Author Interview: Kendare Blake of Anna Dressed in Blood

Author Kendare Blake

AUTHOR INTERVIEW:

KENDARE BLAKE

Romance, ghosts, and gore...what more could a YA reader ask for? Meet Anna, the murderous main (ghost) character in Anna Dressed in Blood. Author Kendare Blake creates a terrifyingly cruel, yet strangely intriguing, dead girl—a victim whose revenge on the living will leave you forever fearful attics. Luckily, there's Cas, a ghost-hunting teen who just might save us all from Anna's fury...unless he falls in love with her first.

Watch for the sequel, Girl of Nightmares, due out Aug. 7. Meanwhile, meet Kendare Blake:

 
We are dying to know how you came up with the idea of Anna, this blood-soaked and grotesquely murderous yet sympathetic character?

Anna came entirely from her name. Anna Dressed in Blood. And I thought, who's that? Oh. She's a dead girl. And she kills people. Well, that's not good. Someone will have to kill her.

Jen's Pick: A Monster Calls

Hi there! My name is Jennifer, and I work with young adult books at the Charleston County Public Library. Welcome to my random thoughts about books for teens. If a book grabs your interest, click on the title to reserve a copy…or click here to search CCPL's e-books. Happy reading!

A Monster Calls

By Patrick Ness

To appreciate this haunting new fictional story, you must know Siobhan Dowd’s real-life story. She was a human rights worker and a popular author. A Monster Calls would have been her fifth young adult novel. She’d created the idea, the characters and the novel’s beginning.

Yet, she died of cancer in 2007 at age 47, taking her artistic energies with her.

In stepped Patrick Ness, author of The Knife of Never Letting Go series. He had never met Dowd.

But he'd heard about her monster.

Ness embraced her story, infusing his own creative vision to give it a full life, with gut-gripping results.