Coming Soon!
Tags: Dark Fantasy, YA, Gritty, Urban, Tragic Heroes, Postcolonial Fantasy, Morally grey characters,
Teenager Brimri Mgedowu has always been hated because of her ancestry.
One of the last descendants of the black-skinned magic-wielding race that once held the country of Hanheim in brutal bondage, she and her friends are condemned to live on the battle-scarred island called The Heart where the Hannish discard their outcasts and criminals. Living hand to mouth, Brimri feeds herself and her friends each night only by running grifts on the Hannish that come to the island to whore and gamble. But when her mentor commits suicide after a brutal attack by the islet’s most notorious druglord, she is forced to realize that her people’s future in The Heart holds nothing but death.
Driven by newfound desperation to escape the country, Brimri hatches an impossible plan: she will rob the king of the criminal underworld, stealing enough to buy her folk passage on a ship to a distant empire where it is rumored that some of their kinsmen still live. Unfortunately, a new threat lurking in the shadows may make escape difficult—a shapeshifting demon known only as ‘The Taker,’ who is drawn to Hanheim’s collective trauma.
The product of a world-shattering mistake set in motion by her slaveholding ancestors, The Taker sucks the life out of Hanheim’s citizens one by one, trapping them in their worst memories and gorging on the pain. When a blizzard destroys the harbor and traps the city with the demon as Brimri tries to flee with her gold, she discovers that she cannot run from the sins of her forebears.’ To save her friends and herself, Brimri must use her fledgling magic to battle the monster that slavery created—in a clash that will plunge her back into the worst night of her life.
STONEHEART takes the gritty elements of streetlife in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and combines them with the rigorous worldbuilding and literary exploration of racism in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.
This book will be self-published while Billions to Burn was traditionally published. Why?
When my agent submitted this book to publishers, I was told that it “focused too much on the magic” (yes, that was an actual comment), and that I would be better off rewriting it as a fantasy romance, which is more popular with the current market.
While I enjoy a good fantasy romance, I decided to maintain my original vision for this book, which was inspired by my love of extravagant second worlds and detailed magic systems created by authors like Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss.