Interview and Giveaway: Fury (The Cure #1) by Charlotte McConaghy

Published March 25th, 2014

Description:

In the tradition of Divergent comes a novel about a world where negative emotions are stolen ... and only those with fury can stand up and fight.

Eighteen-year-old Josephine Luquet wakes naked and covered in blood that is not hers on the same day every year—when the blood moon is full. Josi has not responded to the "Cure"—an immunization against anger mandated by the government—and believes herself to be a threat to others.

Then she meets Luke. Luke has had the Cure but seems different to the other "drones"—and he's dead set on helping Josi discover the truth about herself before the next blood moon.

But time is running out. Is Luke willing to risk his life to be near her? Does he truly understand what violence she is capable of?

Raw and full of passion, Fury is a story of love in a dystopian world, and how much we are willing to forgive in the struggle to remember our humanity.

MB's INTERVIEW

Thank you, Miss Charlotte McConaghy

1. You started to write at 14. How do you evolved as a writer now at 25? How important is for a writer its personal experiences?

My writing has evolved enormously since I was 14. (At least I really hope it has!) Although the types of stories I tell are still similar, the main thing I have noticed is the character development—I didn’t think enough about it as a teenager, but now see it as the most important part of writing. As you get older, as you practice your writing daily, you learn to be rigorous with your characters, with the worlds you are creating, and with your craft skills. I suppose there’s something sad about losing the complete escapism of how I used to write—it was to disappear into another world without thought for reality—but there is also pleasure in challenging yourself to be better at what you love.

2. In a time of a flow of the YA or NA Dystopia, what such a story needs to be noticed by the readers?

I think you need a great concept, to start with. It needs to be something that captures people’s attention and makes them consider an idea or future. Beyond that a good dystopian story needs rich, complex, flawed characters, and it needs solid, well-written and engaging prose.

3. I saw Fury described as Adult, New Adult and even Young Adult. What was your intention and what do you think about the necessity of such categories?

Good question. My publishers and I decided that Fury was an adult novel, but I see it as a compliment that Fury has been categorized in so many different age-groups because in my opinion the categories don’t exist except as a marketing/selling tool. I don’t write for specific age groups, I just write stories I like. I would never write differently for teenagers as I would for adults, because doing that I think implies that teenagers are at a lower reading level, when they’re really, really not. I guess thematically you get differences—at different ages we care about different issues, but that’s a big generalization because on a basic human level we all relate to each other, and to a good story. I suppose what’s confused Fury is that it has big, dark themes, is set in a violent world, tells the story of a complex, adult relationship, but also happens to be about a character who starts the novel as an 18 year old. Makes it hard to classify!

4. What do you think about the messages between the lines and will we find such message in your book?

I very much hope you will! I think explaining the unspoken message between the lines defeats the purpose and would ruin your reading experience, so I won’t say what the messages in Fury are—I’ll let you decide for yourselves. But I will say that multiple layers of messages and stories within a novel are extremely important if you want readers to have an emotionally rich engagement with the story. Every scene needs subtext, and you get that when you allow readers to surmise a different truth to the ones your characters experience or believe to be real. You want readers to have their own emotional reactions to concepts and ideas, even if they differ from your protagonist’s. Then you know you’ve come up with a challenging world.

5. What was the biggest challenge when you created the Fury’s world and how did you handle it?

I think the biggest challenge was understanding the motivations behind the people who made the world the way it is. I needed to make it plausible and believable to such a degree that it would never be questioned that this kind of world could really exist at some point in our future. I then had to make sure that everything added up, that there were realistic results of each change, whilst not removing everything relatable from the world. I think that’s the hardest part of science-fiction—you can’t create an entire world to your satisfaction, like you can in fantasy. You have to stay true to the reality we live now, whilst thinking really carefully about the implications of certain decisions.

TOUR SCHEDULE

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About the author:

Charlotte started writing her children’s fantasy series ‘The Strangers of Paragor’ as a teenager and has since gone on to publish five novels. After a Masters degree in Screenwriting she wrote ‘Avery’, the first in her adult fantasy series ‘The Chronicles of Kaya’, published by Random House. She now lives in Sydney, Australia, and has just released a new dystopian sci-fi novel called ‘Fury – Book One of The Cure’, published by Momentum.

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Author's Giveaway:

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