Photo courtesy of Isabel Rodriguez ’21
Lyndsay Ely (left) and Elizabeth Byrne (right) presented their young adult books the Odyssey Bookshop on Feb. 10
BY ISABEL RODRIGUEZ ’21
Two authors, Elizabeth Byrne and Lyndsay Ely, visited the Odyssey Bookshop this past Saturday to hold an event and book signing for their debut young adult novels, “The Grave Keepers” and “Gunslinger Girl.”
Byrne’s “The Grave Keepers” follows the story of two sisters, Athena and Laurel Windham. Their parents are owners of a cemetery, but their primary focus is grave openings and grave keeping. In their world, people get a grave when they are born and have a grave opening when they turn 13 years old. They become gravekeepers and must spend time at their grave.
Ely’s “Gunslinger Girl” is a sci-fi western. In a lawless city, a teenage girl named Serendipity “Pity” Jones becomes a sharpshooting gunslinger. She soon realizes that the freedom she has living in a nation called Cessation comes with a price, and the aftermath of the Second Civil War towers over Cessation and its people.
The authors, both familiar with each other’s work, interviewed one another at the Odyssey Bookshop, providing a more informal and personal conversation for both the authors and the audience. The first question they asked each other was what inspired them to write their novels. Byrne explained that she thought it would be interesting to write a scene in a grave that did not involve horror necessarily, but a more casual “sitting in a grave and having a conversation.” Ely mentioned that she is a big western fan and was inspired to write about a girl gunslinger, as there was a lack of representation in this genre. In addition, she was watching “Deadwood” at the time and loved the idea of a lawless city, and she weaved these two ideas together to form “Gunslinger Girl.”
During their conversation, Ely revealed that she intentionally placed the storyline 20 years after the Civil War to focus on how society rebuilt itself rather than on the conflict itself. After reflecting on past wars, she believes that it didn’t “matter what the war was about but what happens afterwards.”
Multiple people in the audience engaged in the Q&A session, with one individual asking about the process of publishing a book. Both Byrne and Ely spent years writing their novel and put a considerable amount of time into editing. They admitted that the process of publishing is long, and several rejections are expected, but neither Byrne nor Ely gave up. For Byrne, some of the main characters in her early drafts turned into minor ones in the final story. Byrne and Ely both work in publishing, which gave them a behind-the-scenes knowledge of what it takes to make a book happen, but they had to experience it on the other side as an author.
Before ending the Q&A, Byrne and Ely announced that they have more books in the works. While they did not go into detail about their new stories, Byrne did reveal that the rough draft for her next standalone novel is due in the summer. Their writing journey is not over, and readers expect more from both Byrne and Ely.