The Square of Sevens

"I have a fondness for stories about orphans, and this particular one is about a young woman whose name is Red. She’s never known her mother. Her father dies when she is very young, and she is given into the care of an English gentleman. She’s raised as a lady in Bath, England, and early in her adult years she discovers a document that describes a fortune-telling method called ‘the Square of Sevens,’ something that her father was in possession of and worked very hard to make sure she had access to. The story is Red trying to figure out what this is and how it works. She’s trying to figure out why people are trying to steal it, and her friends and loved ones begin dying around her as these elements close in. It’s a really wonderful mystery within a puzzle. Who were her parents, her mother in particular? How did her parents come to be guardians of this very specific fortune-telling device? What is she going to do with it now that she’s the caretaker of it? It’s a really fun romp, a love story, and a coming-of-age novel that gives you a really interesting look into Georgian society in England in the 1700s. When I put together my list of books, it was revelatory to me. I realised how few books are set in the 18th century, particularly 18th-century America. If I look at my shelves, I have hundreds of historical novels. Many of them are set in the 1600s, many in the 1800s. Countless books are set during World War Two. But for some reason, fewer in the 1700s, and in 1700s America, almost nothing. It was an in-between time in our history. We had the Revolutionary War , when we gained independence from England. Most of the fiction we do have is set then. But almost nothing else. It got me thinking that perhaps that’s why The Frozen River was so difficult to write. It was an odd, in-between time in American history ."