The B&N YA Podcast

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This is a special message to let you know, soon we'll be merging our YA podcast with our main B&N Podcast. We've got so many YA writers joining us in the studio and we cant wait to share these conversations with all of our listeners!

Here's more good news: If you've already subscribed to the B&N YA Podcast, you won't have to change a thing. You'll start seeing B&N Podcast episodes in your feed and those will include our episodes featuring YA and Adult writers. ☺️

We hope you'll enjoy hearing the full range of wonderful authors joining us on the B&N Podcast. 

From all of us at Barnes & Noble, thanks for listening!

Our guest today is the novelist Abigail Hing Wen, who joins us to talk about her new YA novel Loveboat, Taipei, a coming-of-age story about taking risks, finding your voice, and discovering yourself in places you never would have predicted. Ever's Chinese-American parents have planned every aspect of her future: but one summer in Taiwan -- a trip they've sprung on their daughter as a not-very-welcome surprise might change everything. The result is an absolutely sparkling story that's based in part on the author's own young experience and a program that's still going on today, and it's B&N's latest YA Book Club selection. Abigail Hing Wen sat down with Bill Tipper in the B&N studio to talk about the real summer-in-Taiwan experience that was the genesis for the story of Loveboat, Taipei.

A note to listeners:  After this episode we're integrating our YA guests into our main B&N Podcast.  Go to this page to get links to subscribe to the B&N Podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or search for "B&N Podcast" wherever you listen!

On today's episode we're joined by Ryan LaSala, for a conversation about his bewitching debut novel Reverie. It's a story that begins as a mystery -- a high school student named Kane Montgomery is recovering from a terrible auto accident that left him nearly dead, and has robbed him of a large part of his memory. When Kane tries to solve the puzzle of what happened that night -- and why people he barely knows seem to treat him as an old friend -- what he discovers will turn his world upside down and inside out. Ryan LaSala has written a gripping YA fantasy in which dreams and reality trade places, and discovering the truth about yourself can have world-shattering consequences. Reverie is our B&N YA Book Club pick for January 2020, and we were thrilled to have him join Bill Tipper in the podcast studio to talk about the unusual path to this uniquely spellbinding read.

Hi YA Podcast listeners. If you're a regular listener you know that one of our most exciting episodes ever was Melissa Albert's interview last December with the groundbreaking fantasy author Tomi Adeyemi, when the writer joined us for a deep dive into her critically acclaimed and hugely bestselling Children of Blood and Bone, the first volume in her West African–inspired series about an oppressed magical class and the girl who fights to reclaim their power. Huge world- building, electric storytelling and indelible characters combined to make that book an instant classic, and now Adeyemi has returned with the second volume in the series, Children of Virtue and Vengeance. To celebrate we're bring back Tomi Adeyemi's visit to our studio, and her conversation with Melissa Albert about the origin of the series, writing love letters to Harry Potter, and overcoming the reluctance to love your own work. 

On today's episode science fiction and fantasy titan Brandon Sanderson joins us to talk about his brand new YA novel Starsight, the sequel to 2018's New York Times bestseller Skyward. Sanderson has made his name with fans all over the world through epic fantasy like the Mistborn series and the Stormlight Archive, as well as the bestselling Reckoners trilogy for young adults. With Skyward, Sanderson says he set out to take a classic fantasy pairing -- think a girl and her dragon -- but gave it a sci-fi twist, matching the hotshot young pilot Sensa -- a girl with a mysterious past and some unique talents -- with an ancient spacecraft powered by a wisecracking artificial intelligence called M-Bot. Skyward was, simply put, a blast, and with its sequel Starsight, the author takes Sensa, M-Bot and her friends into a universe vastly larger -- and more dangerous --than the one she's known. Brandon Sanderson joined B&N's Bill Tipper just before Starsight hit bookshelves for a spoiler-free chat about his new novel, how a boy who didn't like books became such a prolific writer, and what he's learned from his students.

On today's episode we're thrilled to have bestselling author Marie Lu joining us to talk about creating one of the most powerful and popular YA series of the decade, the page-turning dystopian saga that began with 2011's Legend. Her latest novel, Rebel, returns readers to the world of the authoritarian future state known as the Republic, with her focus moving to Eden Wing -- the younger brother who the heroic Daniel Wing has tried so hard to protect. Our frequent YA Podcast host Melissa Albert -- author of The Hazel Wood -- chatted with Marie Lu by phone about writing complex characters, incorporating disturbing social trends into her imagined world, and her forthcoming work of fantasy The Kingdom of Back. Plus, the author reveals the the plucky video game character who was her first inspiration as a writer.

Our guest for today's episode is Akwaeke Emezi, the author of the new YA novel Pet, which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature.  Emezi burst onto the literary scene with their novel Freshwater, a powerful story of a young woman inhabited by multiple spirits, and her journey to understanding her many-sided self.  Now, writing for Christopher Myers's Make Me a World YA imprint, Akwaeke brings us the story of Jam, a teenager living in the city of Lucille, a community that prides itself on having been through a revolutionary change — one that eliminated what are known as monsters — those who abused, imprisoned, or did violence to others; where a black trans girl like Jam lives in a happy community with her loving parents Bitter and Aloe.  But when Jam accidentally invokes the magic that lies dormant in her mother's powerful artwork, a strange being emerges, one that calls itself Pet.  Pet is a hunter and it has come, it tells Jam, because there are still monsters in Lucille.  I talked with Akwaeke Emezi about this ingenious and spellbinding tale, and their lifetime of making worlds out of story.

What would happen if the future were made perfect?  That was the question National Book Award-winning author Neal Shusterman posed in  2016's YA blockbuster Scythe, a story set in a world without hunger, poverty, disease or war, in which human life is only ended by specially trained figures known as Scythes.  But perfection turns out to have its own problems, and the Arc of the Scythe trilogy follows young characters caught up in the question of the price we might pay for having everything we want.  The stakes got higher in 2018's Thunderhead --and now the saga concludes with the breathtaking and ambitious final volume The Toll.  Scythe is B&N's YA Book Club selection for December, Neal Shusterman joined Melissa Albert to talk about this provocative epic, and the challenges of concluding the trilogy.

Maggie Stiefvater is the keeper of a host of odd obsessions, threading her bestselling fantasy novels with vicious water horses, sleeping Welsh royalty, ley lines, and liminal spaces. She’s the author of books including the Raven Cycle, which continues this fall with the first installment of the Dreamer trilogy, Call Down the Hawk. In it she’ll further explore the Lynch brothers and the dark gift of dreaming, taking objects from your unconscious life into your waking one. I talked to Stiefvater about her early ambitions, books that feel like a fever dream, and why Call Down the Hawk is THE book for her.

A  Halloween treat for readers -- we return to our wide ranging interview with the queen of shadowy fantasy, Holly Black! Black's books  straddle the real world and the realm of the fey, or reimagine reality to include magical mobsters, walled vampire cities, and haunted toys. In The Wicked King, sequel to last year’s The Cruel Prince, human girl Jude, raised in Faerie by her parents’ murderer, has seized control of the fey courts through puppet king Cardan. But, says Black, while book one was about what Jude would do to seize power, book two is about what she’ll do to keep it. We talked to the author about pleasure reads, how she writes, and why we’re more likely to forgive villainy if it’s on an epic scale.