The Keeper of the Mistby Rachel Neumeier
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Release Date: March 8th 2016
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Fiction
A lush new fantasy about finding the will to lead against all odds, perfect for fans of Shadow and Bone.
Keri has been struggling to run her family bakery since her mother passed away. Now the father she barely knew—the Lord of Nimmira—has died, and ancient magic has decreed that she will take his place as the new Lady. The position has never been so dangerous: the mists that hide Nimmira from its vicious, land-hungry neighbors have failed, and Keri’s people are visible to strangers for the first time since the mists were put in place generations ago. At the same time, three half-brothers will their own eyes on the crown make life within the House just as dangerous as the world outside.
But Keri has three people to guide her: her mysterious Timekeeper, clever Bookkeeper, and steadfast Doorkeeper. Together they must find a way to repair the boundary before her neighbors realize just how vulnerable Nimmira is.
With a spunky main character, lyrical storytelling, and hidden romance, The Keeper of the Mist is an engrossing story that is full of adventure.
Thank for inviting me over here to Curling Up With A Book, ______! It’s a pleasure to be here.
You asked about my favorite character in The Keeper of the Mist, and you know, that’s a good question for this particular book. I don’t always have a particular standout favorite character, so if you’d asked me that question about The Floating Islands or, I don’t know, Law of the Broken Earth, for example, I think I’d have had a hard time answering it.
I usually do feel attached to most of my characters, even the bad guys, at least the more human bad guys who have more normal motivations, even if those motivations aren’t exactly admirable. But when I have an actual favorite, it’s usually not the central protagonist and usually not a character whose role was clear to me from the beginning. Instead, it’s most often a character who went in a direction I didn’t see coming – a character who surprised me.
As you might guess from this, I don’t (can’t) compose a detailed outline before I start writing. Usually I write the first thirty or hundred pages kind of by feel, then get a rough inkling of the end, and finally work out the middle of the book as I go. This process means that I often find out who a character is and what he’s like by introducing him and seeing what happens, and that I’m sometimes startled by his eventual role. (It also means that sometimes I have to go back and remove a character who turns out not to do anything important. This happened in Mist, in fact, because Keri started out with four half-brothers rather than three, but no role appeared for the extra brother and eventually I erased him.)
But I most enjoy the characters who have a distinctive personality from the moment they walk on stage, and where I didn’t see it coming. When I was writing the second Griffin Mage book, I remember commenting to my agent, “If I can’t find something for Tehre to do other than being The Love Interest, I’ll take her out of the story.” And then when she actually walked on stage, she turned out to be so much more than just a love interest! She astonished me by turning out to be a genius with physics and materials science, and went on to become a secondary protagonist and drive half the plot.
Well, in the same way, when I started The Keeper of the Mist, I had only the vaguest idea what two of Keri’s three half-brothers were like or what roles they would play. Brann, her oldest brother, I mostly had in mind from the beginning. What a total jerk he is, but though he’s not based on anybody in particular, I think we’ve all known guys like that. I more or less understood where Domeric was going from the moment I wrote his physical description, and I do like him, maybe more than he deserves. But Lucas was something else!
From the first moment he’s introduced, Lucas has a very distinctive style. He’s something of a scapegrace younger brother (though still older than Keri, of course). When Keri meets him, practically the first thing he says to her is: “I heard there would be flour in your hair and sugar syrup all sticky on your fingers, but you look perfectly civilized to me. Tell me, are you likely to come over all spatulas and spoons and dash down to the House kitchens to make fancy pastries? If you do, can I have one?” That’s Lucas: light-hearted and deliberately ridiculous.
Or so he seems. Perhaps it won’t surprise you if I add that Lucas has hidden depths. But though I suspected from the start that this might be the case, I myself didn’t realize just what those depths were going to include. In the end, Lucas took a much larger role than I initially guessed he would. I’m very pleased with how he turned out, and I hope readers will be, too.
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Rachel Neumeier started writing fiction to relax when she was a graduate student and needed a hobby unrelated to her research. Prior to selling her first fantasy novel, she had published only a few articles in venues such as The American Journal of Botany. However, finding that her interests did not lie in research, Rachel left academia and began to let her hobbies take over her life instead.
She now raises and shows dogs, gardens, cooks, and occasionally finds time to read. She works part-time for a tutoring program, though she tutors far more students in Math and Chemistry than in English Composition.
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