24-12-2021
Well readers I’m looking forward to getting to know you and telling you a bit about myself (well, the good bits at least), and what I’m working on at the moment. It won’t involve anything strictly personal since I understand that you’re here because you love books and that’s what I really want to talk about – all those books I love, (as well as my own, of course!) and hopefully the ones you love. Just let me know. An author’s life is frequently solitary and so it’s good for our morale to hear what young people are reading and enjoying these days.
I expect you’ve read at least one of my books: and if it was The Green Enclave in the Runa series then I have good news, as I’ve almost finished the next in line. This one, Changelings, is set in a future South America, more specifically in Chile, and when the heroine Allie rescues a child thief and tries to help his pregnant sister she falls into great danger. Look out for the release date.
In between plotting, writing and falling into despair when I can’t get my heroine out of the trouble I’ve got her into, I’ve been enjoying the works of a few favourite authors. At the moment, having just finished More Than This by Patrick Ness, I'm on to his Monsters and Men the third part of the trilogy, Chaos Walking, and worthy winner of a variety of awards. Actually the book is a fabulous creation of a new world where the colonists end up fighting not only amongst themselves but against the indigenous people, whom they have brutally subjugated. These strange native people, called the Spackle, as well as certain of the colonists, can communicate telepathically (something Ness calls The Noise) not only with other people but also to some extent with the animals.
Todd and Viola, the young hero and heroine, are caught between three factions, eaach of whom is determined to be accepted as the rulers of this new world when the next spaceship loaded with more colonists arrives. Todd is reluctantly linked to the Mayor in order to protect Viola, Viola joins The Answer, a group of women who have provoked the war by their treatment of the Spackle, and the Spackle are out for revenge.
The action is pulse-racing and tear-jerking, and the whole question of war and its consequences is thrown into high relief. Can Todd and Viola hope to stop the fighting? How can there ever be peace when they are so hopelessly outnumbered? And if war makes monsters of men, what terrible choices may they have to make? I can strongly recommend it and am looking forward to his next one, Burn.
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