BLURB:
It’s the week before Halloween and Marina is about to turn thirteen. Her father died a year ago. Her mother has strangely fallen asleep and no-one can wake her. She is sent to live with her mysterious grandmother, Ursula who tells her that that you can enter a strange world between the ever falling rain in the west of Ireland. Marina enters a haunting watery world full of strange creatures, demons and gods. Meanwhile, in our world a strange sleeping sickness has taken over.
A haunting fantasy thriller that is also about grief and letting go of the demons inside yourself.
Thrilled to be starting off the blog tour with this guest post from author, Susan, Cahill, about this brilliant adventure:
My Inspiration for The World Between the Rain
The World Between the Rain tells the story of Marina, a 13-year-old girl whose dad always claimed she was someone who can see doorways to other worlds where other people see nothing at all. Marina never believed him, until one rainy night she falls between the raindrops into a watery world full of shadows, strange creatures, and forgotten gods.
My main inspiration was the idea of doorways to other worlds. My absolute favourite kinds of children’s books are portal fantasies – ones where the characters start in our world and find a doorway into another magical world. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a classic example of this. I’ve spent a lot of my life searching for and daydreaming about discovering a portal to another world – I even used to trace the maps to Narnia when I was a child and keep them in my pocket. This was so I would be able to find my way around in case I managed to get there. And obviously I’ve checked every wardrobe I’ve ever encountered (I know I’m not alone here!)
The next best thing to actually finding a portal is inventing one yourself. But what kind of doorway might someone find in a small seaside town in Ireland that wasn’t wardrobe, or a tornado, or a rabbit hole, or a mirror. I found myself staring out the window, trying to think of what kind of portal Marina might find. Because I wrote a lot of this book in Ireland, it was, of course, a rainy day. And I thought, what if the rain was behaving strangely, what if you could glimpse another world between the raindrops? And if so, what kind of world might this be?
As you might expect from the title, The World Between the Rain is a very watery book. I grew up by the sea and my family are all cold-water sea swimmers. My brother is a surfer and a hydrographic surveyor, which means that he spends his life on or near the sea, travelling around Ireland surveying harbours and surfing. (I know, I’d like his life too!) So the sea and its vast depths play an important role in the book – all that life teeming below the surface.
And this leads me to my other source of inspiration is the rain-soaked Irish coast itself. I grew up in West Cork and the rolling hills, the gorse, the fuchsia, the windswept beaches, and the ancient monuments like stone circles and wedge tombs were all so magical to me. The landscape itself seems full of stories. Ancient stories. Lost stories. I’ve always wondered what stories people told around fires on rainy nights long ago, stories that we might have forgotten, stories that soaked into the land. These might have been stories about gods and maybe these gods are still around. But perhaps they’ve forgotten that they’re gods. So your neighbour might be a god. Or a stranger you meet on the beach. Or even one of your own family.
And when these two ideas came together in my head – a watery world glimpsed between the raindrops and gods who’d forgotten they were gods – I knew I had a story of my own!
Find out more about the author via these links:
Susan Cahill, Author
Instagram: @susancahillwrites
Twitter: @scahill
Co-Host of Storyshaped - a podcast about the stories that shape us
Twitter: @StoryshapedPod
Website: shows.acast.com/storyshaped
Hosts: Susan Cahill and Sinéad O'Hart
My thanks to Mikka, as always, at the fabulous Everything With Words publishers, for the gifted copy for review and as part of this blogtour.
Visit other stops at:
Post by Rich Simpson (@richreadalot) October 2024.
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