As per tradition, on February 28th—the last Wednesday of the month—book readers alike gathered around at The Bookmark for the Epic Reads book club. This time around we got to sit down and chat for a while with Lana Popović, author of Wicked like a Wildfire.
Lana (known as LanaPopovicLit on Twitter) is a literary agent that identifies as Hufflepuff (right on! Secretly the best house; let’s be real here). While she considers Boston as home, she was born in Serbia, and she would spend her summers in Montenegro where the novel discussed takes place. The story follows Iris and Malina, two young females that have a gleam, described as “a unique way of experiencing and manipulating beauty through magic.” Their mother is suddenly attacked by a mysterious woman leaving her between life and death. This fuels Iris and Malina to act and find a way to save their mother and themselves. It’s a thrilling novel, while slow at first due to all the world-building, gains speed and heads off towards a wild cliffhanger that leaves you wanting the sequel ASAP. Wicked like a Wildfire is her debut novel, having been published in 2017. As well, it is a very inclusive narrative with a lot of diversity. Plus, Lana takes us to a setting never before seen in Young Adult.
The discussion was a good one! We spoke about the book as far as the inspiration for the characters, which one was her favorite to write, the struggles of finding synonyms enough to describe a fractal, and how to deal with rejection when submitting book proposals. The best piece of advice she could give to someone wanting to publish or for any aspiring writers was to just do it.
Other than the inspirational advice, we also talked about how the descriptions of food were so well done that they made most of the readers present hungry while reading the novel. There was also the fact that because of these descriptions the world is so vivid that you genuinely feel like you’re in Montenegro, and she also stressed that it’s not very expensive to visit *wink wink*. Following this, she also mentioned a couple of her favorite books she’s been loving recently like Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer, but if you’d like to have more suggestions on which book you should pick up next, check out her website.
The next book is Everless by Sara Holland—perfect for fans of Red Queen and An Ember in the Ashes—being held March 28th at the San Patricio store around 6:30 pm.