Kate Blair's Blog

Today is the publication date for We Bury Nothing, published by DCB Young Readers, a YA historical murder mystery about a German prisoner of war in Canada, and the reverberations of his death in the present day. It is a story about complicity and resistance.

Bodies or secrets — nothing stays buried forever.

In 1943, German soldier Erich Stein is captured by the Allies and imprisoned at Camp 43 in Canada, where he begins to question everything he once believed about what it means to be “a good German.”

In present day, Keira Martin lands a summer internship at the museum built atop Camp 43 to work on a historical true crime research project: solving the murder of Erich Stein in 1945. But when a fellow intern drowns under suspicious circumstances, Keira unveils a potential connection between the two deaths involving the Hoppers, a politically powerful family on the museum board pushing anti-2SLGBTQ+ policies. The Hopper Scholarship is Keira’s only hope to afford her dream university, but the more secrets she digs up from the past, the less certain she is about her own future …

This is my fifth book

A fact I find wild. I had an insane ambition to have five books published in ten years (I have no idea where such a ridiculous idea came from). My first novel, Transferral, came out in 2015, so somehow I hit that target, in spite of the pandemic.

The idea for this came from my grandfather

Sort of. He was a British spitfire pilot, and was shot down over occupied France when he was 21. He spent 4 years in a prisoner of war camp, and barely survived the Lamsdorf Death March in 1945. He wrote a book of his experiences for us before he died in 2011. He was an incredibly kind man, and on his way home, after escaping his captors as Germany fell, he talked about passing a camp of German POWs, and feeling sad for them, in spite of all the people he lost, and all he endured. He did not feel sorry for the Third Reich, the leadership, or the army, but for the individual men.

That got me thinking about complicity, and how much responsibility falls on the individual in a time where the government controls major media outlets and pumps out lies and distortion. (Perhaps you see where I’m going here?). The present-day attacks on libraries, and trying to ban books (particularly LGBTQIA2S+ books) that do not fit the narrative has a horribly familiar ring to it.

However, unlike the Germans under the Nazi regime, we still have other sources of information, and face no punishment for accessing them. That’s why it was only once I learned about the Canadian camps for German POWs, and the way the prisoners found themselves exposed to a different way of thinking, that some of the central ideas of this story began to take shape.

The German POW camps in Canada are a fascinating and underappreciated aspect of Canadian/world history. I spent many weeks in the Toronto Reference Library (because that was the only place to find some of the books on it) totally immersed in learning about it.

I really hope I’ve been able to bring some of it alive for readers.

Excited to announce (a little belatedly) that A Mist of Memories is a Snow Willow Finalist. The Willow Awards promote reading and celebrate Canadian literature. The finalists will be voted on by the young people who read them. I do love reader’s choice awards. Congratulations to the other nominees, who include a number of my friends!

The first review for A Mist of Memories came in – and it’s a super lovely one from Kirkus.

A forgotten island holds the answers to more than one mystery in this haunting page-turner.

Charlotte and her parents live alone on Levay Island, surrounded by cliffs and separated from the coast of England by a misty sea. After her traumatic accident earlier in the year, she’s been confined to the island, struggling with memory lapses and plagued by the feeling that something isn’t quite right with her family.

In a small town across the water, Ajay is reeling from the disappearance of his friend Oleander. He can’t shake the dire circumstances under which she went missing or her erratic behavior in the days prior.

Ajay decides to retrace Oleander’s steps, and when his investigation leads him to Charlotte’s island, the two find kinship and a common goal in their search for truth. But to their dismay, it seems the more they try to probe the island’s secrets, the more it fights to stay forgotten.

Both the gloominess of Ajay’s seaside town and the crumbling grandeur of Charlotte’s island lend atmospheric dread that complements the story’s gothic elements: unreliable narrators, visions, uncanny occurrences, and more. Twists and turns abound, but the heart of the book is its poignant exploration of regret, grief, and loss. Ajay is of South Asian descent, bringing subtle tension to interactions with the otherwise predominantly White cast, including Charlotte and her parents.A modern gothic thriller with emotional depth. (Mystery. 14-18)

After four years working on a book, it’s hard to see it properly, and self-doubt eats away at you. This was particularly the case for this one, as so much of it was written during the darkest days of the pandemic, while juggling homeschooling and full-time work, and feeling like I was failing at everything. Having the first review be so positive means a lot.

I was particularly delighted because I adore gothic novels. At one point during the pandemic it seemed they were all I could read (which is probably why I wrote one!). I’m so glad I hit the right notes with this.

I have a new book coming out! It’s for young adults, it’s called A Mist of Memories, and it’ll be available in May 2023 with DCB.

It’s about a lost island wreathed in whispering mists, a missing girl, and a quest for the truth

Charlotte and her family have always been the only inhabitants on Levay Island, a popular tourist spot. But the island has been closed to the public since Charlotte’s freak accident on the cliffs in May. Her recovery isn’t going well – she hardly has any memories from before the accident, keeps losing hours of time, and is seeing a ghostly woman from the dark myths of her fog-bound island. She doesn’t think she can trust her own mind any more.

On the mainland, Ajay is desperately searching for his friend and crush, Oleander, who disappeared from their seaside town in July, after her father’s suicide and the leaking of a nude photo. When Ajay’s search brings him to the forgotten island of Levay, he and Charlotte must face memories they are desperate to forget and find out who the Lady of Levay is before the legend claims them both.

This book took me far too long to write (four years!), mostly because I was hanging on for dear life with homeschooling and full time work during the pandemic, so I had little time for writing. I’m so proud of myself for getting it written anyway.

I have, once again been very bad at updating this website. This time it’s due to a global pandemic, which is more than enough of an excuse, frankly.

There has been more news on my latest book, The Magpie’s Library, which was nominated for a 2021 Northern Lights Award and named one of the Ontario Library Association’s Best Bets for 2019, which all made me very happy back in a time that feels impossibly long ago.

Since then I have been trying to continue to write, mostly using the same tricks I talk about here, but with both children home for most of the year, homeschooling, continuing to work full time and no nights off or lunchtimes to myself, it’s been going agonizingly slowly.

I’m far from alone in this, and time is not the only issue, as this excellent article spells out. For the first few months I was reeling, then in a shocked daze, and had trouble even reading. I miss seeing people, and tucking mental notes away. I miss getting out into the city and sitting in a cafe where I’m alone but exposed to the world around me, filled with those serendipitous little observations that bring a character into focus. I miss seeing people to whom I am someone other than a mother and an employee.

I tried not writing. That was worse. I had trouble dragging myself back to the computer after a long day in front of the computer, but on the days (and occasional weeks) where I didn’t, it made the work-bed-work monotony starker.

We are starting to see signs of the end of all this. It’s still a way off here in Canada. I sit here on a cold grey day with cases rising again, anticipating the schools closing once more, but yesterday the AstraZeneca vaccine was approved. My parents and step-parents in the UK have all received their first dose. There have been many times when it felt like this wouldn’t end, especially as we head into March again, but summer is coming.

I just wish it would hurry up.

I am once again very late in updating this site. To be fair, I do have a full-time job and two small children, and I just finished the second draft of my next manuscript, as well as working on other exciting things that may or may not come to anything in the long run.

So my poor website got ignored until now (better that than the children), and this will just be a quick post to make excuses and highlight the main reviews for The Magpie’s Library.

As well as the Quill and Quire review I’ve already mentioned, the Canadian Review of Materials gave it 5/5 stars, saying;

The Magpie’s Library is an empowering story about dealing head-on with the curves life throws at you and emerging whole on the other side.

I also got my first ever Kirkus review – and they said;

The action is fast paced and constant, but readers are always privy to Silva’s feelings… Blair releases information about the characters and clues almost grudgingly, deftly hinting at possible patterns and interrelations, while completely surprising readers with the final denouement… This intricate and compelling fantasy will pull readers in.

And since it sounds like my son’s nap is over, I’ll go back to neglecting this blog again, until I have more news to share, and time to share it.

The thing about publishing is that you work and wait for years (three years, in fact, since I wrote the first scene of The Magpie’s Library), then everything happens in a big rush.

As I have mentioned before, The Magpie’s Library is coming out this month – next week, in fact. The launch is at Bakka-Phoenix books on May 23rd at 6:30pm. Come! There will be cake (of course).

The first review is in too, and it’s a super-lovely one from Quill and Quire.

Told in lively prose imbued with a British parlance, The Magpie’s Library is a nuanced tale that isn’t afraid to play with multiple narratives and timelines. The chapters shift between Silva’s point-of-view, the magpie’s, and the characters that Silva inhabits. Elements of magic realism add excitement and wonder, but the book moves beyond the superficial skimming of gateway fantasy. Here is an otherworldly story that deals with weighty topics such as Alzheimer’s, death, and the complexity of family relationships. A rich emotional landscape is presented to show how grief and pain at times necessitate the need to explore other worlds.

Quill and Quire

And, to cap it all off, my book has been spotted in the wild, by my friend (and awesome author) Lisa Dalrymple!

The Magpie’s Library is my most personal book to date. Although I never found a magical library I did, like Silva, always check wardrobes in case one of them led to Narnia. While growing up, I longed to escape to the fantastic worlds in my books.

So it felt natural to place a fantastic world in the everyday landscape of my childhood; Hayling Island. I lived there from the age of 3 until I left home at 18. Hayling is a small island attached to the south coast of England by a half-mile long bridge. It is home to about 17,000 people.

Hayling is bit of an oddity. It’s obscure enough that most Brits haven’t heard of it, and it came 26th in a best selling list of Britain’s crap towns. But it once had an iron age shrine and a Roman temple. The churchyard near my parents’ homes has the oldest yew tree in the country, and the grave of a Russian princess. It also has a funfair, beaches, many retirement homes, and of course, a library.

Hayling Library is next door to my primary school, and across the road from my middle school. I used to turn somersaults on the bar outside, and sit and read on the wooden train in the children’s section. I remember poring over encyclopaedias there for homework research and being far too competitive about summer reading programs.

The ridiculously stony beach is where I went to swim in the summer and be alone in the winter. A lot of Islanders did that, but there were conveniently enough beaches that it was possible to avoid running into the other people who wanted to be alone.

Funlands, Hayling’s funfair, has rollercoasters and twisters, waltzers and dodgems, but like Ollie, Silva’s brother in The Magpie’s Library, the main attraction there for me was the arcade, one of several on Hayling, with all its bright flashing lights and video games.

I’ve tweaked Hayling a bit, for example, moving the long-closed Havant Cinema to the island. But I’ve tried to stay true to the real place where most of my UK family live today (you know, apart from the magical magpie bit).

Many of my friends who were all desperate to leave the island in their teens have since moved back. We joke that they put a homing chip in our brains, and it activates in your 30s. So far, I’ve resisted the temptation to return, but I don’t get to visit Hayling as much as I want and I often miss it. So I did enjoy sitting at my desk in Canada and writing about the island that will always be home to me.

I have once again completely neglected this blog for far too long. But now I have news to share.

The Magpie’s Library – a middle grade fantasy – is coming out in 2019 with DCB! It’ll be out in Canada in May, and the US in October.  And it has a GORGEOUS cover designed by the amazing Emma Dolan (you really should check out her site, I love all her book covers).

Thirteen-year-old Silva loves her visits to her grandpa’s house on Hayling Island. For Silva and her brother Ollie, the cottage by the sea has always felt like their real home – a comforting, steady presence in a childhood spent moving from place to place. So it’s a shock when they arrive for a visit to find their Grandfather in hospital, confused and frail. The doctor says he has Alzheimer’s, and is only going to get worse.

Silva seeks refuge in the library she’s loved since she was a child, and it’s there that a magpie appears, along with a magical door that only she can see, a door to another library, full of enchanted books which allow her to step into other people’s lives.

But there is something sinister about the magpie’s library. Every time she visits, she leaves feeling a little more broken, a little more disoriented, a little less…herself.

Silva must solve the mysteries of the magpie’s library and save herself and her family before her own soul is sealed in the pages of yet another book in the magpie’s collection.

For anyone in the Wellington County area, the Elora Writers Festival is next weekend. You really should go – and not just to see me – there will be Drew Hayden Taylor, Kathy Stinson, Linden MacIntyre and Michelle Winters speaking as well. I’m really excited to hear their readings (and to get to meet them!)  It’s on Sunday May 6, from 1-4 p.m., at Aboyne Hall, Wellington County Museum & Archives. You can buy tickets here or from the Fergus Grand Theatre Box Office. They are a serious bargain at $25.

More information about the festival can be found here.

Much as I’m looking forward to it, I’m glad it’s not this weekend, as I’ve lost my voice. But I’m taking care of it so I’ll be fine by the 6th.

Also, just in case you need any more encouragement to get Tangled Planet, here’s another review – this one from the ‘Recommended Books’ section of this month’s Canadian Children’s Book News (which also has a great profile on fellow Elora reader Kathy Stinson):

“Kate Blair weaves an interesting and gripping tale in Tangled Planet. In addition to the murder mystery that underlies the main plot, the reader is also pulled into the debate about whether humanity is ready to leave the stars to return to planet life. The political nuances in this story create a tale that will appeal to a wide variety of readers, and the first-person perspective of Ursa helps to keep the suspense building throughout. Blair creates an accessible narrative style with a fairy-tale plot that intermingles politics, science and exploration to draw in even the most seasoned science fiction fan. In addition, the ways in which Ursa learns to deal with her grief are true to life and powerful, regardless of the setting.”