Naomi Novik

And then I realized I really didn't enjoy reading those books.

What I enjoyed was fantasy by authors like Naomi Novik, and Erin Morgenstern, Night Circus.

And I wanted to write something that would be fun and whimsical, something that you could call charming, something that would have a sense of humor, something that would make people feel happy and maybe black out a

little, or at least smart.

So I think it might be the same reader.

Maybe also look at some of Naomi Novik's, Catherine Arden, and also Robin Hobb is having a real moment for us in the store now.

And I think that Robin Hobb books might work.

Thank you, Emily.

There's a lot of interest overlap there.

And there's been some, again, Naomi Novik has done Uprooted, for instance.

It has like a strange detour where the protagonist goes where the love interest isn't, which you wouldn't normally do in a romance.

But otherwise, it just feels like straight up romantic.

Secret History.

Well, I never tried to read that, but I didn't like The Atlas Six, the Naomi Novik books.

I know that they have magic in them as well, but they were just too heavy on the dark.

They just didn't do it for me.

And so if it is a struggle to figure out where do I begin my story or in the process of revising, where do I cut to or what do I need to add? I think that's the question of if if someone only has one to two pages to read, does that promise the rest of the story? That's your agreement with the reader, right? And it's subtle and fun.

I think one of my favorite series recently was Naomi Novik's Escalamance trilogy.

Absolutely love it.

And that opening line of Orion Lake needs to die.

The institution itself is the villain.

But Naomi Novik takes it to an entirely different level of hostility in her 2020 novel A Deadly Education, the first of the Scholomance trilogy.

Oh, the Scholomance.

This is where it gets really intense.

But that was, that was what they saw in it that they wanted to correct.

And so Naomi Novik's, uh, Scholomance series, which is about a school for magical education, um, but a very dark one, and a very twisted one, and a very dystopian one, is a direct response, and she has said so, to the Harry Potter novels, um, and to particularly the way that magic works in Harry Potter, right? So I think that some of that dystopian fiction sort of popularity, um, in the young adult world was spurred as a reaction and a response to Harry Potter.

Uh, jumping on the bandwagon, of course, 'cause young adults are buying books by the thousands, by the millions, right? Let's get in on it.

Um, but also because people felt that there was maybe, um, there were themes that, that Harry Potter was not addressing that they wanted to address, um.

Uh, so that kind of like...

And Naomi Novik, I read much later, but, um, her Temeraire books do something similar, and I think that idea of dragons where they're not people, but they are, I guess, horses or ships, you know.

Um, yeah, I think it's, that influence is there deeply for me.

Um, yeah, so that's, that's the kind of thing.

It exists to protect its students.

Naomi Novik's The Scholomance series takes that exact premise and inverts it entirely.

It shatters the illusion completely.

Like, the school in The Scholomance is not a bubble.