THE CHARMED CHILDREN OF ROOKSKILL CASTLE

The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle is set in Scotland for a number of reasons. First, the magic “lives” in a chatelaine (you can read more about that in my previous post) that is a European jewelry. Second, it felt right to place the children in a castle, with its dark, spooky corners, large scale,… Read more »

In my previous post, I discussed the role that clocks play in The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle. In this post, we’ll talk about jewelry. The original title of the novel was Chatelaine. You may be reacting to that title the way that the Viking Children’s marketing department reacted: What in the world is a chatelaine?… Read more »

In the previous post, we reviewed the machines of war that influenced my novel. In this post, something about clocks. In The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, Kat Bateson is a logical girl who idolizes her father. His hobby is clock-mending, and Kat spends her time with him learning about the inner workings of clocks,… Read more »

In the last post I talked about the United Kingdom during the Blitz. In this post, I’ll talk about other influences on the content of The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle. For example, a short-wave radio plays a major role: When Father brought a short-wave wireless home a couple of weeks before leaving, he’d shown it… Read more »

In the previous post on the backstory behind The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, I introduced the opening of World War 2 in Great Britain. This week, we’ll review the early days of the war. In The Charmed Children, Kat and her brother and sister are shipped out of London, as were many children, in… Read more »

This is the first in my series on the backstory and other fun stuff about The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle. In The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, Kat Bateson faces change in the early days of World War 2: The pieces that made up Katherine Bateson’s world were scattered across the landscape and over… Read more »

My next novel, The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle (out from Viking 3/15/16), is a middle grade mystery that’s part fantasy, part historical fiction. It’s set in Scotland in 1940, although it also contains a parallel story in a much earlier timeline. I thought it would be fun to run a series of blog posts… Read more »