Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Interview: Shannon Hale

How many of you have heard of YallFest? How many are attending? It's a one day book festival in Charleston, South Carolina. For more information, check out the official website! Each monday and friday leading up to the festival, I, along with a bunch of other bloggers, will be posting author interviews to help with promotion for the festival. Today, please welcome Shannon Hale!

Author Interview:

Q. Describe your book in 5 words

A. Boarding school for children of famous fairytales

Q. Best writing tip you ever received?

A. People remember a story for its characters.

Q, What one young adult novel do you wish you had when you were a teen? Why?

A. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. It’s smart, engaging, and discusses so many things I was struggling with.

Q. Tell us 5 random facts about yourself.

A. I have 4 kids (including identical girl toddler twins). My husband likes to wear masks and hide around the house to scare me. I like to read while lying on my belly. I love the sky. I’m not a very good speller.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. The third Princess Academy book.

Author Bio:

New York Times best selling author Shannon Hale started writing books at age ten and never stopped, eventually earning an MFA in Creative Writing. After nineteen years of writing and dozens of rejections, she published The Goose Girl, the first book in her award-winning Books of Bayern series. Book of a Thousand Days, a standalone novel for young readers, is a Cybils award winner. Princess Academy won a Newbery Honor and is followed by best seller Princess Academy: Palace of Stoneand an upcoming third book in the series. Her books for the adult crowd are Austenland (now a major motion picture), Midnight in Austenland, and The Actor and the Housewife. With her husband Dean, Shannon wrote two graphic novels: Rapunzel's Revenge, winner of the Pacific Northwest Young Readers Choice Award, and its acclaimed sequel, Calamity Jack. Her latest, Ever After High: The Storybook of Legends, will publish October 2013. Shannon's books have been translated into many languages and studied in classrooms from elementary schools to universities. She spends her days as a stay-at-home mom to four young children near Salt Lake City, Utah.

You Can Find Her At:

Books:

Princess Academy:

High on the side of rocky Mount Eskel, far from the valleys where gardens are green and lush, where lowlanders make laws, Miri’s family has lived forever, pounding a living from the stone of the mountain itself. For as long as she can remember, Miri has dreamed of working alongside the other villagers in the quarries of her beloved mountainside. But Miri has never been allowed to work there, perhaps, she thinks, because she is so small.

Then word comes from the valley that the king's priests have divined Mount Eskel to be the home of the prince’s bride-to-be—the next princess. The prince himself will travel to the village to choose her, but first all eligible girls must attend a makeshift mountain academy to prepare themselves for royal lowlander life.

At the school, Miri soon finds herself confronted by bitter competition among the girls and her own conflicting desires to be chosen by the prince. Yet when danger comes to the academy and threatens all their lives, it is Miri, named for a tiny mountain flower, who must find a way to save her classmates—and the one chance to leave the mountain each of them is determined to secure as her own.

From acclaimed author Shannon Hale comes the Newbery Honor-winning novel about would-be princesses and one small but determined girl's destiny.

Austenland:

Jane Hayes is a seemingly normal young New Yorker, but she has a secret. Her obsession with Mr. Darcy, as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is ruining her love life: no real man can compare. But when a wealthy relative bequeaths her a trip to an English resort catering to Austen-crazed women, Jane’s fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman suddenly become realer than she ever could have imagined.

Decked out in empire-waist gowns, Jane struggles to master Regency etiquette and flirts with gardeners and gentlemen—or maybe even, she suspects, with the actors who are playing them. It’s all a game, Jane knows. And yet the longer she stays, the more her insecurities seem to fall away, and the more she wonders: Is she about to kick the Austen obsession for good, or could all her dreams actually culminate in a Mr. Darcy of her own?

Goose Girl:

She was born with her eyes closed and a word on her tongue, a word she could not taste. Her name was Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, Crown Princess of Kildenree, and she spent the first years of her life listening to her aunt’s stories and learning the language of the birds, especially the swans. And when she was older, she watched as a colt was born, and she heard the first word on his tongue, his name, Falada.

From the Grimm’s fairy tale of the princess who became a goose girl before she could become queen, Shannon Hale has woven an incredible, original, and magical tale of a girl who must find her own unusual talents before she can lead the people she has made her own.

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