Mary E. Pearson on THE HISTORIES & The Beauty of Darkness

Lia and Rafe have escaped Venda and the path before them is winding and dangerous - what will happen now? This third and final book in The Remnant Chronicles is not to be missed.
Bestselling author Mary E. Pearson's combination of intrigue, suspense, romance and action make this a riveting page turner for teens.

YOU GUYS! I am so incredibly thrilled and honored to have the author of one of my FAVORITE YA fantasy series EVER here at Good Books & Good Wine. Also, because I am an idiot and originally posted this under visibility Private, I have edited/revised this to include a pre-order giveaway on me. Open internationally with a copy shipped from either Amazon or Book Depository.

QUESTION FOR MARY: Sometime histories in fictional books can be drawn from real life or maybe the inspiration for the history of various societies can be sparked by the author’s imagination. Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process for coming up with the intertwined histories of Venda and Morrighan?

What I did was imagine an event, something huge which in this case is described as the “devastation” and then, everything that happens after that point. It’s an advanced world in chaos and survival mode and one woman, Gaudrel, who was a child herself at the time of the upheaval, tries to explain it to her own granddaughter decades later in gentle terms that a young child can understand. She uses story and sprinkles it with bits of truth to entertain the child.

In this scattered world with few survivors, there is no one definitive source for what really happened and as the story is passed along over generations, the truth changes too, much as the message in a childhood game of telephone would—to the point it is almost garbled nonsense by the time the last child gets the message whispered in their ear.

Morrighan passed these stories from her grandmother onto her own children and the scavengers she led to a new land. But stories tend to twist and evolve over time, sometimes from lapses of memory, sometimes twisted by the tellers for their own purposes. And that is what Lia discovers when she compares Morrighan history to what Gaudrel wrote down. There are similarities in the historical accounts but they don’t match up exactly. When Lia discovers that her kingdom descended from murderous scavengers and that the Remnant wasn’t as “pure” and revered by the gods as she thought, she sees her whole world in a new light.

I’ve always been fascinated at how history in our real world keeps revising itself. When I was a child I always thought the history I was taught in school was the endgame—the unerring truth. But so much of it is dependent on who is telling the history, the weight they assign to certain facts and events, and really, how much accurate information they actually had in the first place.

In Lia’s world, the many kingdom histories all evolved from a single family, three women who were torn apart by outside forces: Gaudrel, Venda, and Morrighan. It become Lia’s quest (or burden?) to find out what the truth really was.

For a more detailed account of the early history of the kingdoms, I recommend reading the novella, Morrighan. It gives a lot of insights into the beginnings of the Remnant world and how it came to be. There are some truths in there, that Lia and the rest of her kingdom, will never know. I touched on that a bit in The Beauty of Darkness, with the inclusion of another “history,” this one The Lost Words of Morrighan, because besides all the histories of the world that scholars choose to write down, there are countless personal histories that are lost to time, but hold truths nevertheless.

Thanks for having me at your blog today, April.

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April (Books&Wine)

April is in her 30s and created Good Books And Good Wine. She works for a non-profit. April always has a book on hand. In her free time she can be found binge watching The Office with her husband and toddler, spending way too much time on Pinterest or exploring her neighborhood.

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