You can tell from my reviews of Passenger and Wayfarer that I really enjoyed these books! So of course I jumped at the chance to be in on a group phone interview with Alexandra Bracken! The interview was done on Wayfarer‘s release day (Jan. 3). Each person got to ask a couple questions. It was so interesting to hear what everyone wanted to know more about! Today I’ll be sharing my questions (which came from a group of my students who are obsessed with the books!) and some general comments from the author. First, more about Wayfarer!
About the Book:
I’ve been orphaned by my time.
The timeline has changed.
My future is gone.
Etta Spencer didn’t know she was a traveler until the day she emerged both miles and years from her home. Now, robbed of the powerful object that was her only hope of saving her mother, Etta finds herself stranded once more, cut off from Nicholas—the eighteenth century privateer she loves—and her natural time.
When Etta inadvertently stumbles into the heart of the Thorns, the renegade travelers who stole the astrolabe from her, she vows to finish what she started and destroy the astrolabe once and for all. Instead, she’s blindsided by a bombshell revelation from their leader, Henry Hemlock: he is her father. Suddenly questioning everything she’s been fighting for, Etta must choose a path, one that could transform her future.
Still devastated by Etta’s disappearance, Nicholas has enlisted the unlikely help of Sophia Ironwood and a cheeky mercenary-for-hire to track both her and the missing astrolabe down. But as the tremors of change to the timeline grow stronger and the stakes for recovering the astrolabe mount, they discover an ancient power far more frightening than the rival travelers currently locked in a battle for control. . . a power that threatens to eradicate the timeline altogether.
From colonial Nassau to New York City, San Francisco to Roman Carthage, imperial Russia to the Vatican catacombs, New York Times #1 best-selling author Alexandra Bracken charts a gorgeously detailed, thrilling course through time in this stunning conclusion to the Passenger series.
Find out more on UnrequiredReading
Interview Excerpts:
To start us off Alexandra Bracken told us a bit about the book in general. She said:
I’ve been calling this book my problem child in the sense that it was the book that came out kicking and screaming whereas some books just sort of rain down on you from the heavens and explode out of you, and those stories are amazing. But I am really proud of this book. I think I managed to accomplish everything that I was going for in it.
My first question was the number one question all my students wanted to know: how did you decide which places to go to and which time periods to be there?
The answer to this question is mostly that I’m just selfish. Originally Passenger was just going to be set in 1776 in New York. I studied Revolutionary War history and 18th century America in college, so I felt very comfortable writing in that time period. I had a really good grip on what the different concerns were, what the economy was like, what the atmosphere was like. That’s why I felt weirdly comfortable writing in Nicholas’ voice, then I decided I’ve got to push myself and expand the story so I could make it more inclusive.
I can have it be more of an actual treasure hunt, and include other continents, because it seems to me that a lot of time travel books are very North American and Euro-centric. I did not want that to be case in this book. I really wanted to push myself to research other countries and other time periods that I was interested in but never really had the chance to study in-detail in college.
For example, Luxembourg Garden in Paris is one of my favorite places in the world, so I very selfishly included that for a brief moment in Passenger. For the places that I’d never visited, I never expected this to actually be the case, but tourists, when they walk through places, will actually record themselves walking through the entire site. It made it very easy to write about the layout of all of those different places.
From there I started filling out in my mind what I thought those places would look like inhabited, and in certain cases not inhabited at all. It was mostly combinations of my having studied that place or visited that place, but also, places that I was interested in. I included Damascus in Passenger because of the Syrian civil war.
I started writing Passenger when I still had my day job, and I was listening to NPR Morning Edition first thing every morning when I sat down to eat my bagel and drink my coffee. The Syrian civil war had just broken out at the time, and I didn’t know anything about Syria. So I started researching that region and researching that history, because I was just curious about what was at stake aside from colossal loss of human life. So a lot of the time it was a natural decision, but I was very overwhelmed at multiple points in writing in terms of time periods to choose from, the continents, all that stuff.
And my students’ second question was: If you were a traveler, what place or time period or historical figure would you want to travel to meet or to be at?
Until I wrote Passenger, I would always say the 18th Century, especially right around the outbreak of the American Revolution because I wanted to get a sense of what the atmosphere was like, how people were feeling. I just have a very strong affinity for that time period for whatever reason. A psychic told me I was alive then in a past life, so clearly that’s it.
But I think after writing this, and reaffirming that I think time travel is only fun if you’re a white guy, I kind of would want to go into the future. I also love spoilers, so I would love the spoiler, as long as what happens in the next few decades is not nuclear war. Although that would be a good spoiler to have, because then I could prevent it. It’s funny that I really went into past with the series, whereas I would prefer to go into the future myself.
Thanks so much to Alexandra Bracken for answering all our questions! I loved learning more about Passenger and Wayfarer, as well as her writing in general.
Check out these blogs over the rest of the month for more about the group phone interview:
* Reading Teen * Novel Novice * The Book Cellar * Page Turners * Vilma’s Book Blog * Super Space Chick * The Young Folks * The Fandom *
About the Author:
Alexandra Bracken is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Passenger series and The Darkest Minds series. Born and raised in Arizona, she moved East to study history and English at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. After working in publishing for several years, Alex now writes full-time and can be found hard at work on her next novel in a charming little apartment that’s perpetually overflowing with books.
Brittany
Time travel books and the actual concept of going back in time has always fascinated me, so I know I really need to read Passenger and Wayfarer, especially given how much research Alexandra Bracken did 🙂 Lovely interview, thank you for sharing!
Brittany @ Brittany’s Book Rambles