GUEST POST WRITTEN BY AUTHOR D.C. PAYSON
The Lost Princess of Aevilen begins with a scene that will be uncomfortably familiar to many Australians, and to Americans living in Southern California: an out of control wildfire threatens the main character’s family home. There’s something particularly cruel about wildfires. You watch them in slow motion, hoping-and-hoping-and-hoping that they’ll change course or somehow be put out. And if your home does burn down, there is an immediate experience of displacement—a very sudden and final ‘welcome to your new life’. Or, at least, that’s how my wife describes it.
The opening of The Lost Princess of Aevilen is actually based on real events from my wife’s life. Her house burned down in a large wildfire that swept through Malibu, California, in 1993. As in the novel, she moved in with her grandmother, who was born in Germany and fled to the United States just prior to the start of World War II. As you’ve probably already guessed, displacement is a major theme in the book! But since the book is a young-adult fantasy, I thought it might be interesting to twist things and ask the question: “What if Julia’s grandmother weren’t really from Germany? What if she were from somewhere else, and Julia-already reeling from the fire-were magically transported to that place?” Thus, Julia ends up in Aevilen, a small, mountain-ringed valley in a totally separate world.
The character Julia is about someone who feels helplessly blown about by the winds of fate – first her house burning down, then being unwittingly transported to Aevilen- slowly turning into someone who realizes that she has agency and, in fact, the potential to shape the world around her. I purposefully wrote her to be an everygirl, since I wanted her to be someone the reader could identify with and think, “Wow, I might feel like that, too, if I were in her shoes!” She’s meant to be vulnerable, and then, over time, start to discover her own power. It’s an arc that many of us might hope to follow in challenging times.
I wove one other real-world narrative into the book. As mentioned above, Julia’s grandmother fled Nazism. It’s estimated that 100 million people were killed by the fascist and communist regimes of the 20th century. That’s an unfathomable number. Much like a wildfire, those regimes swept countries and even whole regions in what must have seemed like inexorable waves, individual citizens mostly powerless to resist them (and often killed if they tried). Even though it may seem a bit simplistic, I wanted to use a regime like that as the villain in the book, because indeed that’s what Julia’s grandmother fled in 1938. Except this time, the character Julia has an opportunity that do something almost no one in history had: stand up to the evil regime and change the course of history! As a recent-arrival to the world, she starts the novel more concerned with getting home than saving everyone. But tracking her agency arc above, the more she gets her feet under her the more she begins to buy in to the idea that she can help. Will she jump at the first opportunity to leave? Or does she decide to help the people of Aevilen, drawing on an ancestral legacy that she’s uncovered? (What would you do in her shoes… honestly?)
The Lost Princess of Aevilen releases on May 12th.
