in the ashes on the wind. The kingdom falls to ruin under layers of snow. Meanwhile, Aurora wakes up in a strange and enchanted world, where a mysterious hunter may be the secret to her escape…or the reason for her to stay.
ABOUT
Title: Winter Glass
Author: Lexa Hillyer
Series: Spindle Fire #2
Release Date: April 10th 2018
Synopsis:
Aurora, torn from the dream world and Heath, plots to assassinate the faerie queen Malfleur, only to confront temptations she never expected. Isabelle, meanwhile, opens her heart to Prince William as they attempt to unite their kingdoms and wage a winning war against Malfleur’s army of Vultures.
But when the appearance of an unbreakable glass slipper prompts Isabelle to discover more about her lineage, her true identity begins to take shape and her legacy becomes as clear as ice. Devoted half sisters Isabelle and Aurora will grapple with their understanding of love and loyalty as they face a threat even greater than that of the evil queen—the threat of losing each other forever.
I asked Lexa, "There are so many fairytale retellings out there. Why were you drawn to writing a retelling and why do you think audiences are so enchanted by fairy tale retellings?"
Lexa says,
I think there’s something thrilling about seeing the familiar made completely strange and different; of tracing the threads of the fairytale you know and love through a whole new fantasy world. And fairytales in particular are held in our cultural minds as these moral objects; they contain simple portraits of innocence and evil, of a series of trials that ultimately lead to triumph. We often associate them very strongly with our early childhood, so they are very formative in our understanding of storytelling. (Of course, Disney may have had something to do with that! :) ) For all these reasons, they make great fodder for re-exploration in the YA space, where those simple notions can be questioned and challenged, and the symbols can be rebranded to mean something altogether new.
For me personally, I have always loved to take something I already know and reinterpret it through a new lens. There’s a quote in Spindle Fire: “Men have warred and died for centuries over the interpretation of a few words.” I find it exciting and somewhat terrifying the way a text can be made fungible, can be twisted to serve different purposes. It makes you think that maybe there is really no single “right” version of a story, only echoes of shared images and themes making their way into everyone’s personal reading of it.
As for Sleeping Beauty in particular, it always struck me as one of the most sexist of all the familiar fairytales, with its main character completely passive for the entire tale—literally the object around which men and politics orbit, rather than an actual actor in her own story. I wanted to change that, and I was intrigued by the idea of putting Aurora in a Miss Havisham-like dream realm, which allowed me to build one fantasy world within another. I loved this idea: we all know the story of Sleeping Beauty but what we don’t know is what she was dreaming while she slept. That was the germ of the concept, and it grew from there, wild and uncontrollable, like the thorny vines that spring up all over the kingdom of Deluce when the faerie curse takes hold!
Thank you so much to Lexa for taking the time to write this awesome guest post!!
You can find the rest of the tour at the blogs below as well as more information about Lexa Hillyer!
Saturday: Book-Swoon
Sunday: Me! (Hi!)
Monday: Arctic Books
Tuesday: The Reader and The Chef
Wednesday: The Story Sanctuary
Thursday: Cornerfolds
Friday: Books and Babbles
Saturday: Teacher of YA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lexa Hillyer is the author of the young adult novels Spindle Fire, Winter Glass, and Proof of Forever, as well as the poetry collection, Acquainted with the Cold (Bona Fide Books), the 2012 gold prize winner of the Foreword Book of the Year Award for Poetry, and a recipient of the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in Best New Poets 2012, and she has received various other prizes and honors for poetry. Lexa earned her BA in English from Vassar College and her MFA in Poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She worked as an editor at both Harper Collins and Penguin, before founding the production company Glasstown Entertainment along with bestselling author Lauren Oliver. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, their daughter, and a very skinny orange tree.
Happy Reading!
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