cindy pon, YA author of Silver Phoenix and Fury of the Phoenix (Greenwillow Books). Serpentine is out and Sacrifice releases 9/27/16 (Month9books). WANT (Simon Pulse) releases 6/13/17. chinese brush student of over a decade. i name squat here on tumblr. official author website is cindypon.com.
So, what else do you want to know?
I am beyond thrilled to share the RUSE cover with you!! The cover art is by Jason Chan, and as much as I loved the WANT cover, I think my adoration of RUSE matches that!! Jason is an incredible artist, and I feel so lucky!! I think what I love most about the cover is that it features a bespectacled heroine!! :D WANT is currently $5.99 where ebooks are sold, so pick it up if you haven’t yet!!
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In near-future Shanghai, a group of teens have their world turned upside down when one of their own is kidnapped in this action-packed follow-up to the “positively chilling” (The New York Times) sci-fi thriller Want.
Jason Zhou, his friends, and Daiyu are still recovering from the aftermath of bombing Jin Corp headquarters. But Jin, the ruthless billionaire and Daiyu’s father, is out for blood. When Lingyi goes to Shanghai to help Jany Tsai, a childhood acquaintance in trouble, she doesn’t expect Jin to be involved. And when Jin has Jany murdered and steals the tech she had refused to sell him, Lingyi is the only one who has access to the encrypted info, putting her own life in jeopardy.
Zhou doesn’t hesitate to fly to China to help Iris find Lingyi, even though he’s been estranged from his friends for months. But when Iris tells him he can’t tell Daiyu or trust her, he balks. The reunited group play a treacherous cat and mouse game in the labyrinthine streets of Shanghai, determined on taking back what Jin had stolen.
When Daiyu appears in Shanghai, Zhou is uncertain if it’s to confront him or in support of her father. Jin has proudly announced Daiyu will be by his side for the opening ceremony of Jin Tower, his first “vertical city.” And as hard as Zhou and his friends fight, Jin always gains the upper hand. Is this a game they can survive, much less win?
I was six years old when I learned that I had an older brother I would never meet. Growing up in a slightly traditional Chinese family, we’re not used to expressing emotions and feelings. But it was clear that my mother’s miscarriage had cast a pall over the family, even when it went unspoken. My parents had been looking forward to having a baby boy, and on the rare moments when that topic came up (often unexpectedly) in conversation, I could sense that quiet sadness that never went away.
I was in my teens before I realized that I—or my father, or the both of us without either side acknowledging—might have started compensating for that absence. I was always tomboyish, and I gravitated to action figures, martial arts, and rough sports. I’d always been the daddy’s girl. My father was an award-winning basketball coach, and while basketball initially didn’t strike my fancy I joined basketball camps that he helped oversee and and practiced mainly to spend more time with him. We had similar interests in pop culture and the like, so we were quick to bond over them - he taught me how to speak Klingon, bought me my first light saber, played video games together.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that these were easily things he could have done with my older brother or—what would probably have happened—things we both could have done with my older brother. I’ve heard of other Chinese parents, fathers in particular, who resent not having a son and often take that frustration out on their families. To his credit, my father never did any of that. But I could see his wistfulness when he played with some of my younger cousins, singling out one of them in particular to constantly tease and play pranks on (jokes and humor were his chosen method of expressing affection), or on those rare occasions when anyone ever alluded to my older brother. I saw it most clearly in his unabashed happiness when I told him he was going to have a grandson, and when he nearly broke down when Ezio was born.
It was when I was pregnant that I started thinking about that brother more often than I ever had in the past, (brought back to the fore most recently, since my little Ezio is about to have a new sibling as well). I had just finished The Suffering, the sequel to the Girl from the Well, and while I’d taken a few months off from writing to prepare for a toddler I’d also been at a loss over what to write next. Somewhere during those sleepless nights where I had to wake every couple of hours to feed my baby or pump, I started coming back to that. My brother didn’t even get to have a name, and it felt wrong for him not to have one. I thought about giving him one, thought about Chinese mythology where spirits could come back from the dead—not to haunt and terrorize like Western urban legends, but sometimes to comfort and impart knowledge.
In Chinese lore, they sometimes came back as fox spirits.
Chinese spirits were also transcendent, intelligent specters—in many stories they show themselves to philosophers while the latter meditate or study; sometimes they even take tea with them.
So I started writing about a girl named Tea and a brother she brought back from the dead, named Fox.
The Bone Witch is a lot of things - a ghost story, a warning about how absolute power can go wrong, a coming of age story, a vengeance quest, a magic tale, a treatise about the patriarchy and how even well-meaning matriarchies can get things wrong.
But at its heart, in its truest, purest form of heartsglass, is just a story about a girl and her brother.
The Bone Witch is about learning to live together, about what it’s like to be family.
The Heart Forger is about learning to make choices beyond that family, to be independent while still learning to give each other space, about learning to maintain that love despite change.
And the Shadowglass, due out next year, will be about learning how to say goodbye.
And I think it’s the best eulogy about my brother that I’ve ever written.
Despite an unsettling resemblance to Japanese revenants, Rin always maintains her sense of hummus. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, she keeps four pets: a dog, two birds, and a husband. Dances like the neighbors are watching.
She is represented by Rebecca Podos of the Helen Rees Agency.
I am thrilled to see Cindy Pon’s near future novel Want on the short list for the 2017 Andre Norton Award! Want is exciting and suspenseful and a feast for the imagination, but it’s more than that. I won’t call it a dystopia because I believe a feature of a good dystopia is the mythic as opposed to realistic tone of its world building. More and more since reading Want, I’ve come to believe it is prescient. This is what our future could look like.
Jason Zhou survives in a divided society where the elite use their wealth to buy longer lives. The rich wear special suits that protect them from the pollution and viruses that plague the city, while those without suffer illness and early deaths. Frustrated by his city’s corruption and still grieving the loss of his mother, who died as a result of it, Zhou is determined to change things, no matter the cost.
With the help of his friends, Zhou infiltrates the lives of the wealthy in hopes of destroying the international Jin Corporation from within. Jin Corp not only manufactures the special suits the rich rely on, but they may also be manufacturing the pollution that makes them necessary.
Yet the deeper Zhou delves into this new world of excess and wealth, the more muddled his plans become. And against his better judgment, Zhou finds himself falling for Daiyu, the daughter of Jin Corp’s CEO. Can Zhou save his city without compromising who he is or destroying his own heart?
