B&N Reads, Guest Post, Our Monthly Picks, Young Readers

The Rescue of Stories: An Exclusive Guest Post from Jodi Lynn Anderson, Author of The Memory Thief

By Jodi Lynn Anderson / April 12, 2022 at 2:38 am

Debug Notice: No product response from API

The Memory Thief is an enchantingly dark and multi-faceted fantasy about love, hope and the power of stories. This first book in the Thirteen Witches trilogy perfectly balances the realistic and fantastical to create a story that is sure to captivate young readers for years to come. Here, we hear from Jodi Lynn Anderson about what inspired the trilogy as well as what her top five witchy/paranormal stories are!

A house on a cliff overlooking the sea, ghosts, a curse, a girl alone…this is where The Memory Thief, the first installment of Thirteen Witches trilogy, begins. In setting out to write it, I wanted to discover what real magic lived underneath this spectral scene: I wanted to tell a story about stories.

I had the idea one night while lying in bed, spinning a yarn in my mind to make a bad thing I’d heard about better. I’ve done this all my life: recast hard events as happy ones…lost things found, broken things fixed. As illogical as it is, I have this bone-level trust that by telling a good story to myself in the dark, I can make a wrong thing right.

And so, I started writing about Rosie Oaks, who’s always turned to stories to buoy her world. With the exception of her best friend Germ (who thinks she can talk to her iguana via ESP), Rosie gets tongue tied around just about every person on earth. She’s also got a mom who’s not quite a mom: who, somewhere deep inside, is missing. Stories—writing them, reading them—have always kept Rosie’s spirit alight: they’ve sheltered her, cheered her on, made her laugh, understood.

But Germ is determined to grow up, and she convinces Rosie that middle school is the time to leave fairy tales behind. And so, one night, Rosie burns every story she’s ever written. In doing so, she finds her eyes opened to a luminous world that’s always surrounded her without her knowing it: the ghosts that haunt her house, a ladder dangling from the moon, the curse laid on her mother at the moment of her birth, and a book—The Witch Hunter’s Guide to the Universe.

Armed only with a flashlight and her stories, with help from Germ and a few ghosts along the way, Rosie must find the Memory Thief – the witch who laid her mother’s curse — and vanquish her. In so doing, she’ll find that the secrets and dangers layered under the surface of the world go deeper than she ever suspected. But she’ll also find more power lies within her imagination than she ever could have dreamed. In this celebration of the way stories rescue us, Rosie will find that the human gift for stretching and growing beauty from nothing at all is exactly what’s needed to face down the most sinister forces in the cosmos.