I know what you're saying: That's easy, anyone could do that. Well, I did it, and here's the proof, jerk. Here's the freakin' book. Right. Here.
Wait, come back!...Okay, I'm sorry, that got antagonistic kind of quickly. That's not me at all. Nor is it my book. I promise, the book won't call you names. Even when it gets kind of slow, even when it strains credulity. That's the Matt Brown guarantee.
Synopses are hard. It seems like if you spend a year writing a book, you should be able to boil it down to a couple of paragraphs pretty easily. But, as anyone who's had the pleasure of listening to me stumble about with an explanation of what Im writing could tell you, it's nowhere near as easy as the back cover of a book would lead you to believe. Sometimes you get too close a story, too immersed into it, to adequately break it down with a dozen "Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you about"s. Anyway, here goes:
A teenage girl discovers that her memory has been
altered to remove all evidence of a younger brother, a boy who has grown to
become the fanatical tyrant of a magical land.
Alone during a summer storm,
Elizabeth's home is attacked by an army of foreign birds. Nights later, she
wakes to find a light emanating from a room that shouldn't exist, the bedroom
of a younger brother her world has been made to forget. Within is a mysterious
stranger named Grim, a traveler from a mystical land who is seeking help
in defeating Silas the Pretender, the tyrant who rules over the land of
Edge...the tyrant who was once her little brother. Eliza of Edge is the
story of a girl who is forced to confront not only a powerful magical ruler,
but her own forgotten adventures in a world where her name lives within legend.
That's all accurate, but it's only the first few chapters, really. Just supposed to be a little taste. There's way more that happens. It's really good, I think. It's YA but hopefully accessible to people of all ages. The literate ones, anyway.
I hope you like it. No, I hope you love it. I hope you want to take it to prom and grope it in your best friend's backseat and then have to make awkward conversation with it until graduation. That's how much I want you to like it. Awkwardly.
The actual book digresses way less. It's also less icky.
I would be remiss if I didn't take a second to honor the original readers, the people who pored through this monstrosity and gave me (hopefully) honest feedback and made it a better read. In no particular order: Katie Rathbun, Fran Reed, David "Forrest" Caskey, Alison "Mink" Railsback, John Malboeuf, Kat Lauer, Wendy Roemer, and J. Steven "Explosteveo" Parsons. Thanks, guys. But the biggest of all the gratitudes has to go to Amber Brown, my first reader and most vocal supporter, and unafraid to tell me when an idea is just plain stupid.
If you like the first few chapters, stick around. More to come, probably posted weekly until it's done. If you really like it, tell your friends. If you don't, and you can vocalize why, then drop me a line (soupbather@gmail.com). Constructive criticism is always welcome.
I hope you enjoy your time in Edge. I definitely had a lot of fun creating it.
--Matt
