First Editions, it's time to enter the Aviary. 🐦📚

The full Songbird of the Sorrows by Braidee Otto Book Club Kits are officially ready to download!

We've packed this month's kits with everything you need to turn your reading experience into a full bookish adventure filled with forbidden romance, dangerous secrets, royal intrigue, deadly trials, espionage, and plenty to discuss.

📚 YOUR FULL KITS ARE WAITING!

🖤 FULL BOOK CLUB KIT

Everything you need to host your Songbird of the Sorrows book club, whether you're meeting in person or virtually.

Inside you'll find:

✨ Complete discussion guide
🍽️ Themed recipes
🎭 Themed activities
🎁 Door-prize ideas
💬 Meeting prompts
🕵️ Games and challenges
📖 Host resources
🐦 And more!

👉 Book Club Kit & Individual Book Club Member Reader Guide 

🪶 INDIVIDUAL BOOK CLUB MEMBER READER GUIDE

Your personal companion while reading!

Use it to track Aella's journey, Raven, secrets, theories, favorite moments, predictions, and all those moments that make you want to immediately text your book club.

👉 Book Club Kit & Individual Book Club Member Reader Guide 

🐦 BUDDY READER KIT

Reading Songbird of the Sorrows with your favorite bookish buddy?

This kit gives you reading checkpoints, prediction challenges, discussion questions, activities, and plenty of ways to compare your theories along the way.

👉 Buddy Reader Kit

🖤 SOLO READER KIT

Going on this adventure alone?

We've got you covered.

Your Solo Reader Kit includes reading prompts, character trackers, prediction pages, secret investigations, themed activities, and a final reading reflection.

👉 Solo Reader Kit 

🕊️ YOUR READING MISSION

You've got the book.

You've got the kits.

Now it's time to:

Read. Investigate. Predict. Discuss.

And remember...

Trust no one. 🖤

🖤 HAPPY READING!

We hope these kits make Songbird of the Sorrows even more fun to read, discuss, obsess over, and experience together.

Now go grab your downloads, gather your fellow readers, and let the Aviary mission begin. 🐦🪶📖

— The Page Ladies Book Club

If you love your fantasy romance packed with forbidden love, dangerous secrets, royal intrigue, deadly trials, espionage, hidden identities, and a heroine caught between duty and desire, Songbird of the Sorrows by Braidee Otto is a book that deserves a spot on your TBR.

From the moment I read the premise, I knew I wanted to dive into this world. Aella is an ousted princess who was given to the Aviary as a child and trained to become a Songbird, a spy, thief, and weapon shaped by an organization that demands absolute obedience. Then she is assigned to Alpha Flight, led by none other than her former flame, Raven.

Because apparently being sent on a dangerous undercover mission isn't complicated enough without putting the one person you're forbidden to love directly in your path.

And then there's a royal court, deadly trials, a mysterious weapon, old feelings, political intrigue, and the increasingly difficult question of whether Aella should follow the orders she's been given or finally make a choice for herself.

That combination had my full attention.

🐦 Aella Is So Much More Than a Spy

One of my favorite things about Songbird of the Sorrows is Aella herself.

She's been shaped by other people for most of her life.

She's a princess.

She's a spy.

She's a thief.

She's a Songbird.

She's a weapon.

But beneath all those identities is a woman trying to figure out who she actually is.

Aella's journey isn't simply about completing missions or surviving dangerous situations. There's a much deeper struggle happening underneath everything: How do you discover who you are when you've spent your entire life being told who you're supposed to be?

The Aviary has trained her to obey, to suppress her emotions, and to put her purpose above everything else. But as Aella's circumstances become more complicated, those lessons become increasingly difficult to follow.

Her struggle between obedience and independence is what gives the story so much emotional weight.

She's not simply fighting enemies.

She's fighting everything she's been conditioned to believe about herself.

And I was invested in that journey.

🖤 THE AVIARY

The Aviary is one of the elements that makes this story especially interesting.

It's not simply a secret organization filled with highly trained spies.

It's a system of control.

The Aviary gives Aella skills, purpose, belonging, and a place in the world but it also demands loyalty in return.

The rules surrounding its Songbirds create one of the most compelling conflicts in the story.

Especially when it comes to love.

Because if you're trained from childhood to believe that attachment makes you vulnerable, what happens when you fall for someone anyway?

That's where the Aviary becomes more than a backdrop for the story.

It becomes part of the larger conversation about control, loyalty, identity, and freedom.

And I loved having that layer to dig into.

❤️ AELLA & RAVEN

Let's talk about the forbidden romance.

Because former flames + forced proximity + dangerous mission + forbidden love + unresolved feelings is a combination I am absolutely going to notice.

Aella and Raven already have history when they are brought back together, which makes their relationship immediately complicated.

They aren't strangers discovering an attraction.

They're two people who already know each other, already have feelings, and now have to work together while being told that those feelings are unacceptable.

That creates a completely different kind of tension.

Every interaction carries history.

Every choice has consequences.

And every moment where they get closer feels dangerous because they're not supposed to.

What I particularly enjoyed about this dynamic is how closely it connects to Aella's larger journey.

Her feelings for Raven aren't just about romance.

They represent something she's been told she isn't allowed to have.

Choosing love means challenging the rules that have shaped her entire life.

And that makes their relationship part of the larger story rather than something happening separately from it.

👑 DEADLY ROYAL TRIALS

Then we get to one of my favorite pieces of the premise:

Aella has to infiltrate a royal court and compete in deadly royal trials.

As if being a spy wasn't enough.

Aella has to navigate a world where appearances matter, alliances matter, secrets matter, and everyone may have an agenda.

She's essentially playing multiple roles at once.

She's a spy.

She's a princess.

She's a competitor.

She's part of a secret mission.

And she's trying to determine who she can actually trust.

That creates a fantastic atmosphere of uncertainty.

I constantly wanted to know what information was being withheld, who was manipulating whom, and what would happen when all of these carefully constructed identities eventually collided.

The royal trials also give the story an entertaining mix of competition, danger, court politics, romance, and strategy.

It's exactly the kind of setup that makes me want snacks, a blanket, and several uninterrupted hours of reading time.

🕵️ SECRETS, SPIES & COURT INTRIGUE

If you enjoy books where you can't immediately trust everyone around the protagonist, there's plenty to dig into here.

Aella's mission requires deception.

The court is filled with political maneuvering.

The Aviary has its own secrets.

There's a mysterious weapon.

And Aella is constantly navigating situations where what people say and what they actually want may be two very different things.

That makes Songbird of the Sorrows particularly fun to discuss because there are so many questions to ask:

Who can Aella actually trust?

Who is manipulating the situation?

What information is being withheld?

How much of Aella's identity is real?

How much of her life has been determined by other people?

And what happens when she stops accepting the answers she's been given?

⚔️ THE TROPES

If you're a trope-focused reader like I am, there is plenty here to get excited about.

🖤 Tropes & Themes

• Forbidden romance

• Former flames

• Second-chance romance

• Forced proximity

• Princess turned spy

• Secret spy organization

• Hidden identity

• Royal court intrigue

• Deadly trials

• Secret mission

• Political intrigue

• Espionage

• Dangerous secrets

• Found family

• Strong heroine

• Morally complicated choices

• Duty vs. desire

• Love vs. loyalty

• Self-discovery

• Rebellion

• Fantasy romance

• Dangerous competition

• Hidden weapons

• Court politics

• A heroine questioning everything she's been taught

If you love fantasy romance where the heroine has approximately seventeen secrets, three identities, one dangerous mission, and absolutely no reason to trust anyone, this premise has plenty to offer.

🖤 DUTY VS. LOVE

For me, this is where Songbird of the Sorrows really becomes a great book-club discussion pick.

The question isn't simply whether Aella and Raven should be together.

The bigger question is:

What happens when loyalty to an organization conflicts with loyalty to yourself?

Aella has been trained to put duty first.

But what happens when completing the mission means sacrificing something or someone she deeply cares about?

At what point does obedience become self-betrayal?

Can you remain loyal to an organization when you no longer agree with its rules?

Is love actually a weakness?

Or is love the thing that finally gives Aella the courage to make her own choices?

Those are the questions I would absolutely want to bring to a book club table.

🪶 IDENTITY, CONTROL & FREEDOM

Underneath the fantasy, romance, and espionage, I think one of the most interesting themes is identity.

Aella has been given so many labels that it becomes difficult to determine which ones actually belong to her.

She's been told what she is.

She's been trained to behave a certain way.

She's been given expectations she never asked for.

And eventually, she has to decide what happens when the identity created for her no longer fits.

That's something I think many readers will connect with, even outside the fantasy setting.

We all have expectations placed on us.

We all have roles we're expected to fill.

And sometimes the hardest thing isn't becoming who we're supposed to be.

It's figuring out who we actually want to become.

🔥 WHAT STOOD OUT TO ME

🖤 Aella's Character Arc

Her struggle to separate who she is from who the Aviary created her to be gives the story an emotional core.

🐦 The Aviary

The secret organization adds mystery, danger, and plenty of opportunities for questions about loyalty and control.

❤️ The Romance

Aella and Raven's history creates plenty of tension, especially because their relationship directly conflicts with the rules they've been taught to follow.

👑 The Royal Trials

The combination of competition, court politics, danger, and espionage gives the story an entertaining fantasy-romance setup.

🕵️ The Secrets

There's enough mystery and deception to keep me questioning what characters know, what they're hiding, and who can actually be trusted.

⚔️ The Bigger Story

Because this begins a larger fantasy world, there are plenty of questions that leave room for the story to expand.

⚠️ A NOTE FOR READERS

As with any fantasy romance, readers will have different reactions to the pacing, romance, character development, and world-building.

I'd recommend checking the author's content warnings before beginning if you're a reader who prefers to know potentially difficult themes ahead of time.

And if you're reading this with a book club, I think that makes the book even more interesting to discuss because there are plenty of elements readers can have very different reactions to.

📚 WHO SHOULD READ SONGBIRD OF THE SORROWS?

I'd recommend this to readers who love:

Romantasy

Forbidden romance

Princesses with secrets

Spies and assassins

Royal court intrigue

Deadly competitions

Hidden identities

Political maneuvering

Strong female protagonists

Morally complicated decisions

Love vs. loyalty

Duty vs. desire

Fantasy worlds with larger stories waiting to unfold

If you like your fantasy romance with a healthy dose of danger, secrets, court politics, and romantic tension, this is definitely a book worth checking out.

🖤 FINAL THOUGHTS FROM THE PAGE LADIES BOOK CLUB

Songbird of the Sorrows is the kind of fantasy romance that gives you plenty to talk about after you've closed the book.

For me, the most compelling part isn't simply the romance or the espionage.

It's Aella's struggle to decide whether she will continue being the person everyone else created or finally choose who she wants to be.

She's been trained to obey.

She's been taught that love is dangerous.

She's been given a purpose.

But eventually, she has to confront the possibility that following orders isn't the same thing as living your own life.

Add in a secret organization, a princess turned spy, former flames, forbidden romance, deadly royal trials, court intrigue, hidden identities, a mysterious weapon, and plenty of secrets, and there's a lot here for fantasy romance readers and book clubs to sink their teeth into.

And honestly, I love a book that leaves me with questions I want to argue about afterward.

🕊️ WANT TO MAKE SONGBIRD OF THE SORROWS A BOOK CLUB EXPERIENCE?

The Page Ladies Book Club has created FREE mini kits for readers who want to dive deeper into the story!

🖤 FREE MINI KITS

Tap the link to download our free: Mini Kits

📖 Book Club Kit
🪶 Individual Book Club Member Reader Guide
🐦 Buddy Reader Kit
🖤 Solo Reader Kit

Want the full experience?

Join The First Editions for access to the complete Songbird of the Sorrows kits with expanded discussion guides, themed recipes, activities, reader guides, virtual and in-person meeting materials, door prizes, games, and everything you need to turn your reading experience into an unforgettable book club event.

Because at The Page Ladies Book Club, we believe reading the book is just the beginning.

💬 BOOKISH QUESTION

If you were Aella, would you choose duty, love, or your own freedom when those three things could no longer coexist? And why? 🖤🪶

On August 12th I had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Beth Durst at Northport Books about her new fantasy novel Sea of Charms. We talked about everyday heroism, the healing nature of genre fiction, and getting past the “Doomed Stage” in a rough draft. Here are some highlights from our conversation. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

ELLA: We’re here to celebrate your new book, Sea of Charms. I saw it was an instant bestseller. Congratulations!

SARAH: Thank you. Yes, I had no chill about that. The Wednesday a week after the book comes out, the New York Times list gets sent to your publisher around 4 p.m. and then it gets posted online around 7 p.m. So everybody knows that starting around 4 p.m., the phone may or may not ring. My cellphone lit up with my editor's name, and I got so excited that I forgot to answer. Then she told me the news that it had made the list, and I bounced for the rest of the night. It meant so much to know that my stories are resonating with people, because that's all I want to do: to share stories with people and give them a little hope, and make them smile, and take them away from whatever is going on in their world.

ELLA: Our heroine Marin is a supply runner. She has a lovely ship named the Silver. She makes pickups and deliveries for the Crescent Islands, and she is accompanied by her sea serpent Perri. This is definitely a book meant to be read by the water. So I'm curious, what is your relationship to the water? Are you a sailor? Do you have a sea serpent friend?

SARAH: The sea serpent was totally why I wrote this book. All the books in the Spell Shop world are stand-alones. You can read them in any order, but they grew out of each other. The Spell Shop has a monologue at the end in which Kaz is talking about his creator and is very very sad, and I'm like, ‘I can't leave very very sad. I need to know what her story is!’ So The Enchanted Greenhouse is her story, a librarian who has been turned into a statue as punishment for an illegal spell. She wakes up human again, and she's on this island that's filled with magical greenhouses. For plot reasons, a sailor arrives to deliver goods, and I just randomly gave her a sea serpent. I'm like, obviously, you're my next story. I couldn't just give her a sea serpent and not tell her story. So Perri is really the whole reason this book exists. 

But the water has always been a special place for me. I grew up in Massachusetts, and when you grow up in Massachusetts, you go down the Cape every weekend. Everything is hydrangeas and gray shingles. You have lobster rolls and eat taffy, and you bounce on a trampoline, and then you go home across the bridge. I took sailing lessons when I was a kid, so I do know how to sail. I watched many YouTube videos to refresh myself. I am terrible at sailing; I am not a relaxed sailor. I am convinced that the boom's going to hit me in the head and I'm going to lose consciousness and fall in the water. So I'm much more of a theoretical sailor, but I do know how it's done, and I love the ocean theoretically.

ELLA: Let’s talk a little bit more about Marin. She is a bit different from the previous heroines in this series. She is healing from a past difficult relationship, and she really values her independence and her autonomy. How did her arc come to you?

SARAH: At their core, all these books are very much about healing, which I'm not sure is something I realized when I was writing the first one. You discover what your themes are as you go along. Marin is starting broken, and I wanted to take her to a place where she's healed. I think of these characters' arcs as like the Japanese pottery, Kintsugi, where the vase gets broken and then the cracks are healed with gold, and it creates something beautiful. It's not that the pain is going away. It's that something beautiful is coming out of it. That's the arc I wanted to tell with this story. It was really important to me that we start in a place of pain and shadow, so that I could tell the story of someone coming out of that shadow and into the light, somebody who was so hurt she never wanted to be vulnerable again, yet finding her way to let people into her heart again. Setting sail is her way of being alone. She's got the whole world at her disposal, but she is alone, and she thinks that that's fine, and that's what she wants. I wanted her to discover that no, it's better if you sail with people, if you take people on your journey.

ELLA: It's better to have a crew! Over the course of the book, Marin meets a lovely man named Dax, and he is outrageously talented and kind, but also quite sheltered. He's been living in a prestigious music conservatory in Elysium, where he is training to be a grand master musician. Speaking of healing, I feel like Dax and Marin are perfect for each other because they are both healing, and they have a lot to learn from each other. What do you think makes them such a perfect pair for each other? 

SARAH: I mean, that's why I paired the two of them. She's alone on the sea, and he's surrounded by people yet still alone. His parents gave him to the conservatory when he was four years old with a destiny to become one of the greatest composers this land has ever known. He has a lot of healing too, to define for himself what life he wants. What I wanted with all of these books was to show a non-toxic relationship. People being nice to each other, a relationship built on kindness and respect. A relationship where they don't have to fix each other, they just get to heal alongside each other. They don't have to change it to fit into a certain type, like the end of Grease when Sandy has to change how she's looking at the end. None of that. They get to be more them. That's what I wanted. Two people that had the capacity to grow towards each other, rather than one of them fixing the other. 

ELLA: That's something I pay a lot of attention to in romance: the healthy, supportive relationships, and characters who have been through toxic, maybe controlling or abusive relationships — writing the perfect love interest for them, who can help them heal. Marin is able to identify that Dax has had so many choices taken away from him and help him connect with what he wants. Dax is able to reflect back at her that, like, ‘You're really cool and impressive, and you don't have to be alone, and people will treat you kindly.’ Everyone in this story is doing that to some degree.

SARAH: Yeah, they are. They're all on their own personal journey. Anybody that's lived a certain number of years has had their heart stomped on a few times. By somebody you've fallen for, by a friend, by a family member, by a teacher, by somebody random on the street that yells at you. Everybody's got some healing to do.

ELLA: Technically Marin is our hero, but there are a lot of heroes alongside her and in the background. There is a running theme of people showing up to support and fight for each other, even if they don't know each other. In this book, there are librarians preserving knowledge during the revolution. There are neighbors providing rescue and refuge for people fleeing the violence. 

In a scene I underlined very aggressively, Marin tells Ree the wax myrtle plant, “Sometimes just surviving is heroic enough.” I loved that quote. I'm curious how you think about heroism in this world.

SARAH: That is something I think about a lot. I've been finding myself playing with what it means to be brave, what it means to be strong. My answer that I've been coming back to again and again is: It is an act of bravery, not weakness, to ask for help. It is an act of strength to reach out a hand and hold somebody else's and go through this world together with someone, not even necessarily romantically, just holding someone else's hand and caring about them and carrying them a little, and they carry you. I think that is really beautiful. That is to me what is heroic. You know, Mr. Rogers is heroic. Steve Irwin is heroic. These people make the world better. I think that's what makes a hero. It's not necessarily saving a day. It's making your corner of the world a little better, making things better for the people you care about, for the people around you, for your community, for your family. 

I've been thinking about that in terms of what it means to live a happy life and pursue happiness, too. So often, happiness is held out as achieving your goals, being at the top of your field, hitting these milestones of having X-many kids and doing this-or-that in your community, winning awards, and I don't think that's it at all. That's nice, but those are just moments. I think living a happy life is going for your dreams alongside people you care about. I think it's just that simple and that difficult. That pursuit of hope that the world can be better, hope that you can be better, hope that people around you can be happier. That you can be happier. That is the point. That journey is the point, not the end destination. That's how I've been defining being a hero in these books: people who try, people who take that next step and then take another one, even when things are hard. That's what being a hero is to me.

ELLA: Speaking of brave, I love Ree, our wax myrtle. He wants to be a sailor, but he doesn’t know how to swim and has to learn from scratch. He throws himself in that water. There are these moments of real courage in the book, of the rebels in the background fighting against oppression, but also this plant is just really excited to follow his destiny.

SARAH: I like those moments of quiet heroism. I could have chosen to do this entire series as epic fantasy. I could have made it about the revolutionaries who throw the emperor out the window, and I would have still gotten to use the word defenestration, which is an awesome word. But that's not the story I wanted to tell in this time that we're in. I wanted to talk about people whose world is changing around them in an out of control way. How do they still find happiness? I wanted to talk about ordinary people.

ELLA: This is also a book about music and being a creative person. Dax is hard at work on his opus, and he has hit a block at the beginning of the story. He explains to Marin, “Creative work doesn’t follow a set of steps. You can open yourself to it, use techniques to unlock different sounds, experiment, but sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Like lighting a fire in a cold hearth. Sometimes the kindling doesn’t catch.” Sounds like someone who's experienced writer's block before. I'm curious what your creative process is like, and if it has changed over the course of your career.

SARAH: It definitely has. My very first novel at age 10 was a cross between The Wizard of Oz and GI Joe with 28 protagonists, and they all had telepathic transdimensional lions as their best friends. I spent most of the book naming the lions.

ELLA: Foreshadowing, actually. 

SARAH: I will always have the talking animals and plants. Creature companions are very important to me. But yes, every book has what my husband calls “The Doomed Stage,” where you get to a point and you're like, “Oh, I've made every decision wrong that I could possibly have made, and what are verbs?” He tells me I do this every single book. There's always going to be that moment where the vision in your head is disconnected from what you put on the page, and you're like, “Oh, but it could be so good, and yet it is not.” That's hard emotionally. You know that story is out there, but how do you get your skills to tell it? And oh, what if you tell it wrong? What if you go down the wrong path? What if you made wrong choices? And you just start second guessing yourself, even if it turns out you have made all the right choices. That little voice starts getting louder and louder and louder. All of a sudden, all you can do is eat chocolate and cheese, which helps. 

For me, the way out is through. This is not necessarily true of every writer, but for me, the way is to just keep writing, to tell myself that this will never appear in the real book. I'm just playing. To talk to my characters through my fingers and to go back to when I last liked it and start again fresh from there, saving the paragraph just in case I don't like it that way either, and write my way through it. That's how I've always gotten myself out of every little tangle. Because being a writer is so much about believing in yourself and quieting that voice, and believing that there's a story inside you that is worth telling. 

The thing that no one tells you when you start out is that everyone not only has a story inside them worth telling, but has thousands of stories inside them because we've all had unique lives. When you go home at the end of the day, the very first thing you do is turn your day into stories. You turn it into anecdotes. Everybody is processing an entire lifetime worth of that. So everyone has stories inside them. Everyone who likes books knows what you like in a book. You know what feels right in a plot. You know what feels good in a character. 

It's just a matter of convincing your brain you can do this, and letting it out, and then not critiquing it until you have a chance to fix it. That is extremely important, because once it comes out, it doesn't match what you think you're going to write, and you're like, oh, how sad. But you don't have to show it to anybody, and you get a chance to make it better. Keep the parts you like. Get rid of the parts you don't. Hone the different details so that each detail you choose is evocative of a larger story of a larger world and is heading in the direction that you want.

ELLA: Something else worth touching on is the way that Dax thinks about art and why art is so important to make, particularly in moments of unrest and big political conversations. He tells Marin that “All art—serious, frivolous, and everything in between—exists to say, ‘You are not alone.’ I think it’s equally, if not more important to share joy as it is to share pain.” This felt like a great case for reading and writing genre fiction. 

SARAH: I have to admit, in that quote, I definitely put something I believe straight into the character's mouth, which I don't always do. In this case, he and I really agreed. I feel that to my very soul: the harder the world gets, the more we need stories. The harder the world gets, the more we need joy. The idea of guilty pleasures and escapism being something that's a luxury is ridiculous, because the world is hard. Whether it's hard because the world is on fire, or hard because of personal reasons, you're hurling yourself against this brick wall. Every once in a while, I think you have to step back and let the bruises heal. That's what joyful fiction is for. It is to remind you that there's good in the world. That there's a reason you're fighting. Because people are capable of love! People are capable of peach pie! People are capable of loving the imaginary, of dreaming of impossible things. I think that's what joyful art exists for — to remind us that life is worth living.

ELLA: What else do you hope that readers take away from Sea of Charms?

SARAH: Hope! That's the key word. In every single one of my books, whether it's cozy fantasy, epic, supernatural, thriller, fairytale, or kids' books, teen books, adult books… In all of them, the core is hope. I think that's one of the things that fantasy does better than almost any other kind of literature: It allows you to hope in a time of impossibility. It allows you to see that dark times can be overcome. It is a literature of hope and empowerment. I've always loved when you close one of your favorite fantasy books and it feels like magic is just right around the corner. That if you just look the right way, the magic is there for you. That's what I want people to get out of the book, that idea that magic belongs to everybody. Everyone can have hope in their lives that things will get better, and that they are strong enough to see it through to the next day.

Y'all, I had a really good reading week! I also have a poll for you in this post. Please fill it out and help me figure out how best to expand what I write about in this space. Thank you! On to what I read last week! Books marked with a * were gifted to me.

Chaos by Constance Fay* - I'm a big fan of this space romance series, but unfortunately this has been my least favorite installment. The plot was great (a prison break!) but the romance was kind of nothingburger. There was just instant attraction that didn't really evolve much beyond that, and he had a weird worshipful stance toward her. I do still hope that there are more books to come in this series (Victory's story when!)

This Is How You Lose The Time War - My sixth reread of this book. Last year I wrote a short piece for The Book Tour Project about why I reread it every year, and you can read that here: https://thebooktourproject.substack.com/p/mi-newsletter-es-su-newsletter-1

Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel* - Cracking open a new Mandel book feels like opening a Christmas present. EXIT PARTY is both dreamlike and filled with anger and grief. It's the rare character-forward novel that kept me turning the pages, needing to know what happens to these people. The way the POVs changed could have been repetitive, but the overlaps were there for a reason, and we still found out new information with each change. Days after finishing, I am still noodling over these characters, their actions, and their reactions to their own actions (sorry for the vagueness, I don't want to spoil it). And then alongside all this personal turmoil, EXIT PARTY is also a rumination on how a country slides into authoritarianism and state surveillance.

Sometimes a book hits you at the right moment. Golden Boy was that book for me. I love dogs and desperately love my very opinionated one, so this story of a girl doing what she could to make her dog better hit home. I received an early copy of this from Simon Teen, and thought the premise was intriguing. Once I read it, my brain started turning to find two comps to describe the book. Golden Boy is the iconic 2000s movie, Life-Size, meets Because of Winn-Dixie. I found myself laughing at so many parts and just enjoyed the story.

I'm so happy to have had the opportunity to ask A.J. Symon about his debut!

About Golden Boy

Science-obsessed, teen-genius Emma Branch is used to being the odd one out—in her family, among her classmates, and in her small town that only ever seems to care about football. She doesn’t mind being all alone; in fact, she prefers it. Besides, who needs friends when she has a best friend already—her golden retriever, Hudson.
But when Hudson gets into an accident, Emma can’t bear to lose her only friend. Luckily, she’s been working on an experimental substance for her school science project that could help him out. All it was supposed to do was heal Hudson, not…turn him human?!
Emma, her family, and the whole town is about to learn just how a golden retriever can change hearts and minds for the better—that is, after causing a big, old mess first.

About A.J. Symon

A.J. Symon lives with his family in Barnesville, Georgia, where proceeds from his work will keep several golden retrievers in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. His ultimate dream is to create a foundation that helps families pay for advanced veterinary care provided by places like UGA’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital so that no one ever has to choose between going into debt or saving a beloved family member.

Author Interview With A.J. Symon

 How would you describe your book in 2 sentences?

Golden Boy is ultimately a story about friendship and family and seeing the world through another person’s (or dog’s) eyes. Sometimes it takes a dog to remind us what it means to be human. In Golden Boy, when the beloved family golden retriever becomes human, a teenage girl’s relationships with herself and her family transform in ways she never thought possible.

What inspired you to write young adult?

I knew I wanted to write a book for young people, but I didn’t gear it specifically for young adult versus middle grade. I just wrote the story that was in my heart, and fortunately, Simon & Schuster saw the potential, and they decided which audience it was right for.

Did you have a favorite you read while growing up?

My favorite young adult book growing up was Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume. I was amazed by her ability to capture a young adolescent boy’s experience so accurately.

What was your writing process like?

I wrote this as a way to deal with the grief of losing Chip, my service dog of ten years, so it just poured out of me very quickly. It was almost like automatic writing. All the grief and sadness poured out of me onto the page and came out through the mouths of my characters. And then all of the joy that Chip gave me, all the lessons he taught me, and ten years of unconditional love poured out, too, and I started to feel better. I think Chip's spirit lives on in this story. So I hope that this book lifts the reader up the way that he lifted me up all those years.

What sort of research did you have to do for Golden Boy? What was the most surprising thing you came across?

I wanted to make the story feel as if it could be possible for a dog to become human, so I did a lot of research into genetics. I discovered that dogs and humans share almost 90% of the same DNA, so we're almost cousins in that respect. Also, dogs only express about half of their genes, so it seemed plausible that if Emma, the main character, found a way to turn on some of those unexpressed genes, then maybe a dog could evolve into a human being overnight.

What was it like to create a character like Emma and her science experiments?

There is a lot of me in Emma. I was a big nerd growing up, and my dog was my only true friend. So I had to dig deep into my own experience to create her emotional life—or lack of emotional life. Again, I did a lot of research into genetics to make her serum sound plausible. Also, both of my parents were chemists who taught at Emory University, and I grew up around science labs, so I was pretty familiar with the setting already.

There were so many ways to write a dog becoming a human. How did you decide to write Hudson the way you did?

I will probably embarrass myself with this answer, but I know I’m not the only dog lover who does this. I’ve always imagined what my dogs would be like if they were human. I have full-on conversations with my dog all day long, and I do his voice and mine. In fact, I’ve created voices for every dog I’ve ever had. I’m sure that I would appear an absolute lunatic to anyone who happened to witness these exchanges. So I have years of experience under my belt imagining what a dog might say in everyday situations.

Would you want any of your dogs to be human? And why?

Only when they’re sick. Dogs are so stoic when they don’t feel well. It would be great if they could tell you what they were going through so you could help them. But otherwise, no. I want my dogs to be dogs.

Your book deals with family complexities and the far reaches of grief. What was it like to put those subjects into a book?

It was healing for me on both fronts. I guess most writers use their personal lives as fodder for their fiction. My family was not comfortable expressing our feelings, and that’s the main issue between Emma and her father. And then I worked through a lot of the grief losing Chip through writing about Emma and Hudson’s relationship. The great thing about fiction is that you can fix things in your stories that you have no control over in real life.

You’re a avid dog lover—what dogs in your life inspired Hudson?

Hudson is based on Chip, the service dog I lost, and his father, who is the real-life Hudson. So the character of Hudson is an amalgam of both of them.

Who is your favorite character in the book?

That’s a tough one. I really like Emma because I understand her so well. I also love Hudson because he’s so sweet and innocent. And this may be surprising, but I also like Emma’s father Wayman, who I know is really gruff and brusque and not particularly likable on the surface. But that all comes from his own pain and fear. He’s a damaged individual just trying to do the best he can with the tools he was given.

What is your favorite scene in the book?

I love the scene where Hudson the dog learns how his new human body works. That was fun to write. I also have a weakness for heart moments. There are a couple of those that still give me a lump in my throat. I just love it when characters find new ways to connect.

What’s a recent book you’ve read and loved?

I’m re-reading the Talisman series by Stephen King and Peter Straub because the last book is coming out soon, and I needed to remind myself what happened. My stories tend to be set in the “real world” where some extraordinary event happens (like a dog becoming human), so I’m always awed by other writers’ ability to create full-on fantasy worlds with rules and hierarchies and all of that.

How do you hope readers feel after finishing your book?

My hope is that it lifts readers up. They’ll laugh a lot and may even shed a tear or two. It’s perfect if you just want to be entertained, feel good, and smile. But the book has a lot of layers, so even though I wrote it for young readers, anyone of any age can relate. You can read it just for the funny story, but it also deals with family relationships, friendship, honesty, bullying, grief… A kid who picks the book up today can enjoy it one way, then a few years down the road can discover completely new things in it. And even more when they’re an adult. It’s definitely something that will get the whole family talking.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on both a prequel and a sequel. Not sure which will be done first. But there is definitely much more to come. I’m excited to share them with readers.

Thank you so much A.J. for allowing me to ask you questions about your book. If you haven't already, grab a copy of Golden Boy.

This week has been a weird combination of wanting to do absolutely nothing and somehow still getting a lot done.

Which is pretty much how I operate.

I see people talk about daily writing goals all the time, and I have finally accepted that I am never going to be one of those people.

There are days when I can barely make myself open my computer. Sometimes I will go more than a week without writing anything at all. Then something clicks and I'll write thousands of words in a day or finish an entire draft in a few weeks.

For a long time, I thought I needed to fix that.

Now I'm trying to work with it instead.

Depression, anxiety, trauma, and disability don't care about your carefully organized productivity schedule. Some days I have energy. Some days I don't. When I get a window where my brain actually wants to create, I've learned to take advantage of it.

And this week, I did.

I've been working on Werewolf Summer, the second Woods Bay book, and getting back into that world has been exactly what I needed. I've also been doing the decidedly less glamorous author things like line edits, metadata, book descriptions, anthology work, and repeatedly wondering where the hell my print proofs are.

Because apparently publishing a book means spending at least 30% of your life asking, "Why hasn't this shipped yet?"

There were some really good things mixed in too.

Two of our Death by TBR Books titles hit #1 in their IngramSpark subject sales rankings, which was one of those moments where I actually had to stop and remind myself that I'm allowed to be proud of what I'm building.

I am very bad at that.

Usually I accomplish something and immediately move on to the seventeen things still unfinished.

I'm trying not to do that as much.

I've also continued turning part of my house into the nostalgia cave of my dreams.

There's now an old CRT television involved.

VHS tapes.

DVDs.

Old magazines.

Movie tickets.

And apparently I am one impulse purchase away from completely recreating a teenager's bedroom from 2001.

This is fine.

Actually, it's more than fine. It's making me ridiculously happy.

I've been thinking a lot about what I wrote last week about wanting more nostalgia, more movies, more reading, and less time staring at my phone. I'm still figuring out what that looks like in practice, but I can already tell I'm happier when the internet isn't the main event of my day anymore.

I'm watching old movies on an old TV.

I'm collecting things I loved when I was younger.

I'm writing when I actually have something in me to write.

I'm letting some emails sit there.

The harder part has been giving myself permission to have low-energy days without turning them into evidence that I'm failing.

This was a rough mental health week.

There were days when depression felt heavy enough that accomplishing anything seemed ridiculous.

So I'm trying to count things differently.

Did I write something this week?

Yes.

Did I work on my books?

Yes.

Did I spend time doing things that genuinely made me happy?

Yes.

Did I survive the days that sucked?

Also yes.

Maybe that gets to be enough.

I don't need a daily word count.

I don't need to post three times a day.

I definitely don't need to understand whatever Instagram's algorithm is doing.

I need to create when I can.

Rest when I can't.

Watch horror movies.

Read books.

Hang out with my cats.

I'm Stephanie Rose. Horror author, publisher, house goblin, cat lady, Halloween queen, and horror maven. I'm currently living somewhere between 1999 and 2003 whenever possible, and frankly, I think I'm staying here.