Q&A with Amanda McCrina

  

 

 

 

Amanda McCrina is the author of the new young adult novel Beyond Seven Forests. Her other books include The Silent Unseen. She is also a historian and a bookseller, and she lives outside Nashville, Tennessee. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Beyond Seven Forests, and how did you create your character Renia?

 

A: Renia appears as a side character in two of my earlier historical novels, Traitor and The Silent Unseen, so my longtime readers first met her as a hospital director secretly involved with both the Polish and Ukrainian undergrounds during World War II.

 

I always wanted to write more about her—she’s this sophisticated, educated, aristocratic woman who also happens to be coordinating resistance groups out of her house, so you just know she has to have an interesting backstory—and I knew she would have been a teenager during World War I, so that’s where I started digging for a story.

 

I didn’t know much at all about World War I’s Eastern Front, but I followed historian Nicolai Eberholst on social media. His research focuses quite a bit on the Austro-Hungarian army during the war.

 

At one point, he posted a photograph dated from 1915, showing a young Ukrainian boy about to be executed by the Austro-Hungarians on suspicion of spying for the Russians. I started imagining what might have happened if teenage Renia had crossed paths with that boy, and the plot was born.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I had to do a lot of research into the medical technology and practices of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and into the empire’s legal system, as my main character is a medical student working in a military hospital and the entire story takes place in a courtroom.

 

I wanted these details to be plausible and authentic without bogging the story down in technicalities, which is always a tricky balance.

 

The most surprising thing is still the sheer scale of casualties on the Eastern Front and how little attention the front gets in popular understandings of the war.

 

The Siege of Przemyśl plays a big role in the book. This was a months-long Russian siege of an Austro-Hungarian fortress city that ultimately resulted in more than a million casualties, greatly contributed to Austria-Hungary’s defeat in the war and to the breakup of the empire, and shapes the landscape of Eastern Europe to this day.

 

I’d never even heard of it until I started researching this book. That’s baffling to me.

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book says, “A thoughtful examination of boundaries between right and wrong, carried by the moral tension and strength of the characters, this novel challenges readers to question ethical certainties.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I always like giving my characters these impossibly difficult ethical dilemmas and seeing what happens—what choices they make, what the ramifications are.

 

I like writing characters with deeply held beliefs who then have to grapple with what those beliefs really look like in practice. I want my characters to feel like real people—people who have doubts, who make mistakes, who don’t always know the right thing to do—so my readers can see themselves in them.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I love that Renia’s strength as a character is a quiet strength. She isn’t an action hero, she doesn’t ever pull out a weapon, but she is absolutely a force to be reckoned with. I’ve always loved books with quietly strong characters, and I hope that readers too find Renia’s kindness, empathy, and firmness of conviction empowering.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My work in progress is an adult historical novel set in ancient Britain, about a Celtic tribeswoman navigating life under Roman occupation who sets out to solve the murder of a soldier and finds herself caught up in a rebellion against the empire.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Please do be mindful of the trigger warnings at the beginning of Beyond Seven Forests; there is a subplot dealing with sexual assault.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Amanda McCrina.