And now for my first blog post strictly for my readers! I hope I don’t butcher this completely and I hope it doesn’t come off as boasting. I want to be sincere with you guys. These are just my honest opinions and my inferences about how my book is different and what readers might like about it.
To start, my debut novel is titled, Silent Night, and it’s a young adult dystopian featuring a female assassin as the lead. The story takes place in the year 2110, in a city that has crumbled after a decades long civil war. Technology has risen and fallen. Two warring groups struggle for control in the chaos: the Resistance and the Assassin’s Guild.
I think there are 3 main things that set Silent Night apart from other books in it’s age group and genre: the main character, the setting, and the government.
The aspect of Silent Night that stands out most in my mind, is the main character, who goes by the same title as the book. Silent is not the nicest person. She is not someone you automatically root for. She is someone you have to grow to like. She starts off as a sort of anti-hero and it takes her time to figure out what it means to be a hero. Silent’s walk between good and evil is done on the edge of a blade and it is not easy. There are not many books in this genre where the hero of the story could so easily be the villain. (at least, not that I’ve found)
The second point is the setting. The book is set in the fictional Haven City and focuses on just the city itself. It’s not about the crumbling world or warring countries. I like that aspect of it because it allows the situation to be more detailed. And I promise you that there’s no ‘big reveal’ at the end that there were bigger forces outside the city limits that were pulling the strings the whole time. This is simply the story of Haven: how it fell apart and how, someday it might find all its pieces and rise again.
The final difference that makes Silent Night stand out is the lack of government. Most dystopian books and movies feature a dictatorial government and some kind of revolution of the people, usually small at first. Then growing in size until the government is overthrown and democracy steps back in. You won’t find that in Silent Night. Haven City is pretty much bereft of government. The Resistance keeps inputting mayors so the city doesn’t entirely cease to function, but, well, the Assassin’s Guild keeps killing them off. The assassins are descendants of the mercenary bands hired during the first civil war, left behind when the rebel group lost. The Resistance agents are the descendants of the city soldiers who fought and won that war. The conflict of the story is between these 2 warring groups, as the Guild tries to seize control of the Haven and the Resistance tries to annihilate them once and for all.
So there you have it. Of course, this is all my opinion and since it’s my own book, I’m biased. This post is more about what I hope is different about my books, what I hoped to get across and even if I didn’t get it perfect, I’m proud of the story I put into the world.
If you’ve read Silent Night, let me know in the comments what you think about the above points. If you haven’t read Silent Night and this post intrigued you, you can buy it in ebook and paperback on Amazon right now. I even have a direct link on my home page.
Thank you guys for giving this a read and I look forward to writing more reader related posts in the future. Next week’s post will be about my first ever novel and what I learned from it.