Description: A girl finds herself in the fantasy land her grandfather wrote about and discovers being the hero has a price. A dark yet comic young adult fantasy duology that pays tribute to C. S. Lewis's Narnia and other heroic fantasy.
Brief description:
E. L. (Elaine) Chen's short fiction has been featured in anthologies such as Masked Mosaic, The Dragon and the Stars and Tesseracts Fifteen, and in magazines such as Strange Horizons and On Spec. Her first novel, The Good Brother, was released in 2015. Her second book, Summerwood/Winterwood, will be out in late 2019. She lives in Toronto with her son and a requisite cat.
Review Quotes:
"Summerwood/Winterwood will beguile readers with its dark vision of a Narnia-like land, populated with real, damaged people. These wonderful tales explore how stories serve the teller, and the roles they force upon the unwitting."
--Kate Blair, author of Transferral, Tangled Planet and The Magpie's Library
"An eerie, textured nightmare tapestry of regret and healing, The Summerwood duology undoes the stitches of children's fantasy with the verve of The Magicians--and makes them new again with the compassion of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children."
--Leah Bobet, multi-award-winning author of An Inheritance of Ashes
"The Summerwood duology delivers a gut punch to Narnia while also serving as a bleak, brittle coming-of-age story. Chen takes the reader on a journey into a fantasy world that is never a space of safety or triumph but that still, in its own way, offers a means of escape."
--Kari Maaren, award-winning author of Weave a Circle Round
"I enjoyed reading The Good Brother and highly recommend it to anyone who likes horror, YA novels with paranormal themes, or who wants something new in a ghost story."
--Lesley Donaldson, author of The Queen's Viper