#hillarymonahan

[daenor23]

Thrift store book haul. #thriftstore #bookhaul #middlemarch #volumeI #volumeII #georgeeliot #withershins #susanrocan #maryunleashed #hillarymonahan #blackwidow #foreverred #margaretstohl #darkplaces #gillianflynn #theperfectroyalmistress #dianehaeger #iamthecheese #robertcormier #bookstagram (at Wolseley, Winnipeg)

[btafest]

A Q&A with Hillary Monahan!

What was your favorite book as a teenager?

THE SHINING.  I went straight from Christopher Pike into King as a kid.  I remember being huddled under the blankets with this book and developing a reasonable fear of topiary gardens because of it.  To this day, I dislike them.  I go to Disney pretty much yearly and always eyeball the shrub animals in Epcot like they're When Animals Attack waiting to happen.

What was your very first story about?

When I was a kid—fifth grade? —there was a writing contest at school.  I won it with a comedy story about a kid's embarrassing aunt taking her to the beach.  I don't remember much other than the aunt driving a bubblegum pink Cadillac and my grandmother cackling as she read it. She was an author, too, and found it delightful. I think she told my mother then I'd be a writer.  A trillion years later, here we are.

What is one question about your books/writing that you wish someone would ask but never has?

Probably why there's no love interest in MARY. Frankly, it was done on purpose. There are plenty of books in YA that juggle relationship drama with plot drama very, very well. But there are also a whole slew that take a perfectly capable female protagonist and make her stop worrying about her life/her problem/an axe murderer/_____ plot thing to moon over a boy.  While I do, to a point, agree that teenaged girls can fixate on boys, they're not blind to everything else.  They're not going to ignore present danger to ruminate about makeouts.  They're smart.  They can prioritize. I wanted to write a book where the girls run the show from start to finish.  Boys are around, sure, but at no point do they become bigger than the peril.

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Come meet Hillary Monahan at the 3rd annual Boston Teen Author Festival! Saturday, September 27th from 11am to 4:30pm at the Cambridge Public Library. For more information, check out our website at www.embraceya.weebly.com!