Thursday, October 5, 2017

Welcome to the FFBC: The Memory Trees by Kali Wallace-- Interview + GIVEAWAY



The Memory Trees

by Kali Wallace
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Release Date: October 10th 2017
Genre: Young Adult, Magical Realism, Fantasy, Paranormal

Synopsis:

The Memory Trees is a dark magical realism novel about a mysterious family legacy, a centuries-old feud, and a tragic loss that resurfaces when sixteen-year-old Sorrow returns to her mother’s family orchard for the summer.

Sorrow Lovegood’s life has been shaped by the stories of the women who came before her: brave, resilient women who settled long ago on a mercurial apple orchard in Vermont. The land has been passed down through generations, and Sorrow and her family take pride in its strange history. Their offbeat habits may be ridiculed by other townspeople—especially their neighbors, the Abrams family—but for the first eight years of her life, the orchard is Sorrow’s whole world. 

Then one winter night everything changes. Sorrow’s sister Patience is tragically killed. Their mother suffers a mental breakdown. Sorrow is sent to live with her dad in Miami, away from the only home she’s ever known.

Now sixteen, Sorrow’s memories of her life in Vermont are maddeningly hazy; even the details of her sister’s death are unclear. She returns to the orchard for the summer, determined to learn more about her troubled childhood and the family she left eight years ago. Why has her mother kept her distance over the years? What actually happened the night Patience died? Is the orchard trying to tell her something, or is she just imagining things?




Hello Kali! We are super excited to talk to you about THE MEMORY TREES and to have you in our FFBC tours.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Favorite Book?

That is an unfair question and you know it! My favorite changes every week.


Favorite TV show?

Bryan Fuller's Hannibal. There's nothing else like it in the world, and I love it in all its bloody, dark, weird, disturbing, Gothic, Grand Guignol glory.


Favorite movie?

Oh, I don't know. Probably Aliens, if only because I often watch less satisfying movies and think, "Why can't this take place in space, with monsters, and Ripley? That would be cool." Put it in space with monsters and I like it better than things that are not in space and do not have monsters.


Favorite Song?

I could never pick one. I like many kinds of music and many kinds of songs, and my favorite at any moment depends very much on my mood.


Favorite Food?

Oh, now this one I can do: cheese. I don't need to get more specific, do I? Can we just leave it as the whole big category? Cheese.


Name 3 fictional places you would move to in a heartbeat.

Hogwarts (obviously), the Federation starship USS Enterprise (NC-1701A or D, if we are being specific), and the Three Worlds from Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura series (even if my risk of being eaten by something bigger and meaner than me would be pretty high).


What were your favorite books growing up?

I loved Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Gordon Korman's I Want to Go Home! and MacDonald Hall series, Cynthia Voigt's A Solitary Blue, Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, Lois Lowry's The Giver, and every batshit crazy weird-ass YA thriller Christopher Pike ever wrote, especially the one about homicidal time-traveling dinosaurs.


 Favorite Quote?

I don't have a single favorite quote, so instead I will quote this entire passage from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather about stories and why we need them:

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable.

"

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.



"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"



YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.



"So we can believe the big ones?"



YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.



"They're not the same at all!"



YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.



"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"



MY POINT EXACTLY.”


What are your fandoms?

I have so many it's hard to keep track! But the main one is always and forever Harry Potter. If you want somebody to spend hours talking about the unfairness of the points system or need help Sorting your cat into its proper house or have questions about minutiae of the Marauders-era timeline of events, I am your woman.


Name a recent book you read that you would recommend to our YA fans?

Shannon M. Parker's The Rattled Bones is a gloriously creepy and heartbreaking ghost story set on the coast of Maine.  If you like tough female characters, explorations of dark and troubled history, salty sea tales, and ghosts, this is the book for you.



ABOUT THE BOOK:


Could you tell our Book Addicts a little bit about THE MEMORY TREES?

The Memory Trees is about a girl named Sorrow Lovegood, who returns to the ancestral home of her mother's family, an apple orchard in the mountains of Vermont, after several years away. When Sorrow was eight, her older sister, Patience, died in mysterious circumstances, and Sorrow is determined to find out what happened that terrible night. Complicating the situation both then and now is her mother's lifelong struggled with mental illness, a generations-old feud with the neighboring family, and Sorrow's only unreliable memory, which leaves her certain there are things about her childhood she needs to uncover before she can learn the truth.


Are there any places in that remind you of Sorrow’s family’s orchard (maybe from tv/movies)?

When I was in college, I would sometimes drive out up to the mountains of Vermont, New Hampshire, or western Massachusetts to go hiking or snowshoeing. One winter morning, a snowy gray Sunday at about seven a.m., I was pulled over by a cop in a tiny mountain town--I hadn't seen that the speed limit dropped from 55 mph to 35 mph. The cop didn't give me a ticket; he just told me to slow down a little bit and be careful on the snowy roads. I have no idea what town that was, but I've always remembered the strangeness of driving through winter-gray mountains before dawn, being the only car on the road for miles until the police lights flashed behind me, a tiny town appearing so quickly I hadn't even noticed it, and how quiet and remote and dreamlike it all felt. That's the kind of place I was thinking of when I invented the fictional town of Abrams Valley.


What 3 hashtags would you most associate with your book? (Could be a word or phrase or anything that would instantly make you think of THE MEMORY TREES)

#creepyappletrees #fiercewomen #vermontmagic


How did you come up with the story? Did you find inspiration in any other story/movie/show and how has this affected your writing?

The process of discovering this story was a long and rather painful one, and it's not an exaggeration to say I came up with it by writing something very different--a much more traditional mystery and ghost story--then writing it again, then writing it again, every time getting just a little bit closer to figuring out what kind of story I wanted to tell.


Is there a specific scene that you had the most fun to write?  Or which part was the most difficult to get through?

My favorite chapter to write was Silence Lovegood's chapter, which is one of the sections that explores the lives of Sorrow's ancestors. I would hesitate to call it "fun," because it is a very dark chapter, but writing it was one of those very rare instances where it felt like everything I wanted to say with that scene came together in a very satisfying way.

The hardest parts to write were, without a doubt, the confrontations between Sorrow and her mother, Verity, when they are working though how Verity's mental illness has impacted Sorrow's life.


If you had to pick one song to be the Theme Song for THE MEMORY TREES– Which one would you pick?

"When I Go" by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer


Are there any recommendations you could give your readers to be in the “perfect mood” to read THE MEMORY TREES (specific music, snacks…)?

Although the book takes place in summer, I think what you need for reading this one is a nice spiced apple cider (hot or cold, soft or hard).


What’s next for you?

My next book is a middle grade fantasy adventure called CITY OF ISLANDS, and it will be coming out next summer. It's about a magical city, some very conniving sorcerers, and the girl who gets caught up in their schemes while trying to help her friends.


Thank you so much for everything, Kail!

Thank you so much for having me!

PRE-ORDER GIVEAWAY


  • There is a preorder giveaway: anybody who preorders by 10/10 can get a signed bookplate and some bookmarks if they send an email to thememorytrees@gmail.com.



Kali Wallace studied geology and geophysics before she decided she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds as much as she liked researching the real one. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov's, Lightspeed Magazine, and Tor.com. Her first novel, Shallow Graves, was published by Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins in 2016. Her second novel, The Memory Trees, will follow in 2017. She lives in southern California.













  • 1 signed hardcover of THE MEMORY TREES by Kali Wallace
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2 comments:

  1. Looks like a great novel- thanks for the heads up and the interview. I have added to my TBR pile.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This book is on my TBR. I love the idea of family stories and a feud will be exciting to read about.

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