When everything is looking a bit grim, politically and economically, in the world - fantasy offers the greatest of escapes. And cozy fantasy, in particular, provides a comforting and wrapped-in-a-blanket feeling that’s like regressing to childhood with your favourite teddy - at least it is for me!
So I’m absolutely thrilled to welcome Lina Bardo to the JCLA client list with her wry and witty, snarky and sassy character Mage Danny Grey - with her penchant for rescuing magical (and occasionally dangerous) creatures and not sticking to the rules, she’s a character that I totally fell in love with.
With its themes of found family, the importance of biodiversity, and how the choices we make aren’t always as straightforward as they seem - IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MONSTERS is perfect for readers of TJ Klune, Heather Fawcett and with all the things we loved about FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM.
The worst monsters are not always those with the sharpest teeth…
Mage and wildlife officer, Danny Grey has spent her life trying to protect magical and mythological creatures from those who consider them monsters or an opportunity for profit. When rumours of an unidentified winged beast in the hinterlands of the country come her way, the Council of Mages send her to investigate. Man-made constructs have been banned since the previous war, over a century ago. The best Danny can hope for is that it’s a displaced dragon rather than a forbidden dark-magic construct planning to slaughter the locals.
The remote village meant to be housing her is more than wary of outsiders. Despite her experience, the villagers don’t want her help – in fact, they want her gone as quickly as possible. But with several non-native species of magical creatures having taken refuge in the area, Danny is suspicious that there’s more to the quiet village of Barnaby than meets the eye. Smugglers must be operating in the area - the question is, how involved are the locals.
The elderly local priest Father Pajares seems friendly enough but won’t let her out of his sight, the village doctor, Walter Arden, has inexplicably left his beloved, mortally-sick wife to die alone for the sake of his research, and the mysterious mountain hermit Brother Beltran terrifies not only the local wildlife but leaves Danny feeling very unsettled as well, for reasons she refuses to explore further.
Trapped in an isolated valley with winter fast approaching, Danny needs to untangle the village’s secrets and figure out what type of monster is really haunting the place and those it shelters, and whether the true threat is a magical beast or something far darker…
Lina explained a little about what inspired her to write this book:
‘The original intent for this story was for it to be a light-hearted adventure about a mage, a dragon, and a curse. About twenty pages in, my main character turned into a wildlife biologist and the wildlife took over the story. Anyone who’s worked closely with animals can tell you that’s pretty much how it goes in real life.
When I started the wildlife biology program in university, I expected to be amazed by the animals I’d be studying – and I was – but what took me by surprise were the people. There is no neutral ground when it comes to animal-human interactions. Whether people love wildlife or hate them, want to save them, exterminate them, or exploit them, I’ve never met anyone who was indifferent to them. I’ve since left the field of wildlife biology – ten years of university and entire seasons spent doing field work, and somehow my heart always belonged to fiction – but the things I learned along the way stuck with me.
Writing was my on-again, off-again hobby as a teenager, something I gave up when I went to university. I always hoped I’d get back to it someday, when university was over, once I’d found a good job, after I’d retired. I never considered trying to get my work published, because what were the odds of getting that lucky? It always seemed too unpredictable for someone like me, who can’t even take a vacation without an Excel spreadsheet to account for every hour of my trip. That probably would have been my life, had things worked out the way they were supposed to.
I was sixteen when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Watching the most independent, unstoppable person I’ve ever known get taken apart bit by bit with every surgery and chemo treatment is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life. She fought for almost a decade, but in the end what they put in the ground was a shadow of the person I knew. My mother died before she had a chance to fulfill any of the dreams she’d set aside to work and support a family. She always assumed she’d get to those dreams later. She taught me many things in the short time we had together, but the greatest lesson I learned from her was also the cruelest: you don’t always get a later.
I took up writing again after she died as a way of escaping the grief and the uncertainty. I continued writing because I realized I preferred writing to anything else.
The main character in my story is a reflection of me: a serious, sarcastic oddball who finds her place later in life, who questions everything, and who lives in a world that is a fusion of science and fantasy. Her life isn’t what she expected it to be, but sometimes, that’s not a bad thing.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A lifelong Montrealer, Lina has been obsessed with books and wildlife since childhood. She holds a PhD in Wildlife Biology and has worked as a library assistant, a field researcher studying birds of prey, and currently works as a data analyst in the food industry.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MONSTERS is her first novel.