Traci Chee

Pre-order sale alert! THE HOUSE WHERE DEATH LIVES, edited by Alex Brown, is part of the B&N sale running from now until 4/19! If you’re a Barnes and Noble Rewards or Premium member, you get 25% off! Premium members also get an additional 10% off!

I'm so proud of the story I wrote for this one, featuring grief, guilt, and a hallway that wants to devour you. 🚪😈

The house beckons. Will you pre-order? 👀

Thank you to Sandra Proudman for the graphic!

IYKYK ⚔️

Hi there, and thanks for asking! Leum, Amity, Ket, Emara, Ben, Siddie, and Tana use she/her/hers pronouns. Kanver's pronouns are they/them/theirs.

Happy 9th birthday, Winry! 💗

Glad we relearned this trick just in time for birthday cookies. 🦴 We’re also working on putting away toys, but that’s not going nearly as smoothly. 😅

Happy UK launch! 🔥 Today KINDLING hits shelves in the UK and I’m so excited for readers to meet these characters, these wandering warriors, these lost soldiers, these children searching for home. ⚔️ Prepare your hearts! I aim to break them in the best possible way. 💔

Thank you so much to the team at Harper360YA for supporting this bold little book! 🏔️ I’m grateful for all your enthusiasm in bringing this story to your readers.

✍🏼 Signed copies are available, so check with your favorite local retailer! You can also find it online at Waterstones or Amazon.

Hi anon, and thank you for asking! If I remember correctly, the change came out of the thinking that "The Reader Trilogy," because it included the name of the first book in it, would make the whole series more recognizable to readers, rather than "Sea of Ink and Gold," which works so well thematically but doesn't necessarily ring any bells if someone only read the first book and was looking for the second but couldn't remember the series name.

Ironically, I'd originally pitched the series as being "The Reader Saga," which would have had the same kind of association with the first book that we ended up wanting in "The Reader Trilogy"! But this was at a time when "saga" was still so associated with Twilight, so we decided to go with something more interesting and poetic, like "Sea of Ink and Gold." 😅

Right now, I generally refer to it as "The Reader Trilogy," since that's what readers will need to search for if they're looking for the books, but personally, I'm happy with calling the series by either name, because I think they both work!

Thank you for this question! I'm of the mind that fantasy worlds, including fantasy names, exist as much in the mind of the reader as they do in the mind of the writer, so absolutely I think "Sefia" could be pronounced either way! But if it matters, the name "Sefia" is from the very first draft of The Reader, which I wrote in a Facebook message to my friend Tucker, who had requested that I write him a fantasy story. In that version, there was a girl named Sefia on a ship with a book, which was about a girl named Sofia on a ship with a book, which was about a girl named Sophia on a ship with a book, and so on and so forth, like a hall of mirrors, with the name being changed a little each time.

Which is more fun trivia than an actual answer, I know, but in that incarnation, it was pronounced "SEFF-ee-yah", and for me the pronunciation stuck! =]

I love this rendition of Yuki! You can tell she's got that Nakano duality of grit and sparkle.

Keiko's chapter was so much fun to write. I loved how the structure of it was an inverse of Yum-yum's chapter in Tanforan: Yum-yum is tallying up the days they're incarcerated; Keiko is counting down the hours until Twitchy leaves. (Twitchy's chapter is also a favorite of mine. But how could it not be? That boy, so in love with life.)

Thank you for sharing your art with me!

Thank you so much for your kind words! It was definitely a challenge, delving deeply enough into each of the kindlings' psyches to expose how unique and distinct from one another they are, so I'm very happy that came through!

I've written a bit about my inspirations in my newsletter: You can find this piece on the first time I saw Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven, as well as a separate piece on why I wanted to attempt a retelling now, for young people in the 21st century. In particular, I hope Kindling speaks to young people who are facing so many existential questions about their future that I don't think those of us in older generations had to contend with, at least not in such numbers or on such an enormous scale. At the same time, I also suspect that these same questions and traumas affect so many of us today--I'm feeling it, absolutely--and in that respect, I hope it resonates, and I hope it finds the readers who need it, regardless of their generation. Thank you for asking!

💡 Did you know KINDLING has not one but THREE maps? 💡

I love maps in books, but because the story of KINDLING is so focused on the defense of a single mountain village, it didn't make sense to include a world map or even a map of the entire country. Instead, the maps in KINDLING correspond to the action of each part of the story: first the northlands, where the kindlings find each other, then the mountain village of Camas, before and after the kindlings arrive to protect it. I think it provides a really unique and intimate look at the world of KINDLING, with a wealth of details you might not otherwise see!

We were lucky enough to have artist Shing Yin Khor draw the maps for us, and I'm so in love with the way they came out. I've been a fan of Shing's since reading The Legend of Auntie Po, their award-winning graphic novel about a Chinese American girl growing up in the logging camps of the Sierra Nevada in 1885, and when we were thinking of commissioning this series of maps for KINDLING, they were the very first person who came to mind. Their maps just feel so lived in, as if the characters have only momentarily vacated the premises, and any second now they’ll reappear to pick up their belongings and continue their everyday lives, and I'm so pleased they agreed to a short interview because it provides a fascinating look into their thinking and process, with bonus sketches! Here's a snippet from the interview, which comes out tomorrow via my newsletter:

"I think that a good map is indistinguishable from being its own narrative device - as a cartoonist, I think I just naturally assume that of course maps are not information, but histories of people and spaces. Even if a map of this sort does not have people, I think that it should still attempt to tell the story of the people who live there."

🙏 Thank you so much to Shing for answering all my nerdy questions about maps! Subscribe to my Substack to read the full Q&A, out tomorrow!

I'm in the last act of the KINDLING audiobook, and I've been absolutely floored by the narrators, performing their own characters as well as each other, making for this intricate, seamless tapestry of voices, handing off the story to each other, one by one by one.

CATHERINE HO anchors the story in Leum's voice, as curt and grumpy as I always imagined her. She's a flawless introduction to the kindling world, invoking all the harshness of it, the jadedness, the frustration, the complication and beauty.

JEANNE SYQUIA plays our general, Amity, to perfection. That haughtiness! That power! (That denial.) Jeanne moves Amity effortlessly between the calculating leader and the frail human and always lands, somehow in both. Her last chapter? LITERAL CHILLS. I'd follow her into battle any day.

As Ket, AMIELYNN ABELLERA *gets* the rhythms of these ghost narrators, *gets* their pacing and musicality--her readings feel exactly the way the narration always felt in my head. (Plus, she takes the lead in voicing Tana, the girl who brought the kindlings together, whose seriousness and determination and brightness she brings to life so well.)

I already shouted out JOY OSMANSKI for knocking me out with a particular excerpt from a particular character, but her delivery of Emara is equally impressive. Thanks to Joy, Emara's chapters are always a party, bubbling over with humor and life.

ALLISON HIROTO's performance as Ben is as delicate as the character is, evoking the same lightness in her voice that Ben has on her feet. I'm in love with the way her reading pulls to the forefront Ben's contradictions and fragility: a killer desperate not to be a killer; a warrior in search of perfection; a fallible, terrified kid.

ERIKA ISHII was our first and only choice for Kanver, and I'm so thrilled they were available! They so perfectly capture Kanver's softness, their dreaminess, and, at the same time, their quiet clear-eyed criticism. Listening to Erika read Kanver *feels* like being in Kanver's head--drifting, drifting, always drawn toward beauty in what can be such an ugly world.

Siddie would be an easy character to dismiss as something of a child, or a clown, but FERDELLE CAPISTRANO makes it impossible to write her off. In her hands, Siddie is naive and stubborn and, yes, childish, but she's also intelligent, diligent, empathetic, and her last chapter, where she at last comprehends the reality of being a kindling, brought me to tears.

Thank you so much to HarperAudio, this incredible cast, and director RAMON DE OCAMPO for bringing such energy and nuance and *life* to these characters and to this story. It's been a pleasure and an honor hearing you read these words!

[Video description: Various shots of jagged mountains and high vistas, moving from sunrise toward sunset, overlaid with a twangy guitar soundtrack and a female voice reading the text, "HarperAudio presents KINDLING by Traci Chee" and "Ahead of you, that vast and jagged border looms--sharp, immense, severe. The fortresses of gods or the gods themselves, at the tail end of summer and still capped with snow. The Candiveras are all that stand between you and the kingdom of Ifrine beyond--the rest of the world beyond. You pause. You kneel. Scratch your dog behind the ears and adjust the tiny silver medal you wear around your neck. If you had to take one last look at your country, you couldn't ask for a better view than this." and one last shot of a horse and rider meandering off into the sunset with the text, "Performed by Catherine Ho, Jeanne Syquia, Amielynn Abellera, Joy Osmanski, Allison Hiroto, Erika Ishii, Ferdelle Capistrano; Directed by Ramon de Ocampo; audiobook available now."]

KINDLING is out in the UK next week! 🔥 PLUS, a limited number of signed editions are available, so be sure to pre-order your copy now! ✍🏼 Waterstones | Amazon

It's been two weeks since KINDLING, and I thought I'd share another quote, one that's stuck around since my very earliest drafts. ⚔️ If you've read it, you'll know this one comes from a *particularly* interesting perspective. 👀 I knew I had to include a chapter from this POV from the very beginning, as an homage to Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven, but it wasn't until listening to Joy Osmanski bring this scene to life that I realized just how much of a shadow it casts over the rest of the book.

Seriously, I had to stop the audiobook at that point just so I could process my emotions. If I hadn't been in the car, I would have been lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling. And that was *weird* because I did write it, after all. I could remember writing those words! Strange, how a story takes on a life of its own after you've written it. Thank you so much to Joy for delivering such a knockout! 💥

[Video description: A charcoal-gray to red gradient background with flashes of red flame overlaid with percussive battle music and the animated text, "There’s a split second between the roaring in the blood and the spilling of it, before the swords come down, before the choices are made, when everything is possible: victory, defeat, valor, disgrace, the naked blade, an arrow in the shoulder, a killing blow, the whisper of steel, the last gasp, the downfall of your company, the slaughter of the innocent, broken fences, soke, split knuckles, bare teeth, eyes, lungs, the smell of scorched stone and singed hair, a burst of flame, battered bodies, death—" and the cover of Kindling by Traci Chee hovering in the final image.]

If you've started reading KINDLING, you may have met Emara. 🎉 She may be a former enemy soldier, but she's also the friendliest of the kindlings, the life of the party, the quickest to laugh. She's also got a nickname for everyone, from the world-renowned warrior (Amity) to the kid who never made it out of training (Siddie). Now here's a little more about each of the kindlings... according to Emara at least! 😂

👑 AMITY aka "Queenie": literally a goddess

😾 LEUM aka "Grumpy": but she loves me

🗡️ BEN aka "Knifey": a cinnamon roll (could also kill you)

☁️ KANVER aka "Moony": too pure for this world

🌱 SIDDIE aka "Piggy": a pain in the butt but I love her

💔 KET aka "Roamie": handsome and she knows it

🐚 EMARA: everyone's favorite, a perfect human, no critiques