All tagged Trauma

Podcast #24: Talking with Courtney Summers About Everything, Part 1

We were lucky to recently spend over three hours (!) talking with noted Supernatural expert Courtney Summers. (We hear she writes books too.) We covered a range of subjects from zombies with fashion sense to writing characters experiencing trauma and everything in between. 

This is the first of what will be three parts of this conversation with Courtney, who we could have talked to all day if we hadn't gotten super-hungry. Look for the other episodes trickling out on iTunes and here on the blog in the coming weeks. (Pro-tip, subscribing on iTunes means that you get episodes a day or two before everyone else.)

One of the Year's Best: Where the Stars Still Shine by Trish Doller

“I can’t do this. I can’t sit here and pretend I’m a normal girl when my whole life has been so fucked up. Greg and Phoebe haven’t slept in the backseat of their car, or eaten all their meals from a vending machine because their mothers forgot to buy groceries. And the only monsters Tucker and Joe will ever have to contend with are the imaginary kind that are banished in the light. These people are so clean and I feel so—tainted.”

My copy of Trish Doller’s second novel, Where the Stars Still Shine, arrived last week and as I’m looking at it’s pretty, oh-so-shiny cover sitting on my desk, I’m still stuck when trying to talk about why it’s such a special book. 

When I read Trish’s debut novel, Something Like Normal, I had to plug my Kindle in to finish the last ten percent or so because my battery was dead and it was 2:00 a.m. and I just couldn't fathom stopping.

The exact same thing—right down to the dead Kindle battery—happened when I read her second novel, Where the Stars Still Shine. 

Like Something Like Normal, and perhaps even more so, Where the Stars Still Shine captures authentic emotion in a character-driven novel in a way that’s simply real

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