The Sarah Midnight trilogy by Daniela Sacerdoti from Black and White Publishing is one of my favourite paranormal series, so I'm really pleased to welcome Dani to the blog today to kick off her new blog tour for the closing novel in the sequence, Spirit!
Like all
genres, Paranormal Young Adult books have their rules and their clichés. Each
writer negotiates her way among them, to stay true to the genre and to
themselves at the same time. When I started writing The Sarah Midnight trilogy,
I hadn’t read any YA written by contemporary authors – unless you consider the
last Harry Potter books as YA. I was also not on social media as such, so I
really didn’t have much of an idea as to what YA was all about: all I knew was
that I had a story and I wanted to tell it.
My Sarah was a vulnerable heroine, unaware of her own powers and not ready to fight. She was not, in any way, ‘kick-ass’. In making her so, I had unwittingly distanced myself from many other YAs, where the heroine was a ready-made fighter, strong, courageous and ready to take the world on the chin. This is often seen as a better role model for young women than a vulnerable protagonist who hasn’t found her feet. By making Sarah fragile in the first book of the series, I attracted some criticism – but to me, it was the only way to stay true to her character. Sean says of her that she’s like a ‘rose dipped in steel’ – and this sums her up. She’s not a natural fighter, but she doesn’t realise how much strength and power she has inside her until she finds herself in danger. Also, she’s been traumatised by many years of horrific visions, which she had suffered every night from her thirteenth birthday onwards, and this has left deep scars in her psyche.
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