I'm so happy to announce that I sold two more YA novels to my editor Maggie Lehrman at Amulet Books! My incredible agent, Barbara Poelle of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency, brokered the deal. Here's the official announcement from Publishers Marketplace:
The first novel of this two-book deal is tentatively titled Odd & True, and it's currently slated to be published in Spring 2017. An official synopsis won't be available for a while, and I still need to write most of the book, but I'll go ahead and share the synopsis that I created for the proposal.
A dark Edwardian adventure involving corseted heroines, deadly beasts, and the war between reality and imagination.
Once upon a time there lived two sisters, Odette and Trudchen, known to all as Od and Tru. Younger sister Tru, a girl with a severely injured leg and a talent for reading tea leaves, has grown up believing she was born in a castle to a monster-slaying mother and a bohemian father, the latter of whom disappeared from their lives because of a magician’s curse. Older sister Od has fed such stories to Tru to protect her from the family’s secrets, which include scandal, heartbreak, violence, and murder.
In 1909, Od reappears in Tru’s life after a two-year absence, claiming to have been sharpening the monster-hunting skills she inherited from their mother. Their aunt, however, insists that Od had been sent away to a home for unwed mothers. With a suitcase packed full of weapons and a book cataloging America’s deadliest supernatural creatures, Od encourages Tru to journey across the country with her to conquer the notorious Leeds Devil, a nightmare of a beast that’s wreaking havoc in the Mid-Atlantic states. Od agrees to follow her sister on the adventure, mainly to keep an eye on Od’s precarious hold on reality and to unearth the truth behind their family’s fantastical stories.
What Tru finds along the way is the peculiar possibility that she and her sister—two inconsequential young ladies in high-buttoned blouses and lace petticoats—might, indeed, possess the power to save the world.
Currently, I think of Odd & True as an Edwardian Big Fish meets Don Quixote meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After tackling some heavy-duty issues in my March 2016 YA novel, The Steep and Thorny Way, and delving into dark psychological horror for my Fall 2016 adult novel, Yesternight, I'm excited to dip a little bit more into the realms of fantasy and legends.
