Swinging by to talk to us today is Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban, author of Two Moon Princess - my review for that will be posted on the 24th, but I have to admit, I kind of liked it.
In this coming-of-age story set in a medieval kingdom, Andrea is a headstrong princess longing to be a knight who finds her way to modern-day California. But her accidental return to her family's kingdom and a disastrous romance brings war, along with her discovery of some dark family secrets.
So here; settle in for a fantastic blast to that past...
Into The Past
Since an early age, I was an avid reader. When I was very young I loved Fairy Tales. I loved Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and any other story with a princess in it, but my favorite Fairy tale was The Ugly Duckling, the story of a swan that does not fit in when he is expected to look and behave like a duckling.
I strongly believe that the worst form of abuse is to be defined by others. It creates a sense of inadequacy and powerlessness that is very difficult to express or understand. A sense that something is wrong with you because you are not what you are supposed to be. Yet you can't do anything about it, for how can you change who you really are? Both the patriarchal, authoritarian society I grew up in (Spain in the 1960s and 1970s) and the books I read contributed to this displacement.
There were no YA or MG novels, back then, no books with strong female protagonists either. The main characters were always boys/men, the girls/women's characters, girlfriends, mothers or prostitutes or behave like boys. So although I read voraciously as a tween (Jules Vernes, Enid Blyton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Alejandro Dumas, Charles Dickens) I didn't get a sense of self from my readings.
I would have totally related to books like Judy Blume's coming of age stories, Patricia C. Wrede's The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Margaret Peterson Haddix's Just Ella or Running Out of Time, Karen Cushman's Catherine, Called Birdy, and Rosemary Sutcliff's Song for a Dark Queen.
During my teen years I read a lot. Among many others, I read Jane Austen, Daphne du Maurier (terrible female protagonists, I see now), Leo Tolstoy, the French existentialists (Sartre, Camus), and Science fiction authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke.
Some of the books I would have loved as a teen are:The Thief/The Queen of Attolia/The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner, The Shamer's Chronicles by Lene Kaaberball, and The Novels of the Kingdom by Cynthia Voigt. I didn't read much in my early twenties, too busy studying and living. I do remember loving Frank Herbert's Dune, and The Lord of the Rings that, for some reason, (maybe a new translation, or maybe because it had been forbidden during Franco's dictatorship (Franco died in 1975 and until then books and movies had been censured)) was very popular at the time. And, finally, I discovered Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing, my first introduction to women searching for their own voice.
My taste in books changed as I grew up but I have retained a weakness for fantasy stories. both as a reader and as a writer. I like female characters that, like Andrea, the protagonist of my YA novel Two Moon Princess, defy what is expected of them (the Ugly Ducking theme), yet they remain true to themselves. Female characters that are strong, resourceful and do not base their worth on their looks or on their boyfriends' status. I do not like female characters that behave like boys, nor those that need a boy to rescue them.
Cinderella, Snow White and Aurora excluded, of course, for old times' sake.