Compulsion by Martina Boone doesn’t release until October, but here is a look at the cover and a video that introduces the world.
Synopsis
Three plantations. Two wishes. One ancient curse.
When loss is all you know, how do you find true love?
All her life, Barrie Watson has been a virtual prisoner in the house where she lived with her shut-in mother. When her mother dies, Barrie promises to put some mileage on her stiletto heels. But she finds a new kind of prison at her aunt’s South Carolina plantation instead — a prison guarded by an ancient spirit who long ago cursed one of the three founding families of Watson Island and gave the others magical gifts that became compulsions.
Stuck with the ghosts of a generations-old feud and hunted by forces she cannot see, Barrie must find a way to break free of the family legacy. With the help of sun-kissed Eight Beaufort, who knows what Barrie wants before she knows herself, the last Watson heir starts to unravel her family’s twisted secrets. What she finds is dangerous: a love she never expected, a river that turns to fire at midnight, a gorgeous cousin who isn’t what she seems, and very real enemies who want both Eight and Barrie dead.
Tell us 5 random facts about yourself.
1) I’m from Prague
2) I’m an insatiable reader
3) I’m crazy about horses
4) I’m more or less tone deaf
5) I’m actually pretty shy so I babble as a defense mechanism. I plan to outgrow that someday. But then I’ve been planning to do that for more years than I want to mention, so I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen.
Tell us about your journey to becoming a writer
I’ve always been a reader and a dreamer, and I’ve always loved to write, but my family is all physicists and mathematicians and scientists. While they’re readers, too, no one actually considered writing as a job; they encouraged me to find something to do that actually, you know, paid. I tried very hard to get published in book form when my son was born, and nearly made it, and then I made the mistake of giving up. I started a business, and between that and family, I was literally working eighteen hours a day and had no time to write. If I can pass along one piece of advice to writers—heck to humans regardless of what they want to do: don’t put off your dreams. Go balls to the wall. Try. You may fail, but at least you won’t always wonder what if?
Compulsion is set in the South on a plantation. What drew you to that setting?
The South is both picturesque and heartbreaking. It’s also full of history, Spanish moss, crumbling houses, and people who are tied to each other by blood, duty, and secrets. That’s gold for anyone who’s working on a novel.
Why do you feel you had to tell this story?
It was the relationships that wouldn’t let me go, the idea that you can pick your family and choose the people you love in spite of any bonds you might have to a place or to the family you are born into. That theme developed organically from the story and the various forms of love between the characters, but really it was the fictionalized ancestor of one of my characters who first made me excited to write.
In the course of my early research, I discovered that a seventeen-year-old girl, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, had run three plantations in the early 1700’s, and that she was responsible for developing and sharing the seeds that allowed the indigo plant to grow successfully in the American colonies. She started an entire industry. My mind boggled. How had I never learned anything about her in school? But how many seventeen-year-old girls did any of us ever learn about in history class?
My plan, when I began to write Compulsion, was to create a story that included a young woman discovering herself as she was inspired by a fictionalized version of her ancestor. I meant to include Eliza in the story as a kind of ghostly echo. Ironically, though, my indigo ghost never visibly made it into Compulsion at all. She’s in there, lurking below the surface, and she’ll make an appearance in Book Three of the Heirs of Watson Island series. She’s really the thread that ties everything together, but with pirates and murder and dark family secrets, not to mention a hot romance, there wasn’t any room in Compulsion for me to squeeze her in.
What one YA novel do you wish you had when you were a teen?
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. I would have devoured that book. Not only does it have two equally lovable characters who are forced to compete against each other for something they both desperately need, but there are faerie horses. Faerie. Horses. (Okay, water horses, but based on Kelpies. And still.) Need I say more?
About Martina Boone
Giveaway
Enter all eight giveaways for the Compulsion cover reveal through Martina’s Tumblr page.