An Interview With Gita Trelease
Thank you so much for sharing your book with me and agreeing to do a Q&A for my readers.
Everything That Burns continues a transporting story of forbidden magic and the French Revolution that began in All That Glitters (previously published as Enchantée). Where did the idea for this duology come from?
Books come to me over a long period of time, with lots of pieces held in suspension until there’s finally a click that makes all the rest come together. For a year I’d been playing with the idea of a dark fantasy set at Versailles that revolved around gambling and social inequality, but it was a book I read about 18th-century science—its chapter on 1780s balloon mania included a real-life account of an aeronaut rescued by a milkmaid—that gave me the idea to add hot-air balloons to the story. Risk and gambling and magic felt suddenly more complex and compelling. And that girl haunted me. No one had ever interviewed her to ask: Why did you risk your life when others ran away? Around that question, I created the character of Camille.
What was the biggest difference between writing the first book and the sequel?
The biggest difference between writing the first book and the second was the pressure! Not just the time constraints of being on deadline, but also wanting to create a book that did justice to the first one and, to the best of my ability, met expectations for the readers who loved All That Glitters. And as a writer, I always want to grow in my craft, so that inner pressure was there, too.
In Everything That Burns, Camille takes up the pen and starts writing pamphlets about the Lost Girls of Paris. Can you tell us a little more about these Lost Girls and why you—and Camille—wanted to tell their stories?
The Lost Girls are a tightly-knit group of girls who, for various reasons, have fled their homes and are living together in a ramshackle house under Paris’s Pont Neuf bridge. Each girl has a talent—like picking pockets or forgery—that they use to stay afloat. . .until the city demands that, in the name of progress, the girls and their eyesore of a house be removed. Outraged by the injustice of their situation—and its similarity to her own past—Camille convinces them to let her print their stories to draw attention to their plight.
In doing so, she gives them a way to be heard and continues her father’s work as a revolutionary printer. But there’s an emotional dimension to her decision to print these girls’ stories as well. So often we accept the stories others tell us about ourselves as true, not seeing how hurtful or limiting they can be. Though it takes bravery to rewrite them, when we do, we can become heroes of our own stories—something Camille comes to understand over the course of the novel.
One of the central tensions in Everything That Burns is Camille’s fraught relationship with magic, and how, over the course of the book, the shame that she feels about her magical abilities eventually turns to pride. What ideas about empowerment and self-acceptance were you hoping to impart through this aspect of the story?
It’s the often the aspects of ourselves that we’re told are unlovable and unwanted that are, paradoxically, the source of our unique talents and strengths. But because these qualities may be at odds with how we were raised or the world we live in, we try to suppress those parts of ourselves to become the person we’re “supposed” to be. The journey to become our truest self isn’t easy (I’m still working on it!), but I think we have to try our hardest anyway.
We have to ask—what are you working on at the moment? Anything you can tease for readers who can’t wait to read whatever you write next?
Right now I’m working on a new YA fantasy. The mood is gilded autumn in New England, deep shadows at its edges. It’s personal, as I’ve lived in New England much of my life, and though it takes place in a version of the present, fans of the Enchantée series will find that some of my obsessions remain: people who move between worlds; darkly compelling magic; a mysterious, gothic setting; a romance that is both delicious and dangerous; and plenty of yearning for the things you’re supposed to want—as well as those that are forbidden.
