Adi Rule: STRANGE SWEET SONG

Today we’re introducing Adi Rule, whose YA debut, STRANGE SWEET SONG, comes out 2/25/14 from St. Martin’s Press.

Four questions. Go!

What’s your debut book about?

Music flows in Sing Da Navelli’s blood. When she enrolls at a prestigious conservatory, her first opera audition is for the role of her dreams. But this leading role is the last Sing’s mother ever sang, before her controversial career, and her life, were cut tragically short.

As Sing struggles to escape her mother’s shadow and prove her own worth, she is drawn to the conservatory’s icy forest, a place steeped in history, magic, and danger. She soon realizes there is more to her new school than the artistry and politics of classical music.

With the help of a dark-eyed apprentice who has secrets of his own, Sing must unravel the story of the conservatory’s dark forest and the strange creature who lives there — and find her own voice.

What do you do in your daily life outside of writing?

I give tours of historic houses, including the weirdest mansion ever (no one can even agree on how many rooms it has), which sits at the end of a lonely peninsula across the bay from an abandoned prison.

jlbruno via flickr

Not creepy at all.

It has occurred to me, as I go through all by myself at the end of the day to shut off the lights and close the curtains, that it would be a good setting for a ghost/murder/dismembered tour guide story.

I also sing in the chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra/Boston Pops, which is super fun. It can be difficult as well because, besides actually singing all this amazing music, we’re one of the only choruses on the planet that performs entirely from memory. And you have to drive in Boston a lot.

What four facts might readers not know about you?

• Going to the dentist doesn’t bother me.
• I cried at the emotional bits of Mass Effect 3.
• My name is pronounced “AH-dee,” not “Addie.”
• My first cousin thrice removed (or something?) was officially canonized in 2010.
• One time I was at a function and Henry Kissinger was there and he was eating a bun and for some reason I thought this was hilarious.

Artist’s rendition.

That was five facts.

Yes, but one of them wasn’t true.

Which one?

Ha ha! Gotcha. They were ALL true. And that counts as your fourth question.

Tell us about your desert island books.

Clever girl.

• JURASSIC PARK by Michael Crichton, because that’s the sort of desert island I would end up on.
• HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE by Diana Wynne Jones, so at least my last moments could be spent swooning over Wizard Howl before I was eaten by procompsognathuses.
• FLY BY NIGHT by Frances Hardinge, because the water is so real it could probably save me from dehydration.
• RABBIT HILL by Robert Lawson, so I could remember that, despite the dinosaur hell I’ve washed up on, the world can be a beautiful place.
• GIANTS OF LAND, SEA & AIR – PAST & PRESENT by David Peters, because srsly that book is the best.

Adi Rule loves writing, singing, animals, reading, video games, laughing at stuff, and jumping off rocks into the water. Her debut STRANGE SWEET SONG drops 2/25/14 from St Martin’s Press, followed by REDWING. Find her on Twitter and Facebook, because you never know when a stranger will ask you what Adi’s cats were doing today.