Finally, the spinoff I’ve been blabbering about for so long is officially out there in the world, ready to be downloaded to your ereaders or even held right in your hands! Also, it’s available in Kindle Unlimited!
I can’t wait for you to meet Reeve and Celeste. They’re a little different from my typical leads, but I find them both refreshing and charming (easy for me to say since they’re mine lol). Celeste has a lot more trauma than my typical heroine, and it manifests through intense anxiety and self doubt, but she’s still very soft and kind and sweet. Reeve, on the other hand, delineates a lot from Damien and even Conrad–he’s a few braziers short of a fully lit hall, obsessed with doing the right thing, and terrified of intimacy. Of course, most of that changes when he meets Celeste.
So far, my lovely ARC team seems to enjoy the tale, and I’m personally pretty proud of this one. I’m slowly working in some subjects and themes I’ve been tentative about because I want to touch on these experiences, but I also want to give them justice which is a hard balance to strike when you’re adding comedy into the mix. I want to be more inclusive of all sorts of partnerships and struggles, but that can be difficult when you don’t have the lived experiences yourself, or when you’re aware that your own are just a tiny glimpse into what other people have gone through.
I am hesitant to say that there is neurodivergence and disability representation in this book, but my intention was to work with both of these subjects in a light-handed but respectful way. I’ve seen a few reviewers refer to Reeve as neurodivergent, and that was what I was going for in some ways–he sometimes struggles socially and his brain works differently than what is typically expected–but I wanted to be careful with this because he’s also often referred to as dumb. To be clear, I don’t equate these two things, these are just both things that Reeve happens to be. And is he really dumb? Or is he just seen that way when one’s lens is confined to the social “norm?” Similarly, Celeste is often paralyzed by past trauma in a PTSD-like way. I’m not sure I can truly call it that, but I feel like what she experiences in the book is a somewhat fair representation and a possible conduit for a reader looking for that kind of portrayal in a fantasy romance heroine.
All right, well, enough with the heavy stuff, (though here is the list of trigger warnings just in case). One more little joke, and then you can go off and read!
akcaggiano.com 