I have been writing weird fairy-tale flavoured novels since my late teens. Way back near the beginning, I did send one of these novels to a publisher. It was a terrible novel, and it was rejected, thank goodness, but after that, I lost my nerve for something like fifteen years. I wrote plenty of novels, but I stuck them all on dusty shelves and didn't send them to anybody. Only in my mid-thirties did I decide that enough was enough and start flinging my latest novel at people again. It took five years, but it was accepted by Tor Books in 2015 and was released into the wild on November 28, 2017. It is currently mostly out of print but can still be found in ebook form.

Photograph courtesy of Phil Mills The novel, Weave a Circle Round, is a YA fantasy--with some science-fictiony aspects--about a fourteen-year-old girl named Freddy, her stepbrother Roland, and her sister Mel. Freddy is having some issues with Roland, not to mention her own directionless anger and her increasing tendency not to fade into the background at school, but these ordinary problems are exacerbated when a scatterbrained woman named Cuerva Lachance and the acerbic teenager Josiah move in next door. Freddy finds herself bounced back and forth between the usual teenage crises and the less usual problems that arise when you live next door to people who are a bit too creepily interested in your family and who don't seem to be bound by the usual rules of common sense and/or physics. When Freddy and Josiah walk through Josiah's back door and find themselves in medieval Scandinavia, it becomes evident that the weirdness is only just beginning. Weave a Circle Round tied for the 2018 Copper Cylinder Award (YA category), was a finalist for the Andre Norton Nebula Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, and was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award (YA category). It received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal (where it was Debut of the Month) and School Library Journal, and it was a Junior Library Guild selection. Click to order at Macmillan.com

I am working on another book. I'm not going to say anything about it just yet because that would jinx it. Weirdly enough, I'm not superstitious at all... but still.

I am currently seeking representation.

Page on Macmillan Site Page on Goodreads Blog (WoB Talk)

Content copyright Kari Maaren 2017
Images copyright Kari Maaren, Phil Mills, Erik Mohr, and Karl Stahl 2017