Novel

“The Best Advice is Free”

The digital revolution has irrevocably changed the world. It has given a voice to those who once suffered in silence. And even the poorest among us now have access to a wealth of information. It seems the Silicon Valley pioneers have made John Lennon’s dream a reality by giving power to the people.

Unfortunately, as history has long proved, power corrupts. According to the Pew Research Centre, fake news, misinformation, and propaganda account for 71% of online content. And every snake-oil salesman and extremist now has a platform from which to spread their lies and hate speech.

We now have a generation that receives news from social media feeds and guidance from internet celebrities. Influencers rake in millions from product endorsements, while self-proclaimed gurus sell ‘life-changing’ courses.

We’re all familiar with the proverb ‘You get what you pay for,’ which assumes a relationship between price and quality. In most cases, this idiom rings true. Except, when it comes to advice.

How many people who bought ‘How to write a bestseller?’ have gone on to accomplish this feat? If self-help worked we wouldn’t require psychiatry and the educational system. Or, the self-improvement industry! In today’s world, most guidance you pay for through clicks and credit card details is at best unhelpful. At worst, it’s downright dangerous.

The best advice you get in this life doesn’t cost a dime. Why? Because it comes from people who care. Family. Friends. Teachers. The people who are invested in your well-being. The people who sense when something is not right and want to help. The people who know you.

But how can teachers and parents hope to compete with perma-tanned influencers and their photo-shopped perfection? Is it possible to impart wisdom without hi-tech visual stimuli and ambient mood music? How do you lead pliable young minds away from the enticing mirage of misinformation?

Long before the internet turned the globe into an online community, hell, long before the printing press brought mass-produced wisdom to the public, humanity had a tried and tested way of getting their message across. Myths. Legends. Parables. Fables. Novels. From Aesop to Hemingway, those who seek to enlighten minds do so through the medium of story.

Our way of life may have radically changed with time, but the human condition remains unaltered. Holden Caulfield’s alienation and battle with mental illness still resonates with teenagers 74 years later. And, while nobody makes mix-tapes anymore, Charlie’s struggle to fit in is universal. Unfortunately, Starr Carter’s experience is all too familiar to millions of Americans.

But stories do more than teach, they offer solace. They let readers know they are not alone. Others have felt the same emotions and had similar thoughts. Moreover, books provide hope. Life can be unfair. Justice only exists in comics and superhero movies. The universe doesn’t operate on moral principles. But that doesn’t mean we can’t fight to improve society. That we can’t find meaning and fulfilment in our existence. The billions that went before us did and we can too. It’s all in the stories.

So how do you upstage a bling-dripping influencer sat poolside selling the impossible dream? Recommend a good book. How do you communicate with a kid who has shut themselves off from everyone? Leave a book on their desk.

Will they thank you? Does it matter; The best advice is given without expecting anything in return.

Publishing March 17th, 2025

About the Book: For Aaron, this world is an unfathomable puzzle. Haunted by disturbing dreams, he drifts through empty days, shielding himself behind sarcasm and cynical wit. After being expelled, he sees an opportunity to rewrite his future at a new school. Connecting over a shared love for De Niro films with Robbie, an aspiring actor of Jamaican descent, he unexpectedly finds his companion piece, one person who truly understands him. Together, they navigate the chaotic waters of adolescence, from dramatic first dates to sociopathic bullies, iconic concerts, and a dead body.

With adulthood fast approaching, the crushing weight of societal pressures and devastating revelations threaten to shatter their unique bond. Confronted by the ghosts of his past, Aaron must choose whether to blaze bright or fade away.

A funny and poignant meditation on the forces that shape us, The Drowners is an ode to that time when your tolerance for hypocrisy was zero and life seemed infinite.

About the Author: Hailing from the cold, wet streets of Dublin, David Anderson is the author of The Drowners.

Like a Hummingbird, after college, he migrated south to warmer climes. Namely, sunny Spain, where he teaches English to students who are confused by his Irish brogue. In his early thirties, he caught the writing bug.

He has written several articles for the GMS website about his other obsession in life, football. In 2021, he won a YA Watty award for his novel The Art of Breathing Underwater.

Follow David on Twitter/X, Instagram, and Goodreads!

Thank you, David, for this great advice, also free!

“Exercises for Being a Professional Daydreamer”

I love magic. I always have. I always will.

I’ve always also loved reading, because if I can’t do magic myself, I can at least experience it through stories. When I was a kid, my favorite books ranged from Dorrie the Little Witch to Elfquest to the Forgotten Realms tie-in series to fairy tales to mythology from around the world. I ate up the comic books my parents bought me, a series called Amar Chitra Katha, which retold various Indian myths and legends in a colorful, easily digestible form.

But I’m an adult now, and I still absolutely believe in the need for wonder.

So when I started writing my own novels and short stories, of course they were going to be fantasy. Girls who eat colors out of things. Serpentine-human shape-shifters. Candles with rainbow flames. All the shimmering things I want in my life, and if I can’t have them, then you can bet I’m going to write about them! In beautifully detailed, evocative prose, no less, so I can fully immerse the reader in the jewel box of my imagination.

I type these words having just returned from a walk around a nearby pond on a winter’s afternoon. The liquid surface was frozen over, no ducks or geese in sight, with pristine, glittering white snow adorning the withered fallen leaves on the shore. The pond itself shone in the sun, rippling like frosted glass in a window. Above, the sky was a cerulean so deep, I wanted to eat it, like Nilesh does on his visit to the magical Night Market in my newest novel, Divining the Leaves. The buttery gold of the sun’s rays felt like a hug, and the day itself was evocative of the winter elixir Ridhi samples at the Night Market when she goes there to vend her natural perfumes. I could also picture the sky and the snow swept together into a winter queen’s gown, sewn trimmed with sharp icicles like appliqués.

That may sound ethereal and even whimsical, and it is. Whimsy is a lovely thing. The trick, however, is more practical; I trained myself to think like that. To find the wonder in the world around us, even when things seem utterly mundane. It’s so important to me to offer experiences of the numinous in my books, but in order to do that, I first had to learn to do it in my own life.

It’s when we push ourselves to envision the grand and impossible that we can start to devise new solutions in our own universe, both real and fictional. A handy habit to have, if you ask me. *hands around little cups of winter elixir for inspiration*

So now it’s your turn! Try these prompts to get you deep into the heart of your own wonder.

Exercises for being a professional daydreamer:

• What fantasy novel or movie would you step into, and why?
• If you were designing your own magical world, what would it look like? What kinds of plants and animals and people?
• What would be unique to that world? How? Describe it using all five (or more!) senses.
• If you could have any enchanted power or potion, what would you pick? (Sure, you can have more than one. In fact, you can have as many as you can hold in your mind! It’s magic, after all.)
• If there were one thing you want to see changed in our world, how would you do it in your imaginary one?
• If you were to go outside right now, where would you spot magic even if nobody else did?

Publishing March 4th, 2025 by HarperTeen

About the Book: From critically acclaimed author Shveta Thakrar comes a beautifully imagined contemporary fantasy about two teens, one a believer of magic who yearns to belong, the other a skeptic searching for an escape, who find themselves embroiled in a twisty world of court intrigue when they venture into a forest ruled by yakshas, mysterious woodland spirits drawn from Hindu and Buddhist folklore.

Plant-loving Ridhi Kapadia and popular Nilesh Batra were friends once.

Now, seventeen and alone, Ridhi blends natural perfumes, wears flower crowns, and wanders her local woods, listening for the leafy whispers of her beloved trees. Pleading for the yakshas to admit her into their enchanted forest kingdom, where she knows she truly belongs.

After learning his parents’ perfect marriage is a sham and getting suspended from school, a heartsick Nilesh lands at Ridhi’s doorstep—the last thing either of them wants. So when a pretty yakshini offers him the distraction of magic, the same magic he mocked Ridhi for believing in, he jumps at it.

Furious, Ridhi strikes a bargain with a noblewoman named Sulochana. In return for helping restore her reputation, Sulochana will turn Ridhi into the yakshini she yearns to be—and teach her to divine the trees’ murmurs.

But when Nilesh ends up trapped in the yakshas’ realm, Ridhi realizes the leaves might be telling a disturbing story about the forest her heart is rooted in—one that, even if the two of them band together, threatens to shred the future like so many thorns.

About the Author: Shveta Thakrar is a part-time nagini and full-time believer in magic. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Enchanted Living, Uncanny magazine, A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, and Toil & Trouble. Her debut young adult fantasy novel, Star Daughter, was a finalist for the 2021 Andre Norton Nebula Award, and her second and third novels, The Dream Runners and Divining the Leaves, take place in the same universe. Her adult fantasy novella, Into the Moon Garden, is available as an original audiobook from Audible. When not spinning stories about spider silk and shadows, magic and marauders, and courageous girls illuminated by dancing rainbow flames, Shveta crafts, devours books, daydreams, travels, bakes, and occasionally even plays her harp.

Thank you, Shveta, for promoting dreaming and magic!

“Classic Remixes: On Learning to Appreciate Jane Austen”

I have a confession to make: My first encounter with the work of Jane Austen was not with any of her books, but with the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Maybe it’s because I am now a writer, but this fact often elicits shock and occasionally horror when people learn that I first fell in love not with Jane Austen’s words on the page, but with (gasp) a TV series.

However, I am not at all embarrassed to admit this! I can still remember spending a rainy day at a friend’s house sometime in the sixth or seventh grade, and her mom pulling out a box set and introducing me and my friend to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, as played by Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. We watched two episodes (on VHS tape because yes, I am that old) before I had to go home. I begged my mom to take me to the library so I could check out the rest and see how it ended.

From there, I watched Emma (the 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow version), and of course the incredible Sense and Sensibility, starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, as well as the 1999 Mansfield Park. I don’t think that I put two and two together that all of these period movies and shows that I brought to every sleepover were, you know, written by the same person until a couple of years later, when I first attempted to read Pride and Prejudice. (It did not go well–there was much skipping around.) From there, I muddled my way through Emma, and then got about twenty-five pages into Sense and Sensibility before giving up. The prose was dense, there wasn’t nearly as much dialogue as I’d have liked, and Austen spent an awful lot of time summarizing scenes that I’d rather watch unfold on the screen.

I wouldn’t pick up any of Austen’s work for another four years.

In the meantime, I continued to seek out adaptations. I saw Keira Knightly as Elizabeth Bennet in theaters. I fell in love with Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood retelling with exciting singing and dance numbers. I read YA Austen retellings and Austen adjacent books, such as Austenland by Shannon Hale. Sometimes, I struggled with feeling like I wasn’t a “true” fan because I enjoyed adaptations more than the source material.

I was in college before I attempted to read another Austen novel, and this time it clicked. With an ingrained knowledge and appreciation for Austen’s stories and characters, as well as the reading stamina that I honed over years of reading novels that didn’t intimidate me, I actually loved the Austen novels I picked up. I had a better understanding of the Regency period and the social commentary, and that allowed me to laugh at the humor and get swept up in the romance. And with every reading since, I only fall more in love with Austen’s writing and her distinct outlook on social class and society. I appreciate her much more now, as an adult, than I did as a young teen. But without the adaptations and retellings that I consumed by the bucketful from ages 11-18, I’m not sure I ever would have been the Austen fan I am today.

For this reason, I don’t get upset or offended when readers sheepishly tell me that they’ve never read any of Austen’s work, and it’s why when I set out to write my first novel, Pride and Premeditation, it was very important to me to write a satisfying retelling that could also stand on its own, especially for younger readers who might not have had the chance or have the inclination to pick up a more challenging classic. My version is, admittedly, a bit unconventional as I mash up Austen’s classic characters with a murder mystery plot, but it is exactly the sort of thing I would have inhaled at age 13, and I had a lot of fun writing it, even as I worried about whether or not it would find an audience beyond Austenites.

Luckily for me, I needn’t have worried and I am delighted every time I get a note from a reader telling me that they enjoyed my books. More often than not, this is also followed by an admission that they’ve never read the original classic. And that is okay with me. Not every teen is going to gravitate toward the classics just because they’re classics. (Heck, not every adult reader wants to read the classics!) Retellings pique readers’ interest with fun and approachable twists on the classic stories, and especially for younger readers, they give them the confidence and framework to perhaps pick up the original classic someday. I’d even go so far as to say that genre mashups of classics and fresh retellings are what keep those classics relevant and talked about–not necessarily assigning them in high school English class.

I’ve seen the retellings to classics pipeline play out in real life, too. When I was a teen librarian, a few years before my first book was released, I ran a teen book club. We picked the book A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro, a fantastic gender-bent retelling of Sherlock Holmes. Most of my teens had never even read Sherlock Holmes before, and at least one didn’t know the legendary character at all. But they all enjoyed that book, and at the end of the session, a few of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books were checked out of the collection. That wasn’t my end goal, but it was satisfying nonetheless.

And similarly, now that I have my own classic retelling series out in the world, I hope that teen readers pick it up because they’re intrigued by the premise and curious about the plot and characters. I hope the idea of a genre mashup gives them a thrill, and that it sparks an interest that wasn’t there previously. Because no matter how you come to these characters, whether it’s through a YouTube webseries or a musical or a YA novel, we can all agree on one thing: Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are a pretty iconic couple.

Published November 12th, 2024 by HarperCollins

About the Book: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that London’s first female solicitor in possession of the details of a deadly crime, must be in want of a suspect.

The tenacious Lizzie Bennet has earned her place at Longbourn, her father’s law firm. Her work keeps her busy, but luckily she often has help from (and steals occasional kisses with) Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, a stern but secretly soft-hearted solicitor at Pemberley.

Lizzie is hired to investigate a deadly warehouse fire, and to find the mysterious woman who was spotted at the scene moments before the flames took hold. But when the case leads her to the sitting room of a woman Darcy once proposed marriage to, the delicate balance between personal and professional in their relationship is threatened.

Questions of the future are cast aside when the prime suspect is murdered and Lizzie’s own life is threatened. As the body count rises, and their suspicions about what was really going on in the warehouse grow, the pressure is on for Lizzie and Darcy to uncover the truth.

Lizzie and Darcy are back for more suspense, danger, and romance in this first in a duology spinoff of the Jane Austen Murder Mysteries!

About the Author: Tirzah Price grew up on a farm in Michigan, where she read every book she could get her hands on and never outgrew her love for YA fiction. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a former bookseller and librarian. Now, she’s a senior contributing editor at Book Riot, and co-host of the Hey YA podcast. When she’s not writing, reading, or thinking about YA books, she splits her time between experimenting in the kitchen and knitting enough socks to last through winter. She lives in Iowa.

Thank you, Tirzah, for sharing the resurgence of the love of Austen with us!