Ohana Reads: Blog Tour: Persuasion by Martina Boone

Hellllooo! Welcome to the Persuasion Blog Tour! Today I have the honour of presenting Martina Boone's new book Persuasion, the 2nd book in the Heirs of Watson Island series! I have a rather fancy giveaway in stored for you and a interview with the author herself!

I have yet to read Persuasion, but I know it's going to be great! Thanks for stopping by! And good luck with he giveaway!

Persuasion by Martina Boone

Release Date: October 27th, 2015

Publisher: Simon Pulse

Series: The Heirs of Watson Island, #2

Format: Hardcover, 464 pages

Description from GoodReads:

Grieving the death of her godfather and haunted by her cousin Cassie’s betrayal, Barrie returns from a trip to San Francisco to find the Watson plantation under siege. Ghost-hunters hope to glimpse the ancient spirit who sets the river on fire each night, and reporters chase rumors of a stolen shipment of Civil War gold that may be hidden at Colesworth Place. The chaos turns dangerous as Cassie hires a team of archeologists to excavate beneath the mansion ruins. Because more is buried there than treasure.

A stranger filled with magic arrives at Watson’s Landing claiming that the key to the Watson and Beaufort gifts—and the Colesworth curse—also lies beneath the mansion. With a mix of threats and promises, the man convinces Barrie and Cassie to cast a spell there at midnight. But what he conjures may have deadly consequences.

While Barrie struggles to make sense of the escalating peril and her growing and forbidden feelings for Eight Beaufort, it’s impossible to know whom to trust and what to fight for—Eight or herself. Millions of dollars and the fate of the founding families is at stake. Now Barrie must choose between what she feels deep in her heart and what will keep Watson’s Landing safe in this stunning addition to a series filled with “decadent settings, mysterious magic, and family histories rife with debauchery” (Kirkus Reviews, on Compulsion)

Hi! Thank you very much for having me on the blog today! I’m so grateful for the chance to talk Persuasion and Compulsion! : )

I was fascinated with the Fire Carrier and the yunwi in Compulsion, what was the inspiration behind them? Will we be learning more about them in Persuasion?

The mystery of the Fire Carrier and the yunwi—who they are, where they came from, and what they want/need—is the central story question for the entire trilogy. We make more headway toward understanding in Persuasion, but we don’t get the full picture until the very end of Illusion.

The short version of the inspiration is that it’s based on the Cherokee legend of a witch so frightening that no one will even talk about it or knows what it looks like because they don’t dare look. I couldn’t resist that idea—what could be so awful, and what if it isn’t really awful at all?

The long version is that the inspiration for both the Fire Carrier and the yunwi come from Cherokee mythology and the history of the Carolina Lowcountry. At the turn of the 18th century when the Watson, Beaufort, and Colesworth plantations were settled, 50 percent of the slaves in the Carolinas were Native American, most of them women and children. Horrifically, they were forced to scout out the best land, find the best crops to grow, find medicine, and then cultivate the land—often land that had belonged to their own tribes. As was the case with slavery all over the world, often tribes tried to survive themselves by enslaving and selling members of other tribes, but weren’t able to save themselves in the end. Enslaved Africans were brought into this existing framework, and the whole terrible system continued. The resulting mix of magical systems, belief systems, medicine, and history still creates a unique culture in the Carolina Lowcountry, but much of the history is overlooked and forgotten. History is always written by the winning side. I wanted to show how history changes in this series, and to bring some of the forgotten aspects of it to life. The mythology and history of the Fire Carrier legend is a perfect example of how one thing can become another, or how things get mixed and reinterpreted within one culture and across different cultures.

  After Compulsion, Barrie has lost two important people in her life and has to deal with it all. How did you know what to write when it came to the grief? Did you have to do some research, or did you know from a personal experience?

Both. I worked with a lot of PTSD resources on this—won’t say why because of spoilers—but a lot of that has to do with grief and guilt as well.

On the personal side, I’ve lost people close to me. My grandmother was basically the same kind of a figure in my life as Mark, though I didn’t have her for as long. My parents were divorced when I was three, and I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. But when I was five, my mother remarried, and she and my step-father took me with them when they defected from what is now the Czech Republic. Because we defected, we couldn’t go back or we would have been arrested, so I only saw my grandmother a handful of times after that. It wasn’t until after the Berlin Wall came down that I was able to get a visa to go back. My grandmother was so excited that I was finally going to go see her that she started making a flurry of preparations, and she ended up falling down the stairs and breaking her hip. Unfortunately, that killed her before I was able to get there, so I never got to see her.

The guilt and grief and pain of that separation, the total devastation and heartbreak, the refusal and inability to let go, that has stayed with me ever since. There’s a lot of my own hurt and pain and grief over losing my father in Barrie’s relationship with Lula, and there’s a lot of my own heartbreak over my grandmother in her feelings over losing Mark.

 The Heirs of Watson series has such a compelling plot, what inspired you to come up with it? What haas changed from that original idea?

The plot for the series comes from four basic concepts:

1. The magical gifts that complicate the relationship between Barrie and Eight let me really explore the fact that real relationships between young adults are complicated. I totally believe in love at first sight—and I believe there is one special person that is perfect for you. I married my husband eleven months after we met and had a pretty big wedding to plan in between. We’re still very happily married, still in love, and still best friends. But it hasn’t always been easy because his career needs and mine often conflicted. As teens heading for college, and then for real life, this is especially true. Do you risk your heart completely when you have to weight that against achieving your future plans and dreams? How do you know it’s real enough to be worth the risk? To be worth fighting for? How do you know the feelings are based on reality—as teens, we all hide a lot of ourselves from the rest of the world, and we’re also still discovering ourselves. All of that is magnified by the magic that Barrie and Eight have to deal with. This was the biggest change when my publisher bought the three books as a series instead of as three companion stories. I needed to change to have everything from Barrie and Eight’s point of view, and that gave me the chance to really dig into this. YAY!

2. The setting of Watson Island is loosely based on Edisto Island, South Carolina, and researching the magic, history, and folklore of the area led me to the unique mixture of Native American, African, and European history, belief systems, and magic.

3. The story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney fascinated me. At the age of 17, Eliza ran three plantations for her father, who was the governor of Antigua. She also worked with seeds her father sent her from the West Indies and an overseer from Montserrat to develop the method of growing indigo that worked in the Carolinas. As a result of her work, indigo became the third biggest export in the Colonies until the Revolutionary War. But she didn’t accomplish this on her own. As with all wealthy individuals in the colonies, Eliza used slave labor both in the house and in the fields. She left behind a letterbook, which records her incoming and outgoing correspondence, and reading it it struck me how moral she was in every other way. I couldn’t help wondering how she managed to make sense of owning slaves and being a good person in other aspects of her life. We tend to think of slavery as something that’s over, but there are still thirty million slaves in the world right now. Most of them are women and children, which has always been the case, so for me, the Eliza story was especially fascinating because it let me explore some of the issues that women have always faced. For all her accomplishments, Eliza didn’t own the slaves she worked—she didn’t even own the clothes on her back—her father and husband did. She may have had the appearance of freedom and power, but traditionally women within the Cherokee nation had more rights than European women had. There were so many contradictions there that I needed to explore this. You’ll see in Illusion how it all ties together.

4. The story of the Fire Carrier ties to some pretty cool twists that are based on actual events and phenomena. These blew my mind. Again, you’ll have to wait for Illusion to get those answers, though. There’s a LOT of new stuff on this in Persuasion.

Check out the rest of the series!

Compulsion by Martina Boone

Release Date: October 28th, 2014

Publisher: Simon Pulse

Series: The Heirs of Watson Island, #1

Format:

Description from GoodReads:

Three plantations. Two wishes. One ancient curse.

All her life, Barrie Watson has been a virtual prisoner in the house where she lives 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.

Check Out Ohana Read's Review!

Martina Boone was born in Prague and spoke several languages before learning English. She fell in love with words and never stopped delighting in them. She’s the author of SIBA Book Award nominated Compulsion, book one in the romantic Southern Gothic trilogy, the Heirs of Watson Island, which was an Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Bookstores Alliance, a Kansas State Reading Circle selection, a Goodreads Best Book of the Month and YA Best Book of the Month, and an RT Magazine Best of 2014 Editor’s Pick. The second book in the trilogy, Persuasion, will be published in October 2015.

She’s also the founder of AdventuresInYAPublishing.com, a three-time Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers site, the CompulsionForReading.com book drive campaign for underfunded schools and libraries, and YASeriesInsiders.com, a site devoted to the discovery and celebration of young adult literature and encouraging literacy through YA series. She is also a founder and permanent mentor at 1st5PagesWritingWorkshop.com, helping to shepherd aspiring writers into the publication process and help them find the right starting point for their novels in progress, Locally in her home state of Virginia, she is on the board of the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia, helping to promote literacy and adult education initiatives.

She lives with her husband, children, and a lopsided cat, she enjoys writing contemporary fantasy set in the kinds of magical places she’d love to visit. When she isn’t writing, she’s addicted to travel, horses, skiing, chocolate flavored tea, and anything with Nutella on it.

1 winner will receive THE DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE Series signed by Laini Taylor, signed personalized copies of COMPULSION & PERSUASION, a charm bracelet, and a jar of the sweet potato mustard that is on the cosmic dog in Compulsion. US Only.

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Thanks for stopping by, I hope y'all love this series! I hold Compulsion dear to my heart!