Monday, December 24, 2018

Ally Condie

Ally Condie's forthcoming YA novel is The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe.

From the author's Q&A with David Canfield for Entertainment Weekly:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Why did you feel now was the time to get back into YA?

ALLY CONDIE: It’s been since 2014, which is crazy to me — that it’s been that long. I actually started writing this book in 2014: It was going to be my next YA. I liked the idea, I felt really good about it, I liked the setting, I was getting some really positive feedback on the opening chapters from some readers. It’s a revenge-novel…I realized something I was missing. And it turned out that was rage! [Laughs] You kind of have to have that to write a revenge novel. Then 2016 came around and, all of a sudden, I had it all. [Laughs]

I don’t know how political anyone wants to be with any of this… but there was a lot, especially right around the time of the election and since — we had the Kavanaugh hearings, things that had been happening to young women and the way that that’s reacted to. That made me very angry. It was very easy to channel that into this character because she’s an extremely strong woman who’s working against a society that is stacked against her all the way. But she has a lot of — like, rage is the word, but there’s also a lot of love. That was the important thing…. That comes together any time we’re talking about politics and stuff: We feel anger, and then there’s that strange side of the coin where you realize, “Oh, but the only way to fix this is to...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue