It wasn’t until I was an older teenager and young adult that I started to see a surge of diverse fantasy in children’s and teen media - Avatar: The Last Airbender, for example (TV show, not the movie!), or Malinda Lo’s Huntress or Anna-Marie McLemore’s When the Moon Was Ours - and I started to realize that there was nothing stopping me from writing my own story into worlds like those I spent so much time in as a child.ĬL: Did you have a question at the center of the novel that you wanted to explore? One thing to notice about these books is that as wonderful as they are, they’re overall very white and straight. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons, and, of course, Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted. While I wasn’t thinking explicitly about this while I was writing, it’s clear in retrospect that I was inspired by a lot of the classic children’s fantasy I read as a child - books like Tamora Pierce’s The Immortals series, Donna Jo Napoli’s Zel, Patricia C. Rebecca Kim Wells: I’ve been told by several readers that Shatter the Sky has a bit of a “classic” feel to it - like the books that one might have loved if they were reading in the U.S. What were your influences when writing it? Here, Leidig and Wells discuss what the author calls her “angry bisexual dragon book.”Ĭasey Leidig: Shatter the Sky 's short length and spare writing makes it stand out among other YA fantasy novels. In addition to writing, she works as a bookseller at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wells earned her undergraduate degree in political science from UC Berkeley and her MFA in writing for children and young adults from Simmons College in Boston. I couldn’t put this down and I can’t wait for more!” “Maren’s quest to steal a dragon and rescue her girlfriend is, at its heart, a politically driven story about risking it all, digging deep and then deeper, and discovering who you are along the way.
“As YA fantasy grows ever more complex, Shatter the Sky stands out as having a classic feel - familiar, simple, but impeccably executed,” says Casey Leidig of Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco, who served on the panel of booksellers who selected Wells’ debut for the Indies Introduce program. Rebecca Kim Wells is the author of Shatter the Sky (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), a Summer/Fall 2019 Indies Introduce young adult debut and a Summer 2019 Kids’ Indie Next List pick.
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