Make your life better.”Īnd Fie, the 16 year old heroine and Crow chief-in-training the novel focuses on, is absolutely the one to burn that castle down and make her life better. I’m going to tell them to burn the castle down and make your life ok. It was important to me,” Margaret Owen told me after we had a lengthy discussion on the final season of Game of Thrones, “especially as I’m writing for young adults, that I don’t leave them with this message of: if you’ve had a hard life or a hard time, you’re never going to escape from it and you’re going to die.

“The needle that I was trying to thread,” Owen told me, “was to tell a story that accurately reflected this lack of privilege that in a way was realistic but not transgressive or not taking a story that belonged to someone else.”Īnd reader I have to tell you - she absolutely succeeded.įie’s anger was a curious thing, sometimes tempered and unwavering as cut steel, sometimes raw and unstoppable as a cut vein.

Yes, this is a world in which people can wield fire and heal wounds, where 16 year old girls can use a bag of teeth to hide her trail from her pursuers, but it also firmly grounded in the experiences and voices of our world.

Margaret owen the merciful crow