I’m delighted to share that Wake the Wild Creatures is now on sale wherever books are sold! It’s available in hardcover and ebook from Little, Brown—and in audio from Hachette Audio!
I want to thank many of you for pre-ordering the book and buying it this first on-sale week, and for all the wonderful people who went to my book tour events! My special thanks to my conversation partners at each event who brought such beautiful, thought-provoking questions: Emily X.R. Pan, Robin Talley, Malinda Lo, Libba Bray, Kelis Rowe, and Kate Pentecost. I’m eternally grateful to each of you for being there at my side. 💜 I’m so grateful to my publisher Little, Brown for sending me on a tour during release week so I could connect with readers and celebrate the book!
Now that the book has entered the wild, I wanted to share here some interviews I did about it…
Here are highlights from a few interviews, with links to where you can read the whole piece:
For Writer’s Digest, I shared about how a piece of art inspired Wake the Wild Creatures and how authors should always be ready for surprises: “Authors in traditional publishing should always be ready for upheaval, as many of us who have been in this business for a while have come to know. . . . Anything can change at any moment in this business. From this experience I keep reminding myself to focus only on the parts of this process I can control: the story I write, the effort I can put into sharing it with others, and, as a safeguard, keeping my eye on writing the next book.”
⭐️ Read the whole interview in Writer’s Digest.
For the Nerd Daily, I shared about first discovering my love of writing by writing a story about an alien family from Venus and about what readers will find in Wake the Wild Creatures: “Readers will find flawed and fierce women and girls in this book, and a healthy amount of female rage. There’s also an element of magic or, perhaps, magical thinking connected to the natural world. This is a story for survivors, for dreamers, for outcasts, and for anyone who wants to consider living a different kind of life of their own making.”
⭐️ Read the whole Q&A on the Nerd Daily.
For YA Books Central, I shared the specific way I know when a book is finished and the ways my teenage narrator is like me and unlike me: “As a child, I used to run free in the woods where I grew up, and I often felt like an outsider in the rest of the world. But the difference between me and Talia is that as a teenager I desperately longed to escape the mountains for the big city, and I made a life for myself amid the noise and concrete. Talia would never do something so terrible. I understand her and why she wishes to stay, but I don’t think she could ever understand me.”
⭐️ Read the whole author chat on YA Books Central.
And finally for School Library Journal‘s Teen Librarian Toolbox, I talked about how your dream doesn’t have a deadline and it’s never too late, and I shared something that feels very important when it comes to this book and the place I write about inside it: “There is a line early on in Wake the Wild Creatures when my protagonist, Talia, defends her home from people who do not understand it and says, ‘It’s not a cult. It’s a community.’ . . . To me, the heart of this book is about community and about what the Neves stands for. This is a story of the building of a community when one didn’t exist, and being brave enough to think of society in a new and different way. It’s also about rebuilding when things are broken but are worth saving. What I most hope is that this book will find the readers who see what Talia sees.”
⭐️ Read the whole Fast Five Interview on SLJ’s Teen Librarian Toolbox.
I hope these little snippets entice you you to buy the book or order it from your local library! Thank you to all who are reading!