RACHEL HENNESSY is the award-winning Australian author of five novels. Her latest novel, City Knife, is the thrilling conclusion to ‘The Burning Days’ trilogy.

Good Reading for Young Adults caught up with Rachel to discuss her new novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The creatures of the city are on the hunt. After years of being individually slaughtered, they have come together to make war on the wardens who created them. Fatima and Emmaline, of the River People, will fight for the survival of their village, and it is only Pandora who believes there has to be another way.

In the thrilling conclusion to ‘The Burning Days’ trilogy, the sins of the past will be revealed and all hope for the future will be under attack.

MEET RACHEL HENNESSY

City Knife is the thrilling conclusion to ‘The Burning Days’ trilogy. What was the initial inspiration for this series and what can fans expect in this latest novel?

I began writing the series after falling in love with The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I know there is now a bit of YA-dystopia fatigue, but I couldn’t help myself when my character, Pandora of the River People, wandered into my head not long after I’d finished with Katniss Everdeen and her extreme coolness.

Pan is more like me as a teenager: confused, anxious, prone to falling in love with the wrong kind of guy and, most of all, restless. She spends the three books looking for a different kind of life than she has, and in this final instalment, must come to terms with her expectations versus her reality. We also get more insight into the people around her. I’ve written this book from many different points of view because I wanted to show how we’re created by, and connected to, all those around us: family, friends and (maybe) enemies.

The worldbuilding in your series is incredibly detailed – can you tell us about what’s involved in your writing process?

As unglamourous as it sounds, I’m a big fan of Excel spreadsheets to keep track of character traits, landscapes, and timelines. I love creating these other documents alongside the narrative so that the world stays consistent, and I feel like I know all the corners of it. It’s also very handy to have other things to do when the writing itself feels too hard (which happens often for me). Creating a character’s history, year by year, is fun and it gives me a distraction until I can get into the flow again.

The story is set on a backdrop of conflict and war – what messages do you hope to convey through your character Pandora who believes violence isn’t the answer?

It’s a basic message that we still don’t seem to be able to make happen in the real world: treat other creatures – human and animal – like you’d like to be treated. Bitterness, violence and anger don’t lead us to good places. In the last couple of years, I’ve had to deal with some intense emotional experiences and the only way through them was via love and empathy.

Pan’s reaction to the inevitability of war and fighting is that it doesn’t have to be inevitable. There are always other choices.

Can you discuss some of the challenges you faced in concluding the series?

The biggest challenge was writing the story of a character whose ending I already knew. Without giving any spoilers, it was very difficult to write, in Book 3, the backstory of a character we first met in Book 1. In writing that story, I got to know the character very well and found it hard to know that I couldn’t change their ending, which was, let’s just say, not a happy one.

This related to the overall challenge of ensuring everyone had some kind of ending, whilst knowing many of them weren’t going to be happy ones. It’s not a bleak conclusion but it also isn’t a fairy tale. Not everyone gets to live happily ever after in real life, and this is the same in my books.

What was your favourite part of writing this novel?

I loved giving myself permission to go into a range of different heads. Writers often fall into the trap of thinking we must show only one point of view – to follow one hero’s journey – but that isn’t how most of life works. We might be in our own head, but we’re always having to negotiate other people’s points of view, so it was excellent to make that happen in the story. It gave me the chance to consider what makes different characters tick and make them more sympathetic. This was particularly the case with Emmaline, who Pan had turned into her enemy for no good reason except jealousy.

Once I was able to give Emmaline her own story, it made it clear that they weren’t anywhere near as different as they thought they were. And I guess this is what I think fiction is about: letting us see inside a range of different people’s heads and maybe finding the threads that bind us.

I also really enjoyed filling in the history of the dystopic world I’d created in the other books, drawing on our recent experiences of the pandemic and imagining how we might look back at it in the future.

Now that your trilogy is complete, how does it feel to say goodbye to these characters?

I already miss them! A trilogy gives you a special kind of time with the same characters. I started writing Pan back in 2015 so it’s been eight years of this land and people. It will be strange not to have them in my life on a regular basis, but I’m satisfied about where they all got to, and I hope my readers will be too.

Can you tell us about any new projects you’re working on?

I’m working on a middle-grade novel currently titled My Year as a Wolf. It’s a standalone as I don’t think I can commit to another series quite yet …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Hennessy is the award-winning Australian author of five novels. She writes contemporary fiction and non-fiction for adults, as well as Young Adult fantasy.

Rachel’s first novel, The Quakers, won the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. The novel was described by John Birmingham as ‘un-put-down-able’. This manuscript was also long-listed for The Australian/Vogel Award, shortlisted for the Varuna Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program and winner of the ArtsSA prize for Creative Writing.

She is Lecturer in Creative Writing for the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is a manuscript assessor for Writers Victoria and has been an assessor on the Literature panel at Creative Victoria and the Australia Council.

She lives in Melbourne with her husband, two young daughters and a bearded dragon called Zazoo.

Visit Rachel Hennessy’s website