Riven by Jane Alvey Harris
Seventeen-year-old Emily’s dad is in prison, and her mom’s strung out on pain meds, leaving Emily to parent herself and her younger siblings. Things are mostly under control until a couple weeks before her dad’s release when she begins hearing voices, and strange engravings on her arm appear overnight. She’s pretty sure she’s losing her mind. Unable to cope with reality, Emily slips completely inside an elaborate fantasy world where she frantically searches for the weapons she needs to defeat her greatest fears and return to reality to protect her family.
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
From the author of A Man Called Ove comes a both poignant and hilarious story about what happens in the aftermath of a crime that didn’t occur with a would-be bank robber and eight anxious strangers stranded in a hostage situation during an apartment open house.
Everything Sad Is Untrue
by Daniel Nayeri
An autobiographical novel about a young boy fleeing Iran with his mother and ends up in a middle school in Oklahoma. With humor and profound insight, Everything Sad explores being a refugee in America, how family and culture shape us, and what it means to find your way.
5 questions: Jane Alvey Harris
Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you started writing? Despite being a storyteller from childhood, I never aspired to be an author. I grew up in a devout Mormon household where women got married, had babies, and stayed home raising them. Fast-forward to 2012: I was a soon-to-be single mom of three with no career, and I was scared. My therapist urged me to start writing as a distraction from the trauma I was processing. After some time, I realized the scenes I’d written connected into a complete story. My therapist read them and encouraged me toward publication. That first book took four years and nine drafts to write, evolving from a pretty fairytale to a trilogy about mental illness, self-harm, addiction, PTSD, and abuse.
What do you enjoy the most about the writing process? I love visualizing a scene until I can see every detail, hear the soundtrack, and smell the weather. My sleeping dreamlife also inspires my writing. I love it when all the components percolate in my mind, and then the words pour out. While the personal nature of writing the trilogy sometimes leaves me emotionally exhausted, that pales in comparison to the benefits I’ve reaped by processing some of my own trauma from a safe space with fiction/fantasy elements.
How have the events of 2020 influenced your writing? As an introvert, I’ve been happy as a clam staying home and exploring the breadth and depth of my creativity through music, narration, short stories, and writing the last book in the trilogy. Historically, I can become easily distracted, so lockdown helped clear my plate. As I’m finishing up Primed, it’s also been helpful for me to have the security of home and my kids to tie up loose ends.
What lessons from 2020 will you carry with you? How precious life is. How grateful I am to be able to work remotely as an author, with my writing students, and as a voice actor. All three of my college-age kids came home, and I cherish the time we have together. Going forward, I will be more vocal about my appreciation for essential workers and health care professionals. I will look for ways to be considerate to my neighbors locally and globally.
What are your future writing plans? After eight years, I’m finishing the trilogy. An important chapter of my life is ending, and I’m in a good place creatively. I have several short horror stories in various stages of publication, and I plan on exploring other genres too. I am extremely excited about several collaborations on tap with another author.
Jane Alvey Harris is a writing teacher, voice actor, and author in Dallas, Texas. The first two books of her award-winning YA psychological fantasy thriller, the My Myth Trilogy, are currently available, with the third to be released soon.
