My latest novel, A Thousand Perfect Things, comes out August 27 in print and e-book. In the next few posts I’ll run character sketches from my notebook. No matter how dramatic the plot, stories are always about people first, and their relationships to each other.
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TORI – Main character
In 1857 Tori Harding is eighteen years old. She lives in world where magic has lately invaded her country, escaping from a mystical continent called Bharata.
Tori is a devoted student of her grandfather, Sir Charles
Littlewood/ She has a passionate love of science and especially botany, a discipline learned from Sir Charles. She suffers from a club foot, and this infirmity has oddly made it acceptable for her to train in science, since she has little hope of marriage.
Far too used to expressing her opinions, Tori can be brash in social settings, something she tries (a little) to control for the sake of her sister (Jessa’s) need for a suitable match and in light of her mother’s relentless social agenda to brighten Jessa’s hopes.
Although she has formerly been content with her apprentice status, her grandfather’s approaching death raises the issue of her future in botany. She is aware this may be an unsupportable dream. But Sir Charles’s theory of extra-ordinary mental states and the lines of scientific inquiry they open galvanizes her. If no one else will credit the theory, perhaps this is her opportunity to make her mark.
Her desire is so strong she fends off reality: her grandfather is losing his stature through age and infirmity and, not least, through his growing obsession with theories of magical paths of knowledge. (In this story, an alternate England called Anglica is relentlessly scientific, dismissing spiritualism, religion and intuitive states.) Further dimming her prospects, the scientific societies of the day, which control access to publication and professional endorsement, do not accept women in their precincts.
Despite her scientific ambitions, Tori is not without doubts. Deeply suppressed is a yearning for a love relationship. While she doesn’t want a conventional marriage with its strictures, she does yearn for a great love in her life. Meeting Edmond Muir-Smith (a suitor to Jessa) heightens this internal conflict.
When she reaches the magical continent (Bharata, an alternate India) with her father’s regiment, she will enter a journey into both the dark reaches of the jungle and her own heart to learn how narrow are her old Victorian principals and how wide the world–and her reach–can be.
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A Thousand Perfect Things. A Victorian woman takes on magical beasts, ghosts and the British Raj.
In an alternate 19th century, there are two warring continents on an reimagined earth: the scientific Anglica (England) and magical Bharata (India). Emboldened by her grandfather’s final whispered secret of a magical lotus, Tori Harding, a young Victorian woman and aspiring botanist, must journey to Bharata, with its magics, intrigues and ghosts, to claim her fate. There she will face a choice between two suitors and two irreconcilable realms.
In a magic-infused world of silver tigers, demon birds and enduring gods, as a great native mutiny sweeps over the continent, Tori will find the thing she most desires, less perfect than she had hoped and stranger than she could have dreamed.
– See more at: http://www.kaykenyon.com/novels/#sthash.Iffui4e3.dpuf
In an alternate 19th century, there are two warring continents on an reimagined earth: the scientific Anglica (England) and magical Bharata (India). Emboldened by her grandfather’s final whispered secret of a magical lotus, Tori Harding, a young Victorian woman and aspiring botanist, must journey to Bharata, with its magics, intrigues and ghosts, to claim her fate. There she will face a choice between two suitors and two irreconcilable realms.
In a magic-infused world of silver tigers, demon birds and enduring gods, as a great native mutiny sweeps over the continent, Tori will find the thing she most desires, less perfect than she had hoped and stranger than she could have dreamed.
– See more at: http://www.kaykenyon.com/novels/#sthash.Iffui4e3.dpuf
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