Hey everyone! I’m super excited to be on the blog tour for Kate Hattemer’s The Land of 10,000 Madonnas (April 19, 2016 – Knopf)! Today, I have an interview with Kate to share with you. First, here’s more about the book:

Five teens backpack through Europe to fulfill the mysterious dying wish of their friend.

Jesse lives with his history professor dad in a house covered with postcards of images of the Madonna from all over the world. They’re gotten used to this life: two motherless dudes living among thousands of Madonnas. But Jesse has a heart condition that will ultimately cut his life tragically short. Before he dies, he arranges a mysterious trip to Europe for his three cousins, his best friend, and his girlfriend to take after he passes away. It’s a trip that will forever change the lives of these young teens and one that will help them come to terms with Jesse’s death.

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Kobo | IndieBound

And now for the interview! Enjoy!

Question: Congrats! When this interview goes live, you’ll be just a few DAYS away from release! What will you be doing for the next month to prepare for release? And in the last few days before release?
Answer: Thank you! I can’t believe it’s finally happening! Based on my experience last time, I’ll spend the month before release alternately freaking out it’s happening and forgetting it’s happening, and I’ll spend the last few days working through key last-minute preparations (googling “how to walk in high heels,” doodling exclamation points in my planner, etc.).

Question: The Land of 10,000 Madonnas is such a unique, intriguing title! Who came up with it? What’s the significance of the title in relation to the story?
Answer: Thank you! One of my students, trying to remember this title, said, “I know it has something to do with Beyoncé!” But no, it refers to the original diva, Madonna, the mother of Christ. The phrase has been in the book from very early on – it’s what Jesse calls his apartment, which his art-professor father has wallpapered with postcards of Mary – but it wasn’t actually the title until I realized how much significance it holds. To me, the book is all about where we find home, and I think we’re all searching for our own lands of ten thousand Madonnas, for the places filled with our mothers, literal and figurative. We’re searching for the lands of the people who love us and take care of us, of people who rejoice with us and grieve at our sides – just as Mary is doing for Christ in every single representation of her in the past two thousand years of Western art.

Question: And speaking of the story, what a fascinating concept – sad, but beautiful and heart-warming, all at once. Where did the idea for the plot come from?
Answer: Thank you again! A lot of elements came together to form the plot, but the journey the characters take was inspired by my own travel during the summer of 2012. I was fortunate enough to spend about six weeks in Europe with, variously, a cousin, a few friends, and a sister. It was an amazing trip: we saw a massive amount of art, went on some jaw-dropping, thigh-quivering hikes, and ate our weight in gelato.

Question: There are some really important life lessons in The Land of 10,000 Madonnas. What’s the MOST important message you wanted to convey to your readers – the one thing you hope they take away with them after reading the book?
Answer: Given how much this book changed from conception to final product, I’m surprised to realize that my central goal stayed the same. I wanted to write a book about grief that was about the tawdry, tedious underside – not the shock of the first few days, not the black clothes and the crying, but about the way your world’s still shattered a year later, two years later, ten years later, and you have to wake up every morning and go into that shattered world and pretend that everything’s okay when it isn’t okay, when you’re starting to suspect that it will never be okay. I wanted to write about grief that’s never resolved because it springs from an event so fundamentally wrong that it shouldn’t be resolved. This probably sounds incredibly dire and depressing, but to me, I think, as a grieving teenager, it would have provided some hope. If I am sad for the rest of my life, his life meant something. It means something. I wanted to write about this paradox, which I fiercely believe: you will never stop grieving and you will feel joy. You will never lay eyes upon him again and he will always be at your side.

Question: This is your second book. How was the publishing process different the second time around? What lessons did you learn as a debut that helped make things easier?
Answer: I like how you assume it’s been easier.
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Just kidding: it has been! The revision process was a lot tougher this time around, but I think that without my experience revising my debut, it’d have felt even worse (and that’s saying something). I’ve felt a good deal of anxiety with both books – for some reason I don’t worry about how they’ll do, but I absolutely dread feeling so publicly exposed – but it’s gotten more manageable. I’m trying to embrace the strange shift in control: when you’re writing, you’re the god of your book’s universe, but then suddenly it’s out in the world and doesn’t belong to you at all anymore.

Question: Craziest thing you’ve had to Google for a WIP?
Answer: “Best German karaoke songs.” This, as I’m sure you can imagine, led to an intense afternoon of YouTube research. It was one of those days when you think you’re a writer, and the person next to you in the coffeeshop thinks you’re a fool.

Question: According to your bio, you previously worked as a bookseller. What was it like being on that side of the publishing world, as compared to being a published author now?
Answer: I loved my bookseller job – for one, thanks to my intensely well-read colleagues, I always had a great TBR stack! And I think it’s thanks to my time in the bookstore that I now feel so grateful whenever someone reads one of my books. There are so many books out there, so many freaking wonderful books, and you’re choosing mine?! Like: you are the light of my life.

It’s also nice, though, to have a day job that has nothing to do with publishing. I’m teaching high school Latin now, and I adore every minute. I think I do my best writing (and personing) when I have a healthy mix of interests and priorities.

Question: Are you working on anything new?
Answer: Yes! I’ve spent some time lately returning to my roots as a Roald Dahl fanatic (when I got in trouble as a kid, my mom would confiscate his oeuvre as punishment), so I tried my hand at a ridiculous middle-grade novel. And now I’m working on a YA about a feminist firebrand. I hope they’ll both see readers someday!

About the Author:
 
 
KATE HATTEMER graduated with a degree from Yale in Classics. She works as a bookseller in Cincinnati and is the author of The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy, which has received five starred reviews.

Website | Twitter | Instagram
 

 
Hey everyone! I’m really excited to be on the blog tour for A Drop of Night by Stefan Bachmann (March 15, 2016 – Greenwillow Books) and to have Stefan here for an interview! First, here’s more about the book:

Seventeen-year-old Anouk has finally caught the break she’s been looking for—she’s been selected out of hundreds of other candidates to fly to France and help with the excavation of a vast, underground palace buried a hundred feet below the suburbs of Paris. Built in the 1780’s to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.

Or so she thought.

But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .

A genre-bending thriller from Stefan Bachmann for fans of The Maze Runner and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.

You cannot escape the palace.

You cannot guess its secrets.

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Indiebound | iBooks | The Book Depository

And now here’s the interview! Enjoy!

Question: Congratulations on the release of A Drop of Night! What have you been doing the last few weeks to prepare for your book birthday?
Answer: Thank you! ☺ I’ve haven’t really had time to freak out about the book release. I’ve mostly been tweeting and/or stuck in class. On ADoN’s book birthday I’m going to be sitting in orchestra rehearsal until 10PM. I’m super excited, just kind of in a low-key way at the moment.

Question: A Drop of Night was AMAZING! What inspired the story?
Answer: Aw, thanks a ton! I’m so happy you liked it. It was inspired by a dream about a group of teenagers running down a baroque, gilded corridor and suddenly being confronted by . . . something dreadful. That exact scene isn’t in the book anymore, at least not the way it was originally written, but it was the jumping-off point. Another thing that I think inspired it was that Zürich, where I live, and Paris/France, where the book is set, has an odd mixture of the sleek and expensive, and the old-fashioned and history-steeped, which I find fascinating and which is kind of the aesthetic of this book.

Question: That cover is epic! Did you have any say in the concept? Do you feel it represents the story well?
Answer: I love the cover, glad you like it, too! I sent my editor some pictures of things I liked, and color schemes I thought would look cool, and the designer incorporated them. Writers usually don’t have a ton of say in book covers, which is good, because writers usually aren’t very savvy graphic designers. But I did get to give my two cents, and they used it, and that was nice.

Also, yes, I think it represents the story really well. My stories are usually a bit dark, both middle grade and YA, but my earlier ones got fairly jolly covers (which I love, too) and I got some emails from parents who were expecting correspondingly jolly books. A Drop of Night got an actually dark cover, so: goals achieved.

Question: You’ve stated on Twitter that the ARC is very different from the final book. Can you share what, exactly, changed (without spoilers)? Were any scenes cut that you really wanted to keep? Should the ARC readers re-read the book when it releases?
Answer: I cut a chapter, and pared down several scenes, and added clarification throughout for where early readers had questions. So, in essence, the book is thirty pages shorter now and a bit clearer. For me that feels huge, but I have no clue how it will impact different readers. I think if you liked the ARC, the finished book is smoother and more enjoyable. If you hated the mean main character and got hung up on the science behind the book, the changes won’t do anything to change that. Anouk is still blunt and prickly and the science is still dubious at best. ☺

Also, I love deleting extraneous things. I think it almost always makes a book better, the fewer words it has, so I don’t regret any of the cuts made. At least not right now.

Question: If you were dropped into the underground palace, would you fare as well as your characters? Would you make it out alive?
Answer: Do my characters fare well, though? xD I’d probably do as well as some of them, and worse than others. But let’s be real, I’d probably just be Hayden on page 104, because sleeping is everything to me right now.

Question: What books would you recommend to a reader who loved A Drop of Night, and wants to read something similar?
Answer: Hmm . . . ADoN is a bit of a weird amalgamation of genres, so content-wise I’m not sure what’s similar to it. Maybe More Than This by Patrick Ness?

Question: Craziest thing you’ve had to Google for a work in progress?
Answer: I don’t know if this is the craziest, but for A Drop of Night, I Googled: “How does it feel to lose a finger” The answer is “not great.”

Question: According to your bio, you “live in a 150-year-old house outside of Zürich, that may at some point collapse” on you. How do these things—living in an old house and living abroad—influence your writing, if at all?
Answer: So, just to explain the “house collapsing” bit: when we were kids, we moved from the US—land of the new houses—to Switzerland—land of the sometimes 15th century houses—and since we were really young, my siblings and I were always *slightly* worried the third-story bathtub would break through the floor if we filled it, or we would fall through ourselves if we stomped too hard. The house is actually great and very hardy, but we still joke about this when we’re there.

Also, yes! I think living abroad influenced me a lot, as a writer and as a person. I don’t think you realize it as a kid, but growing up between two cultures and continents is a big deal and it can be really challenging. For me the positives far out-weigh the negatives, though. One of the best things about it is that you get a perspective on both countries that I think you wouldn’t have, had you been in the thick of just one country your whole life. I think it’s that feeling of looking in on something you’re not 100% a part of, be it language or customs or unwritten rules, and questioning them or wondering about them or just noticing them, and I think that’s a really valuable thing for a writer to experience.

Question: Are you working on anything new?
Answer: I am! I just sent my next manuscript to my editor. It’s middle grade again—A Drop of Night was my first foray into YA—and I loved writing it. It’s inspired by Jules Verne and is about monsters who emigrated from the Moon in airships, and a band of kids with strange powers who live in the sewers of an Italian Renaissance–like city.

And now for the giveaway! We have 3 Finished Copies of A DROP OF NIGHT (US Only) up for grabs! To enter, fill out the Rafflecopter below!

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About the Author:
 
Stefan Bachmann was born in Colorado and spent of most of his childhood in Switzerland, where he’s now a student of music at the Zürich University of Arts.

His debut, gothic-faery-fantasy THE PECULIAR, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012, and was translated into eight languages. Its companion, THE WHATNOT, was released on September 24th, 2013.

THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES: 36 TALES BRIEF AND SINISTER, a collection of scary stories he wrote together with authors Emma Trevayne, Claire Legrand and Katherine Catmull, was released May 27th, 2014, from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.

His next book, YA thriller A DROP OF NIGHT, about a group of American teens fighting to survive after they become trapped in an underground Versailles, will be out March 15th, 2016, also from Greenwillow/HarperCollins.

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Tour Schedule:

Week 1:
3/14: Emily Reads Everything – Review
3/15: He Said Books Or Me – Guest Post
3/16: Lilybloombooks – Review
3/17: Brittany’s Book Rambles – Q&A
3/18: Kissin’ Blue Karen – Review

Week 2:
3/21: Pandora’s Books – Q&A
3/22: Books In Her Heads – Review
3/23: Part Time Book Nerd – Top 10
3/24: Lisa Loves Literature – Review
3/25: My Bookish Itinerary – Guest Post