Francesca Forrest, our assistant copy editor for Mythic Delirium and Clockwork Phoenix, has a mythic and interstitial novel out, Pen Pal, that’s been racking up accolades since it debuted in December. Congratulations, Francesca!
 
By the way, Pen Pal is available as a paperback from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or as an ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple.
 
Check out what folks have been saying about Francesca’s book:

Told through letters, journal entries, news articles, and secret government memos, the story unfolds with inexorably rising stakes. The layers of liminality in this novel begin right with its appearance; it’s difficult to ascribe a convenient marketing niche. It is not a kid’s story … but it could be read by kids, especially the smart ones with unquenched curiosity about the world. But among the many layers there exists a poignant love story that might sail over a child reader’s head; it will take an adult reader to perceive the many types of faith represented here: in lovers, in friends, in family, in community. …There is humor and wonder, high tension and profound grief — altogether a vivid, memorable book that is one of my favorite picks for 2013.
— Sherwood Smith, SF Site

Em is a child of water, living in a floating community on the Gulf coast. Kaya is a child of fire, imprisoned half a world away above a volcano.
 
They need each other, though they don’t at first know it. … This book isn’t a fantasy, not really. But it hits a particular immersive mythic-y button for me that I don’t know how to describe–I only know it when I see it, and know as well that it’s hard to find.
 
And it gave me exactly the right sort of happy sigh when I turned the last page, as well.
— Janni Lee Simner

Francesca is a storyteller in the oldest, very best sense of the term—everything she tells looks like a hand-blown glass flower with smoky edges that leaves a whiff of warm amber in its wake. After a bouquet of stories, Francesca just published her first novel, Pen Pal, an epistolary exchange between two people from contexts that are rarely trodden in Anglophone fiction.
— Athena Andreadis

This is not just a remarkable book, it is an important book. It is a book that needs to be read.
— Erzebet YellowBoy

 
#SFWApro