Description:
An ugly family secret laid bare, a mortal wound inflicted by her twin sister, betrayed by the love of her life—her supposed “soul mate”. In the wake of the battle with her evil father and his Dark Seekers, Elora Walker fights to recover from them all.
Together with her Vanguard, Magicae, and Vampire friends, Elora races to gather ingredients for the spell of spells, bury the curse, and defeat the prophecy which has tainted her life since birth. To save the world, can she deny the yearnings of her heart? Or, will she succumb to the temptation of love, and plunge them all into Eternal Darkness.
MB's INTERVIEW
Vanguard Legacy is about the battle between light and darkness. How important are the shades of gray in this series?
Throughout the series, the characters are required to choose sides, to align themselves with one or the other. For some people, this is easy. Aaron, for example, knows that his side will always be Elora’s, no matter how reckless her actions appear to him. Elora’s choices are less clear, and whilst Zak has something to do with that, so does the fact that the enemy is also not so clear cut. It’s hard not to give too much away to people who haven’t read either book yet! I guess the message in the novel is that people in a battle reach a common understanding—no matter how good or ‘light’ your intentions may be, your hands are going to get a little grey.
What “dark” brings to a fantasy story?
A friend said to me that the darkness gives us another perspective, the chance to see what impact our choices could have. Often, we are forced to make decisions and hope that the outcome is what we desire. The darkness in the novel allows us to explore what the reflections of our choices might be, how things could be different for us. I think sometimes in stories the darkness is simply the ‘opposite’, the necessary ‘bad guy’. For me, the darkness was crucial in this series. Not all of the ‘bad guys’ are inherently evil, or dark, but simply left battling poor choices and trying to make the best of their consequences.
What kind of heroine is Elora?
An honest one. In Foretold, all she seeks is acceptance. She has spent her entire life up to that point trying to please her mother, and failing. She lacks confidence in herself and what she can do, though often finds reassurance in Aaron and his, more ‘normal’, family. Elora’s main priority, when she begins the final stages of her training, is to be the best Vanguard she can be, and for herself not her mother. When she begins to change, when her talents begin to awaken, she has to battle fear of the unknown in order to become the heroine she needs to be. In the second book, we see her begin to take charge of her own life. Though she still makes mistakes, she owns them and grows from them.
Elora is a reflection of us, or maybe just me! We all have moments where we doubt our choices, our decisions, ourselves. It’s how we overcome them that makes us who we are, and in Elora’s case, that’s important because of her role in the future of their world.
What it takes to create a “believable” paranormal world?
To make a believable paranormal world it has to mirror our own. There has to be an emotional connection made between the reader and the characters so that, despite a world of Magicae, vampires, Vanguards and the like, the reader can still invest in the people. Feelings of love, loss, excitement, frustration, expectation—all the things that we ordinary humans struggle with day to day have a place in whatever fictional world a writer can create. I hope the world I have labored over is believable and tangible, that readers can take themselves out of their own world and into Elora’s. That’s what reading should be about—escaping your own trials to explore those of someone else!
How J.K the teacher helped the creation of the Vanguard Legacy?
I guess she nagged a lot to get things done in the tight timescale I had! When I’m teaching, there’s very little time left over for writing due to the nature of my role at school. So I wrote the first drafts of both Foretold and Reflected in a very short time, Foretold was written in six weeks and Reflected in seven. And that’s not writing every day but writing maybe three or four times a week for a few hours each time. This coincides with the summer holidays from school. So, in that six week holiday, I also have my four children at home, planning to do for school, a classroom to set up and lots of other things.
The editing obviously then takes longer, though less so with Reflected as I had learned from the many mistakes I made with Foretold! I have to manage my time so carefully to make sure that everything gets done at work without completely consuming my family time, so I guess that ‘teacher Joanne’, who is super-efficient, allows me to be an efficient writer as well.
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Joanne Kershaw lives in Wakefield, England, with her husband, four young children, and an uppity cat named Dipstick. As a teacher of five- to eleven-year-olds, she spends her days playing at being a grownup, then goes home to delve into Young Adult dark romance and being sixteen again. Joanne lives and breathes books, whether reading, writing, or marking them. She wrote her first novel in six weeks. Encouraged to submit her work by a friend and fellow YA novel addict, Joanne now finds herself a signed author at Xchyler Publishing. Joanne’s Kershaw’s first book with Xchyler Publishing is
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2 comments:
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