About the Author: Leanna Schwartz
What would you like readers to know about you?
As a former high school English and drama teacher, I love stories of all kinds, including in books and on the stage, and I’ve wanted to bring more fat and autistic rep to young adult shelves for a long time. Like many of my characters, I’m autistic, fat, queer, and Italian, and I love getting lost in libraries. I’m so grateful for the chance to share a fat heroine in all her glory on a book cover, and to any reader who spends time with my books.
What music do you listen to (if any) when you write?
I build enormous playlists for each book and listen nonstop. I like a good variety–mostly indie like Hozier, Florence and the Machine, and Halsey, Italian groups like Måneskin and La Rappresentante di Lista, and whatever I let the algorithm dig up to help tap into some good angsty emotions that fit the story—for Prayer, you know I had to listen to Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” and “Made of Stone” and Taylor’s “I Did Something Bad.” And often a few show tunes; I keep going back to Hadestown lately.
What books or authors inspired you to become a writer?
I was inspired at first mostly by playwrights and poets, writing for my theater company and in college. Childhood favorites like The Perilous Gard and Madeleine L’Engle made me to want to write fantasy stories early on, though I mostly had a lot of unfinished fragments, and then as an adult when I started getting serious about writing novels, it was Libba Bray, Sabaa Tahir, Laini Taylor, and Becky Albertalli who made me sit up and say, that—either the ultimately-hopeful high fantasy, or the angsty character dynamics, or the front-and-center fat rep—that’s what I want to do.
About the Book: A Prayer for Vengeance
What is your book about for those who haven’t read it?
Autistic poet and scribe Milo, hoping to earn a place as a temple scholar, tends to the sacred statues a miracle gifted the city centuries ago to protect it from monsters—until the statue he might be a tiny bit in love with disappears, just as something begins stalking and killing the city’s holiest men. He races to uncover answers, but only when the murderer targets him does he find them: Gia, the statue his prayer accidentally awoke, claims that the immortal holy leader Milo lives to serve is the same man who betrayed her and trapped her in stone—and what Milo always believed was a miracle was actually a curse that Gia will stop at nothing to break. Even if she has to kill his followers to do it. Even if she must kill the boy who woke her.
What has been your inspiration for writing it?
It started with wanting to examine how art is one way those in power define so many things to serve their goals—values, identity, history—and then I wanted to show someone framed that way, someone called either a martyr or a monster, breaking free and reclaiming herself and her story. I was interested in the female body as monstrous, especially when it violates mainstream European beauty standards, unyieldingly taking up space. I drew on memories from when I visited Italy, the way you can turn a corner and find a statue watching over a piazza or bridge or well or caught in a moment of horrific drama—and recently I recalled the creepy scene in the great Return to Oz where Dorothy discovers the Emerald City full of people turned to stone, and I realized that had probably burrowed deep into my brain and partially inspired the statue-saints of Milo and Gia’s city.
I also wanted to play around with flipping some YA fantasy tropes, creating a monstrous, dangerous love interest who was a girl this time, and the bookish protagonist who stumbles into all these discoveries and magic as a boy.
I’ll add that Prayer was conceived and drafted from a deeply angry place, before and during 2020, and became a deeply angry book. Seeing those with so much power squander the chance to protect those in need, instead tearing families apart and leaving the weakest to fend for themselves, shaped a lot of the story.
What was your favorite scene or part of your book to write?
Probably about midway through, when Milo and Gia team up, and these people who look quite different on paper—a vicious warrior and a daydreaming poet—realize they have a lot in common. They've both lost so much and believe they’re broken, but together inspire one another to figure out who they’re actually meant to become.
That and all the scenes where they try to kill each other.
Where can your book be purchased?
My local independent bookstore Mysterious Galaxy has a preorder page here.
Or you can order anywhere books are sold, including: Barnes & Noble Amazon Target
To the Future Writer:
What advice would you give to aspiring authors who want to write a book?
Get weird. Weirder than that. Yesss, go all the way into your weird. You will be shocked at how your specific weirdness will connect with the right readers and excite them and actually make your characters deeply relatable.
Read lots of recently published books in the genre you want to write. Don’t worry about being original, just be you, and it’ll be great. Read craft advice—look into beat sheets!—and then either make an outline or don’t, but write, and finish, and let it rest, and get feedback, and revise—and then write something new, because going through the entire process will help you level up more as a storyteller than tinkering with the same few chapters forever.
What’s next for you? Any events, upcoming pubs, etc.
I’ll be at a few events this summer ahead of my debut, and my second book, another standalone young adult fantasy, will be out from Page Street winter 2024. To a Darker Shore features a da Vinci-esque teen girl inventor on a Dante-esque passage through the underworld and a demi hero: plus-size autistic shepherdess Alesta has two weeks to traverse hell, slay the devil that killed her best friend after he was sacrificed in her place, and end her island kingdom's tithings for good—only to find him alive, but monstrously transformed. It can be preordered here.
Where can we find you:
Others- TikTok: @SchwartzWords
What’s on your TBR list?
I’m excited for so many new releases! Painted Devils, the sequel to Little Thieves, by Margaret Owen, with the most feral girls and demi rep! A Crooked Mark by Linda Kao, about a demon-hunter who falls in love with the possibly-possessed girl he’s meant to kill; I am prepared to be completely obsessed. Alchemy of Moonlight, a queer retelling of The Castle of Otranto, for all that gothic goodness. Also When Oceans Rise, a contemporary Little Mermaid retelling with Filipino mythology.