Gwenda Bond – The Frame-Up

Steve Thomas: Gwenda, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Gwenda Bond: Well, thanks for having me back.

Steve Thomas: Yes, in 2013 you were on the podcast and it was your first American Library Association conference in Chicago, way back at the beginning of your career.

Gwenda Bond: Yeah, my first book had just come out.

Steve Thomas: The one thing I always remember back from that conversation is that we joked about starting a Christopher Pike Book Club cause we all talked about where we read Christopher Pike books.

Gwenda Bond: Oh my gosh. I have come so close to starting the Christopher Pike Book Club with various people over the years that it just has never materialized, but someday.

Steve Thomas: Listeners, get in touch with Gwenda if you want to join the Christopher Pike Book Club. So that’s obviously been what, 11 years since then, and before we get into the writing too much, what role have libraries played in your life, like before you were a writer, but now as a writer?

Gwenda Bond: Oh my word. Well I love libraries especially our library here in Lexington. It’s just a godsend, and I frequently have many, many books checked out, like wandering in there to see what’s new is one of my favorite things. Our library also does so many cool programs and things in the community here, and I’m just so grateful for them.

But also really one thing that’s changed in my process, because the internet has gotten so terrible, and it’s not a very good place to do research, even moreso than it was. I definitely will buy books for research, but when I’m researching a new project, a lot of times what I will do is see what the library has in their collection, which is often a more eclectic assortment than what you would get if you’re like the best books about this or that. And so you can find some more like off the beaten path sorts of things to incorporate into your work and definitely for The Frame Up, like there were a lot of the art books and collections and stuff about particularly women’s painting history, a lot of that stuff came from our library here.

Steve Thomas: Great. And like we said before, you were at your beginning of your career when we talked before. How do you feel like your work has evolved over the years?

Gwenda Bond: Well I kind of just follow my muse wherever I want to go. And when I first started out, I thought I would want to write young adult books only forever, but I think I read everything and watch everything consume all kinds of stories, and so it just, naturally certain stories want to be a different tone, want to be for a different age, and so I feel like I’ve jumped around a bunch, did some middle grade, and now I’m writing mostly for adults, but I know that I’ll go back to YA at some point, because that still has a special place in my heart.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. You did a few Lois Lane books and you did a Stranger Things book. Do you like working on licensed content?

Gwenda Bond: I have been so lucky. And people always ask, “What would you want to work on next?” And I’m like, well, I would have never told you I wanted to work on either one of those things. Just when I was asked, I was like, “Yes, obviously I want to do this!” So I do love it, and I feel like it really taught me a lot that I’ve been able to bring over into my original work. But there is something so fun about working with a beloved universe of somebody else’s. And I love to collaborate. I’ve done lots of collaborative projects too. And so I feel like those tap into that a little bit as well.

Steve Thomas: And speaking of that, who is your ideal Lois Lane out of the people who have played Lois over the years? Is there one that really matches your view?

Gwenda Bond: I mean, Margot Kidder was my first Lois Lane and will always be the Lois Lane of my heart, and I got to meet her right before she passed away, like a year or two before she passed away. She actually signed my copy of the book and she’s like, “What is Lois Lane like?” and I’m like, “A lot like you, but younger.” But I do just love her chemistry with Christopher Reeve and the way she plays that character is tough, but vulnerable and plucky and with a comedic sensibility. I think she will always be my Lois, but I think we’ve had so many great ones, right? And I’m excited about the next one, the new one that’s been cast.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, for the James Gunn movie that they’re doing?

Gwenda Bond: Yeah. Fingers crossed.

Steve Thomas: You never know. Sometimes they don’t, they just don’t get Superman. Sometimes

Gwenda Bond: I’m just hoping it’s not too snarky. I’m hoping that it’s got that sincerity that you really need at the heart of a Superman story, I think.

Steve Thomas: I love James Gunn movies and I’m kind of like, James Gunn Superman? I don’t know.

Gwenda Bond: I know, I know. But maybe he’ll pull it off. I hope he does.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I hope so too.

Gwenda Bond: It’s like there’s so much superhero content out there now that has that James Gunn tone because he’s been so influential and done so much of it. It’s like do we need that Superman? I’m not convinced that we do.

Steve Thomas: I guess if you make the other characters all snarky and let Clark be more.

Gwenda Bond: Yeah.

Steve Thomas: I don’t think he’s Boy Scout-y but he’s not snarky, certainly.

Gwenda Bond: No, he can be funny, but I think it’s never mean. I don’t think he would ever have a mean sense of humor.

Steve Thomas: I do like in the licensed stuff now; they seem to give people a little more latitude to do things. It seemed like in the past, you’d always hear bad stories about they were really strict on them and making them follow all these strict rules, but now, I mean, it seemed like with your Lois Lane series too, they let you not probably go anywhere you wanted to, couldn’t make her a Martian or something, but you have a little more leeway to play with the universe and the characters.

Gwenda Bond: Oh, absolutely. That’s really important to me. Like, honestly, the first question I ask if, even if it’s a property I want to work on, is how much freedom will I have because I would never want to take something on and feel like I wasn’t adding something to it, and I was very lucky with the Superman books. I think they were very nervous at first, but then like, I remember we got the first manuscript back from the executive and I had sort of gone off the outline a little bit, because I knew that they wouldn’t actually let me probably if I’d asked, put Clark in the book, but I was like “Well, I’ve created this virtual reality game. Obviously, the reason my subconscious did this is so they can have scenes together where they’re sort of in a physical space.” And so I just did it. I figured if they didn’t like it, I could rewrite it and if I asked for permission, they would say no and luckily it came back with like a giant heart drawn on the front of the manuscript and one global note, which was “Superman cannot do anything illegal.”

Steve Thomas: Probably was not in your plans anyway.

Gwenda Bond: Yeah, I’m like, well, technically, does he have permission to fly around in airspace? I don’t think…

Steve Thomas: Yeah, he wouldn’t intentionally do anything illegal. Oh, I don’t know if it was for the greater good. I don’t know. It’s one of those things. It’s kind of like, that’s the interesting thing I think about a character like Superman or Captain America, that they’re like the straight laced, doing the right thing for the right reasons every time. You surround them by the gray of the world. You don’t make them gray. They’re not gray. They’re doing the right thing for the right reason. It’s just, how do you do that?

Gwenda Bond: Absolutely. Also, the right thing can be difficult. And so I think that’s where people get the idea that Superman is boring. And it’s like, really, you think being a good person in this world is easy? You think making good choices all the time is easy. Really?

Steve Thomas: Well I guess that’s a good lead-in, I think, to The Frame-Up, because there’s people doing illegal things.

Gwenda Bond: Oh yes, no Superman in this one.

Steve Thomas: But can you tell listeners basically what The Frame-Up is about?

Gwenda Bond: Yeah, so I guess the shorthand is “Ocean’s Eleven with magic” but really, it’s more “Ocean’s Eight with magic,” but it’s an art heist book about an art thief who was raised by another art thief, her mother, who she flipped on as a teenager and sent away to prison, and they have magical skills, and Dani’s is that anything that she paints or creates seems like the original. It could fool anyone, so it’s kind of like a forger on steroids. I wanted really to use the magic in the book, like everyone’s skills, just to make them that much more extreme versions of the heist crew.

She basically is hired by her mother’s former partner to steal a painting from this impenetrable collection being put up for auction, and she has a very short amount of time to do it. She has to come home and get the entire old crew on board, including her first lost love and her childhood best friend. It’s all very fraught and hijinks ensue.

Steve Thomas: What was the core of this book? Like, was it wanting to write a heist book? Was it wanting to write something else magic?

Gwenda Bond: It was definitely wanting to write a heist book. I love heists, and I just wanted to set the challenge of doing it because I think it’s very hard. I wanted specifically to do an art heist because I’m a huge art nerd. I love art, and also, I think art heists have a unique fun place because they tend to be a little less bloody, a little less like “we’re murdering people” and that sort of thing. You could really sort of have more fun with the criminal elements. And the art world itself, it’s very much open to critique because, you know, there’s a lot of shady things going on there and people using paintings to move money around. One thing that it always shocks people when I’m like, well, one of the big things that people steal art for now is so they can barter to get people out of prison earlier, or turning over missing pieces of art to the authorities. I think it’s just a really fertile territory.

And I also wanted to tell a family story that was a little more twisted. I love a found family. I love an ensemble cast. I’ve written a lot of healthy mother-daughter dynamics. I have a very good relationship with my mom, so I wanted to write one that was a little more complicated.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, but just to be clear to everybody, this book is not the relationship of Gwenda and her mother.

Gwenda Bond: John Scalzi describes this book as a really super fun heist story about intergenerational patriarchal trauma.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that covers it. Found family really is part of it because family in general, the family dynamics is very important, and generally when people think about family, it’s like your blood family is the one that’s the closest to you and everything, but really in this book, it’s the blood family is the one that’s turned on her and it’s her found family that are there for her.

Gwenda Bond: Yeah, yeah. I do love a found family and I think most of us have a mix of closeness with our blood family and with the friends and people that become our family along the way. I just think there’s always so many layers to relationships that you have with people, especially in this case, it’s a found family that she’s known for almost her entire life, but then she’s lost touch with them and been on her own. So I think there’s also always something fun about someone who’s been isolated and then getting to come back into contact with the people that can be very satisfying. I think the whole theme of the book is second chances really. And I feel like that is really something that we pretend we don’t necessarily get in life, but in point of fact, we do get a lot of second chances in life.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and won’t get into spoilers, but obviously there’s a dark person in the book who wants a second chance at power and stuff too.

Gwenda Bond: You gotta have a villain. You gotta have a great villain. Yeah, the painting that’s being stolen is not exactly just a painting. We’ll just say it that way.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, we won’t go into it more than that. Did you draw on any real life art heists when you were building up the story for The Frame Up?

Gwenda Bond: Oh, for sure. I mean, I tend to write for my obsessions and so I’ve watched everything about every art heist forever, although there’s always new ones that you learn about. I was just reading about one today where this guy buried a bust in a farmer’s field in the 30s and they found it and it was authenticated as real and then the guy’s like, “It’s not real, I made it. I buried it in the ground in the hope that someone would dig it up and my work would get attention.”

But yeah, no, I definitely, there are bits of lore, like from real art heists that I wanted to tie in that I, quote unquote, solve in the book through the presence of magic. Most of the ones that are mentioned are real and certainly I’ve read about everything, lurked in every museum security forum online, which there are a lot of actually, and they all have pitch decks for like the technology that they sell museums so I will definitely to go deep into those kind of rabbit holes.

Steve Thomas: So a lot of the security that was on the collection in the book is actual real security that people are selling?

Gwenda Bond: Yeah, absolutely. Yep. State of the art. I mean, if you’re gonna do a heist, you gotta play fair. It can’t be easy. You gotta make them work for it.

Steve Thomas: The magic system that you use is, like you said, very kind of understated like people aren’t casting fireballs at each other and things like that. How did you go about setting up that system of magic?

Gwenda Bond: Well, I feel like heists themselves tend to almost have a magical quality about them often. Like, the expertise of the people involved is almost supernatural, so I really just wanted to keep the magic fairly naturalistic, filling that same function that is in a traditional heist but just pushing it a little bit further, making it a little more complicated and also making it more complicated in the sense that I wanted the story to have to play by the rules of the magic in the universe, but also the heist has to work in our actual world. I do really like setting magic in the real world, and I think the degree of world building that you use in any kind of thing, like the book I’m working on right now has a huge magic system, very historical fantasy, and it’s just got tons of elements, and that didn’t feel right for this. This is kind of like a “cozy noir” tone, so you don’t want too many flourishes, but also because, if the world building was too complicated, I think it would be very difficult to have all the complicated twists and turns that make the heist itself satisfying. You’d be asking to follow too many things, right?

Steve Thomas: If you could just teleport or turn invisible or anything like that, that’s too many shortcuts.

Gwenda Bond: Exactly. No, the main rule for the magic was it had to make things harder for everyone.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. I think it’s good that you described it as just making the traditional heist roles more…

Gwenda Bond: yeah. Just push it further. Yeah, because ultimately, they’re still criminals doing criminal things.

Steve Thomas: Right. But I mean, like you always have the hacker guy, but this is like someone whose magic power is to be able to work with electronics, so instead of just somebody who’s good with code…

Gwenda Bond: Exactly, exactly. And I love that character. I love Rabbit and her music taste.

Steve Thomas: Well, my favorite character I think is Sunflower.

Gwenda Bond: Oh, well, everyone’s favorite character is Sunflower who’s based on Sally the dog, my Border Collie. Sally is not nearly as well trained as Sunflower, I have to say, but she would eat someone’s face off. So that is where the inspiration for Sunflower came from. Yeah. I love writing pets. I love writing dogs and cats into books.

Steve Thomas: Dogs are more likely to be Superman. Cats are more likely to be the supervillains.

Gwenda Bond: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, you’ve done that with your last few books, Mr. and Mrs. Witch and The Date from Hell, just go toward a real world, but with magic and supernatural elements peeking in here and there and they can be more and less important in the story, but it’s still grounded.

Gwenda Bond: Yeah, yeah. I’m a big fan of that. It’s funny though because, well, I guess it’s still grounded. The things I’m working on right now, one of them takes place in old Hollywood and one takes place in Regency England, and they both have cut a little more extreme magic systems. And I mean, obviously, like the Date From Hell, half of it takes place in Hell, half of it takes place here so those are a little more world building, but again, it’s just dictated by where the story goes.

Steve Thomas: But it’s funny, that even seems, I mean, even when you’re in Hell, it still feels grounded. Like, it’s not just like a…

Gwenda Bond: That’s, like, a huge compliment. I mean, I feel like my Metropolis, even when I was writing the Lois Lane books or when I was writing Stranger Things, like I had maps of Bloomington everywhere. I had role playing games about Metropolis and really wanted it to feel, and people have told me, that it feels more like a city than it does in a lot of Superman stories because place is really important to me and making it feel like a space that the characters actually inhabit like I really enjoy setting.

I read a whole history of Hell for those books, about how our visions of Hell have changed over time and folded little bits of it. But then you also always want to bring like your own, like, something you’ve never seen before. You want to be researching, like for Mr. and Mrs. Witch, I think the weirdest thing I looked up was, “Can snakes eat sushi?” They can. They can eat sashimi. They cannot eat sushi. They cannot digest the rice, but they can eat the fish. Like, this person with Medusa hair, would anyone actually be like, “Fish can’t eat sushi!”? But like, to me, it’s those little details like that make it feel realer in some ways.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Almost all of your work has some sort of magic or supernatural element to it, do you think that’s something that interests you enough that’s always going to be part of your work? Do you have like a straight-up locked room mystery in your head at some point that you’d want to do or anything like that?

Gwenda Bond: If I said that I didn’t, then I would definitely end up writing one. I have a feeling, I mean, I did do a joint project called Dead Air with Carrie Ryan and Rachel Caine that was a serial podcast I created that didn’t have magic in it. It did have like some extra structural flourishes, like we did the actual podcast that the podcaster is writing and producing in the show. That’s available to listen to for free from Realm FM. So for sure I would not rule out doing something without magic. In general, I do like to add a fantasy element because it’s just more fun. I tend to just naturally go there, but I absolutely could see writing things without a magical element in them, especially mysteries or thrillers. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: You also have a newsletter that you write, Dear Reader, on Substack. How have you used Substack to connect with your readers?

Gwenda Bond: Well I need to write one right now. Whenever I’m working a lot, I tend to let the newsletter kind of slide and that has been the case this summer because I’m on deadline. I’m a little overdue, I’m a little behind because I had quite a year last year.

I started out as a blogger early on, and so I think it just naturally is something that I like, to share and communicate and process what I’m thinking in that way. And Substack’s the closest, I think, to that sort of blogosphere community and feel, especially with, like, Twitter collapsing. I do read more newsletters, and it is the one thing that I feel, it’s not the same, but it is something like it used to be when we all just had our little blog roll and like, bounced around the internet. I still kind of have hopes that AI will be so shitty that it will drive us all back to, like, the ancient internet where we were just, like, doing things, not commodified.

I feel like I’m discovering more, like I just discovered this guy and I don’t remember his name, but you could Google it and be like Reacher Appears in Other TV Shows, and it would show up. I just subscribed to his newsletter, so I haven’t memorized his name yet, but his writing is delightful. And his subscriptions, he makes a donation to like spinal research. So even though you can go paid, it’s still going to support something good. I hope we see more of that kind of ethos out there.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and speaking of supporting good things, can you tell listeners about the Lexington Writers Room?

Gwenda Bond: Sure. Well, you know, I like to make sure I time everything optimally. So I met this woman named Lisa Haneberg, and she and I were both thinking about how cool it would be to have a co-working space for writers with some other people locally, so we made a space within another co-working space. We soft launched the week the pandemic started, when everything closed down. We had, like, three days. We had a covert pizza party on the last night. We’re like, “I guess we’re not going to be in here for a while.”

But we had like 12 people sign up that first week, so we sort of knew that maybe this could work. So basically, we just wanted to make a space that was cool and tricked-out and where writers from all different paths could come, and we iterated on it during the pandemic. We were in a second location, which was great, but burned to the ground, and then we moved to the location where we are now, which is an old coffee shop that was beloved here locally that had gone out of business.

And luckily, we were so fortunate after the fire, donations just poured in and we had insurance so we were able to reopen there, so now we have about 100 members. We just hired up a halftime executive director, and we have a community manager It’s basically a 24/7 space that we subsidize memberships. We’re a nonprofit, so it’s 50 a month unless you’re part of a marginalized group and then we have programs, but for 50 a month, you can write anytime you want. There’s snacks, office supplies. We just wanted a place that really supported writers at all stages of their journey, gave a community hub, and I think we’re gonna do some exciting things and maybe have more of a community presence as we move forward.

Our main goal will always be just giving people a place to do their work and support for that. It’s really important to me, the idea of mentoring but also just cross pollinating ideas among other people and having a space that’s not hierarchical where you can have a conversation with someone who’s written a million books. It doesn’t matter how you publish, or if you’re working on your first thing, because I think that benefits and keeps everyone fresh.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. So do you have people that are like, if there’s somebody else there, they’ll chat together and brainstorm together or whatever.

Gwenda Bond: Yep. And we do like a monthly write-in, and we’ll sometimes organize to go to literary events together so people don’t have to go alone, and I think we’ll be doing more readings and those sorts of things this year, now that we’ve got some staff because we were all volunteer. We thought maybe we’d have like, 20 people at our height, and we have a hundred. So we grew really fast.

We’re very fortunate here. I feel like Lexington really and Kentucky in general, there’s just so many excellent writers and so much creative energy here, and it’s affordable enough that we can do things like the Writer’s Room that we wouldn’t be able to afford if we lived somewhere else.

Steve Thomas: That’s great. Okay, so at the end of all the interviews, asking two different questions. The first one is, what was your first favorite book?

Gwenda Bond: Oh, my first favorite book. I don’t remember if it was the first, I’m looking around for it, but one of my early favorites… well actually Peter Rabbit was my very first favorite because I really identify with Peter, and I think anyone who knows me, is like, “Yeah, of course you did.”

But I was really, so I have this, this is my childhood copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense. It’s just like a collection of like, The Monkey’s Paw, The Most Dangerous Game, which is the illustration on the cover. It was really like these twisty little short stories I think I was very obsessed with, and I had a very overactive imagination. So I love being scared by them.

Steve Thomas: I always loved that kind of short story, the thing that Alfred Hitchcock did in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone. Like Stephen King’s short stories, I love so much more than his novels just because I love short stories.

Gwenda Bond: I was obsessed with them. Yeah. Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories. Those were very influential on me as a kid. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: I’m glad Edgar Allen Poe is considered, quote, literary, so that kids can always read it in school. Right! These really cool, exciting stories you get to read because they’re literary, but, like, they’re also just scary.

Gwenda Bond: Ray Bradbury, also. Ray Bradbury.

Steve Thomas: Yep. The other question is we’re building a summer reading list. So what is a book that you would add to a summer reading list?

Gwenda Bond: What age group?

Steve Thomas: Whatever you want.

Gwenda Bond: Oh, what would I add to a summer reading list? I just read The Villa by Rachel Hawkins, which is this music influenced, really twisted friend thriller. It features an album and a mystery of something that happened a long time ago. It’s just very well done, and it’s just like, it’s perfect for summer I think, because it’s a vacation and it’s just has that feel that you want, like summer heat, sweaty, wicked gothic retelling.

Steve Thomas: Okay, great. Well, Gwenda, thank you so much for coming on the podcast again, and hopefully maybe it won’t be another 11 years before I have you back on again.

Gwenda Bond: Hey, I’m hoping to still be doing this in 11 years! So, well, thanks for having me back.

Steve Thomas: All right. You have a great day.

Gwenda Bond: You too.

Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome back to The Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk from Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat from NoveList.

Rebecca Vnuk: And today, Steve was talking to Gwenda Bond, the author of The Frame Up. So Yaika and I went to look for read-alikes from Library Reads and from NoveList for this, and this one was actually a lot of fun to work through, because I’m gonna let Yaika talk about this. She has good perspective on how unique this book is and what makes that a little bit tricky. At least we thought it would be really tricky to find read-alikes, and then, after searching around and chatting about it, we’re like, “Well, wait a minute, a read-alike doesn’t have to be an exact match!” And I think we each came up with two this time. So we found a way around something that seemed tricky at first and gives us an opportunity to talk about some readers’ advisory factors. So Yaika, I’m going to let you start off on this one.

Yaika Sabat: So the Frame Up is first of all, such a cool premise to me, the sort of magic art forger putting together her estranged friends, like the old crew, for a heist which if you don’t have the magic and you’re like “Oh this is like a cool caper movie!” And this is a caper novel but it’s also a contemporary fantasy. You’ve got the magic in there; caper and contemporary fantasy is not a super common crossover. That right there, I was like “Well this is very unique!” And then with caper, you wouldn’t expect the tones “funny” and “romantic necessarily”, “suspenseful” is in there, but you’ve got “funny” and “romantic” and then “banter-filled writing.”

So this mix of appeals and elements that you just are not going to get an exact combination of because I tested it. I tested several combinations and sometimes the Frame Up would be the only book with that exact mix that came up, which I think, if you’re working at a library could potentially be like horrifying. You know, you’re at the desk, someone asks and you’re like, “There’s not an exact read-alike!”, but as Rebecca mentioned, we sort of had to talk through the process, and I think it’s important to remember that you do not have to find a one-to-one match on a book, and a lot of the time people don’t want that. Someone just read a book about a magic forger doing a heist. They may not want to read the exact same story again so you don’t have to get too fixated on the exact plot or the exact appeals.

So I basically thought of it as, okay, if I was at the desk and I was talking to two different readers, and they said they loved this book. I have one reader who I’m talking to, and it turns out they really liked the contemporary fantasy angle but what interested them most was the family dynamic, the family relationships, the focus on the complexities of that. In that case, I might recommend something like The Crane Husband by Kelly Regan Barnhill because that is all about family, love, sacrifice. Now, if you look at the tone of that, it’s very different. It’s going to be thought provoking and bleak. It deals with topics of abuse, so right off the bat, if you’re looking at the two, they may not seem like a match, but those elements are similar. So you could talk to the person, describe the book and see, this might be just what they’re looking for because sometimes people want a different mood too, in their next read.

And then the other one was if I’m talking to someone, and they love that it was contemporary fantasy and they loved the kind of romantic element that you get in The Frame Up, then something like The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna might be a great match because you’ve got the romantic theme. This one’s more heartwarming, but it is going to give you sort of that charming contemporary fantasy angle, so this could be sort of another route a reader takes, and I think it’s important to just talk to that specific reader. Don’t be afraid to say there’s not an exact match, but this has these elements, this has this element, and they’ll tell you if it’s what they want or not. Just don’t be afraid to work with someone in the process.

Rebecca Vnuk: I think that’s excellent advice. And it’s a good example of trying to figure out what is it about this book that made someone want to read it? What is it that makes them say, “Hey, I want something just like this”? And I think there are some books and authors that lend themselves very well to the tropes that we all know and love, and there are some that you’re just like, huh, this has a lot going on here that makes it a unique product at the end, but what are the different factors going into that that appeal to people?

So when I was looking in the Library Reads list for read-alikes, the heist part of this story is what really stood out to me. And I knew that we had had, in the last few years, several books about art heists. And I thought, okay, I’m going to focus on that part of this story to start with, so I came across Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li, and that came out in April of 2022. And let me read you the quick Library Reads blurb on that: “Li’s debut novel is a fun heist book focusing on five Chinese American college students recruited to steal artwork from Western museums and return them to China. The book looks at issues of diaspora, colonization, and the characters different relationships with culture and identity. Give to readers who liked The Verifiers and Skin Deep.” And that comes from Allie Williams at the Camarillo Library in California.

And I was thinking about that as Yaika and I were talking and I was like, Hmm, you know, on the surface that doesn’t really seem like a great read-alike because all it has is that heist part of it. There’s no fantasy element in there, there’s not family in there, but I thought I’m going to let that stand. Then I started to think about what I would do if I was on the desk, right, I probably wouldn’t let somebody leave just with that one, because that is just picking the obvious pick and not giving them other things to think about.

So I was like, okay, what’s another one? What are other elements that I could grab for that? When Yaika and I were chatting, we started talking about, well, there’s this family element in here and you don’t find a lot of that in fantasy. You either find like epic family stories of like lineage and stuff like that, or you find someone who’s looking for family, whether they’ve lost one or they’re looking for a new one. And then it started to stick in the back of my mind. I was like, I know we’ve had some fantasy books that deal with families and emotion and history and that sort of stuff. And then I came across The Unmaking of June Farrow, and that’s by Adrienne Young, and that was from October 2023, and our blurb on that says, “When her grandmother dies, June worries about falling prey to the family curse of hallucinations, which stole the sanity of her mother and grandmother. When a door opens leading to the past, June learns more about her family and discovers unexpected truths about herself and her place in time.” And that comes from Nanette Donohue one of our Library Reads Ambassadors, actually, from the Champaign Public Library.

And again, I think on the surface, somebody might not think, Oh, that’s a read-alike for The Frame Up, but if you had someone that said, Oh boy, I really liked the fact that, this novel, she’s looking, it’s like, family honor and that sort of thing. And I love that kind of fantasy element, are we in the real world or is there another fantasy like how the worlds meet and all of that. So I thought it fit, even though on face value it might not look automatically like a read-alike, but I would maybe suggest that to someone who really liked that fantasy element of The Frame Up.

Yaika Sabat: I like that. Yeah, I think as you can tell by our suggestions, the important thing is just like not to panic, talk to someone. There’s always a read-alike if you can find the right book for that reader.

Rebecca Vnuk: Right. Things are not always obvious. The other thing that I wanted Yaika and I just to touch on really quickly, because I know that coming up and we’re seeing it a lot is the ” romantasy” genre. I love a good mashup of words like that. So when I first came across that, I was like, Oh, romantasy, I love it. It’s just something for us readers’ advisory folks to keep in mind that these are the things that readers are saying and using and thinking about when they’re enjoying their books.

So, maybe romantasy is going to end up being its own genre section at your library or at the bookstore, who knows where it’ll go. But I think even if you don’t mark things as such, it’s good to remember, this is a nice blend of romance and fantasy. So who is that appealing to and why? So romantasy is just, I think it’s a fun new way to think about books.

Yaika Sabat: And that one is being talked about so much by readers and everyone else that you can actually search for “romantasy” in NoveList now because we’re like, this is something people need to be able to search by, yeah, so I think staying aware of the terms readers are using and not being afraid to talk to them about what that means to them is also a really helpful tip when you are recommending books.

Rebecca Vnuk: Absolutely. All right, well, we will check you out next time at The Circ Desk!