Kingdom of the Wicked

"This is not a book to read when you’re hungry. It’s set in this magical version of Sicily, and it centres on this streghe witch – and their family has a restaurant. The descriptions of the food… I had to run off to cook! It was so rich and vibrant, and you can tell it was written with a lot of love and care towards the setting – not just the food, but the environment and the town. It felt very much like you’re walking through the streets of some form of ancient Sicily. Emilia is a twin, and her twin goes missing. She finds her violently killed, and has to discover what happened to her – and in doing so she summons one of the princes of Hell. It’s Wrath, of course – the sexiest of all princes of Hell, right? Because you want them angry! It’s a really great enemies-to-lovers, because they’re thrown together – they have to form an unwilling allyship to discover what’s going on and why all these witches are being killed. Wrath says that he’s been tasked with investigating these witch deaths, and Emilia’s trying to find out what happened to her twin sister. Wrath is tied to her via the magic she used to summon him there, and their investigation ends up leading into the underworld, dealing with all the different princes of Hell. There’s a lot of different princes in the first book who all have their hands in the pie, and you’re wondering who’s really pulling the strings behind what’s been happening… The sexual tension in the book is great. You can tell they hate each other but they’re really attracted to each other, and I feel like that’s one of the best starts for a fantasy romance. Yes! I think that’s one of the hardest things in the writing of these books: coming up with some plausible reason that they have to be together physically in order to have a romance develop, but also not having them immediately fall for each other. They have to have all these misbeliefs about each other and secrets that they’re hiding from each other, and then see redeeming qualities in each other and start to build attraction. But you can’t do that if they’re just constantly leaving each other! So you have to have some sort of mechanism that ties them together. For me, I love a good quest – they both have to go rescue someone, they both have to go get something. Travelling through these fantastical worlds is a great way of throwing two characters together. Working on a mission or defeating a common enemy, things like that, are a great way to make them say, “Okay, well, we’ll work together for now and then we’ll hate each other later” – but then they end up falling for each other. Right! There’s battles and complex systems of magic and action scenes and monsters… Also, I have a theory that for a lot of us who write fantasy romance, we grew up in the era of this resurgence of epic fantasy shows and movies – Tolkien and things like that. And we’re all thinking, “Just somebody kiss, please .” We love the fantasy world, we’re obsessed with the world building and the gowns and the languages and the lavishness of these worlds, but there’s no intimacy. There are no emotions. There are no moments of two people just staring each other in the eyes – except for a bromance between, you know, all the Lord of the Rings characters. Sam go on, just kiss Frodo, come on! Give us something! You get a little bit of Aragorn and Arwen, and all of the eight-grade girls just had to watch that one kiss over and over and over. A River of Golden Bones started because I wanted to try a fairytale retelling or reimagining, and I thought, “What if Sleeping Beauty wasn’t rescued by the prince, but by a secret twin sister?” We don’t need no princes! And I knew I really wanted to write wolf shifters. I’m a former wildlife biologist, I needed to have some animals! – and I thought wolf shifters would be great, and that it’d be fun to bring them into more of a high fantasy setting. They’re usually in paranormal stories. The story centres around Calla, who has been in hiding most of her life with her twin sister. The twin has trained her whole life to be a princess, and Calla has trained to be the shadow, the assassin and the warrior who’s the protector of her sister. Her sister is betrothed her whole life to their childhood friend, who’s the prince of a different wolf-pack kingdom, the Silver Wolf kingdom. Calla has always had a thing for him, and very early on in the story you come to realise that actually it isn’t her sister who’s his moon-blessed mate, it’s Calla. Then a sorceress arrives and curses her twin sister, a sleeping curse, and takes her away. And nobody is willing to go and save her. So it’s up to Calla to sneak out and go on this quest. She goes into the human realm and starts meeting more humans, and hides out with a merry band of musicians. It was clear to me from the very start that her character would be gender-fluid, exploring the gender binary and stepping out of rigid wolf society into a more fluid human society. I had no intention of writing her that way at the beginning, but even from the first chapter, it was very clear she was grappling with all of this indecision. She only really knew who she was in relation to her twin; whatever her twin was, she was the opposite. I think for myself and for a lot of genderqueer people, we’re looking so much to be informed who we are by the outside world, then once you get to a certain age you start to realise – “Oh, I don’t need other people to tell me who I am! I can actually discover this for myself.” So the first book is Calla’s journey of gender identity and self-discovery whilst also going on this epic quest – both an internal journey and an external journey. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . And yes, non-romantic intimacy is important. For me, it’s all about relationships. Found family is one of my favourite tropes, especially as a queer person; a lot of us don’t necessarily have community and support from the families we were born into. Then we go out into the world, and we find other people. Calla falls in with this group of humans and musicians who take her in and become like a second family to her. And then that hybridizes by the end with her own actual family. That idea of people who deeply see you and understand you, and encourage you to be yourself and not have to perform for them – I feel like everybody needs and deserves that. I love that level of relationship and intimacy set against epic moments of monster battles – we’re fighting monsters and then we’re talking about what self-identity is! We’re bopping back and forth with loyal friends, who want to sit around and talk about how they’re feeling right now, and then go back to some epic adventure. I love an “alpha male” in fiction but it enrages me when it’s used out in the real world. As a wildlife biologist, I’m like, “That’s not how it works!” So I decided, no, we’re going to do wolves, we’re going to make them queer, we’re going to have lots of male emotions."