Alright team, I adore Claire. She’s got a sweet gentle heart, a dark spooky brain, and her stories give me a serious writers’ crush.
She’s written a number of YA and middle grade books, the one that made her appear on the rising star status was her Empirium Trilogy: Furyborn, Kingsbane, and Lightbringer. Her most recent horror was Sawkill Girls which I absolutely fell in love with.
Another thing that I highly respect from Claire is that she’s been very vocal about her challenges with mental health, and how that plays in to not only her writing, but being an author. Not long ago she decided it would be better for her to leave most social medias as it was only pulling her mental health down even harder. I cannot even begin to understand the strength that that takes. As someone who has also struggled with mental health, it taking a pandemic for me to finally go get diagnosed with Adult ADHD, Depression, as well as the Anxiety we’d figured out a while ago, I cannot be more grateful to listen each time that Claire talks.
Synopsis:
My name is unimportant.
All you must know is that today I become one of the four saints of Haven. The elders will mark me and place the red hood on my head. They will give me my true name, and with my sisters I will stand against the evil power that lives beneath the black mountain—an evil which has already killed nine of our village’s men.
I will tell no one of the white-eyed beasts that follow me. Or the faceless gray women tall as houses. Or the girls I saw kissing in the elm grove.
Today I become a saint of Haven. I will rid my family of my mother’s shame at last and save my people from destruction. I am not afraid.
Are you?
A bit more about the Book:
This beautiful cover is the work of HarperCollins associate art director Joel Tippie and artist Diego Fernandez.
Extasia is one of the books that Claire has found hardest to write, her journey through six rounds of revision while handling person issues is absolutely an inspiration to writers who don’t think their stories are ready. They might not be yet but don’t stop working on them!
In her newsletter to subscribers, I was absolutely struck by these paragraphs:
“When I look at this book, I see a clenched fist, thorns fiercely protecting a bloom, bones scattered and shattered and breaking down among the tangled weeds to feed new life. For the rest of my life, I will look at this book and see my own hard work and anger and grief and fear and love and lostness and desires and dreams reflected back at me.
And I hope, when you read it, you’ll see some of that, too—your determination, your hope in the face of desolation, your softness in the face of cruelty. Your love of beauty and your unstoppable curiosity and, above all, your belief in the strength of your heart’s own fire, no matter how mightily the world tries to stamp it out.“
Extasia will be out February 22, 2022.
You can preorder it here from Bookshop, or Barnes and Noble! I’ll update on the audiobooks when more information is available.
You can join Claire’s newsletter here!
You can listen to Claire’s Spotify playlists for all of her books here!
Thanks for joining me on this book cover release, would you like to see more things like this? Let me know in the comment section below!
my way by Starlight 