It’s my pleasure to announce that Lavender, my first novel, is available for preordering from Amazon! (If it’s fiddly, just give it time. It can take a while for a book to be availble across all of Amazon’s various sites.) I’m hugely excited for this, and I’ve been eager to show it off to you for sometime. If you’ll permit me a blurb…
Lavender knows what her family expects of her.
She just doesn’t know how to avoid it.
All her life, Lavender has wandered the forest outside her home, climbing its tall and ancient trees and following its brooks. Yet now her father has betrothed her to a boy in her village: Erkin, son of the village Elder. For Lavender, who hates being stuck indoors, has no knack for cooking, and would far rather be exploring the high branches of the forest, marriage is a fate worse than death. But fate is rarely so simple, and a chance argument reveals a secret at the heart of the forest that could change everything she thought possible.
Sometimes, friends can spring from the most unlikely places, and the biggest fears and the greatest evils don’t need to come at the point of a sword. For Lavender, the struggle to make her own path has only begun.
Lavender is - blurb’s over, by the way, and the rest of this post is largely recycled from an earlier one - Lavender is a very low magic - yet quite fantastical - fantasy novel about a young girl by the name of Lavender. At the start of our tale, she discovers that despite all the attempts she’s made to appear as unmarriagable as possible, her father has betrothed her to the son of the village elder. It’s a story about growing up; about discovery, bravery, adventure and heartache. I hope it’s a story for you.
If you need further convincing, then you can find the first 3 chapters of Lavender here! I’ll also be taking a little more time in this post to cover some details.So, I’ve already said that it’s low magic. What does that mean? Bluntly speaking, there’s no spells. No dragons. The world more or less operates as you’d expect.Well. More or less.
What else? Well, this isn’t quite Young Adult. Nor is it not YA. With Lavender, I’ve tried to craft a story that doesn’t care how old you are. That won’t patronise younger readers or use its younger cast to dodge difficult questions and situations. On the contrary, I think the younger cast lets me dive in with both feet. I’ve felt the category of YA is increasingly nebulous, and whilst there’s much in the way of YA fiction I adore, I find myself not quite sure what it is in order to assuredly categorise my book as such. Regardless, if you’re the sort of person who usually spurns child protagonists, then try the sample chapters. I hope to convince you otherwise.
More than that, I am a proudly feminist author. There’s women in my books, and lots of them. I’ve toyed with saying this outright. There’s a concern that by even squeezing it into this little mini-FAQ I’m constructing that such a declaration will give the impression that by reading Lavender you’re opting in to a morality tale. Instead, what I’d like to say is this. If you’re bored with fantasy as swords for boys. If you read blurbs just hoping for a book with an interesting fantasy premise that doesn’t give the title role to the gruff guy with the shaggy black hair and the stubble and the destiny, then I’ve got a book for you.
