From a Q & A at her publisher's website:
Why did you choose to have the story take place in Georgia, specifically Savannah?Visit Lauren Kate's website and blog.
I went to college in Atlanta and got to spend some time in Savannah, which is a lush, lovely, and very polite town. But the south is also such an embattled place,still recovering from its civil war scars in a way I think other parts of the country don’t like to think about. Setting Luce’s reform school on the grounds of an old Civil War Academy opened up all these cool possibilities to allude to the *big* battle that’s coming in the series.
Many of the scenes in the cemetery are both eerie and frightening which completely draw the reader into the Swords & Cross world; in conjunction with question one, is there a specific place that you thought of when writing about this place?
I guess I’ve always had a thing for cemeteries. Growing up, I had a friend who lived right behind a pretty decrepit old cemetery, and we’d sneak in there all the time to make up stories about the people whose tombstones we read. In Fallen, Cam attempts to do this with Luce—though for some strange reason, she finds it unromantic…
The cemetery at Sword and Cross is...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue