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Blog Tour: A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro
2/29/2016
Hello everyone and welcome to the last day of February! (Can you believe it's here already?!) Today, I am super excited to be hosting a Study in Charlotte blog tour stop where Brittany Cavallaro will be talking about A Study in Charlotte in a guest post and also a giveaway. Definitely enter if you're interested and make sure to check out the rest of the tour. This tour was hosted by the Fantastic Flying Book Club.
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A Study in Charlotte
Pages: 336
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Release Date: March 1st 2016
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The last thing sixteen-year-old Jamie Watson–writer and great-great-grandson of the John Watson–wants is a rugby scholarship to Sherringford, a Connecticut prep school just an hour away from his estranged father. But that’s not the only complication: Sherringford is also home to Charlotte Holmes, the famous detective’s enigmatic, fiercely independent great-great-granddaughter, who’s inherited not just his genius but also his vices, volatile temperament, and expertly hidden vulnerability. Charlotte has been the object of his fascination for as long as he can remember–but from the moment they meet, there’s a tense energy between them, and they seem more destined to be rivals than anything else.Then a Sherringford student dies under suspicious circumstances ripped straight from the most terrifying of the Holmes stories, and Jamie and Charlotte become the prime suspects. Convinced they’re being framed, they must race against the police to conduct their own investigation. As danger mounts, it becomes clear that nowhere is safe and the only people they can trust are each other.Equal parts tender, thrilling, and hilarious, A Study in Charlotte is the first in a trilogy brimming with wit and edge-of-the-seat suspense.
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A STUDY IN CHARLOTTE is my first mystery novel. This means that writing it almost killed me. Though I studied fiction and poetry through undergrad and grad school, poetry was always my main focus (and, in fact, my first book is a collection of poems called GIRL-KING). With a poem, you focus a lot on language, beginnings and endings. You think about each word individually, about what white space you leave on the page. Plot isn’t ever really a consideration, and so it’s still a mystery to me (ha) why I decided to tackle a detective novel. I mean, the long and short of it was that I love Sherlock Holmes and was determined to put my own spin on the story, but it was a bit like jumping directly into a pot of boiling water.
Things I knew I wanted the story to have: a girl Holmes, a boy Watson, a boarding school both like and very unlike the one I had attended as a teenager, and one murdered rugby jerk. I built the premise from there. In fiction, I tend to write the first forty pages before I plot the book to make sure I’m working with a voice I like and can fully inhabit, and that it’s a story I do in fact want to tell. I also knew I wanted the murder to be announced at the end of the first chapter. Once I had those first forty pages and knew that my Holmes and Watson would be framed for murder by a killer using the original stories to frame them, I decided which of those stories I wanted to use in the book (and if they could be applied to a boarding school setting), and plotted the book around them.
That’s just for the events of the plot, though. I knew when I was writing this first book that I wanted it to be a series (and had all my fingers crossed that I’d be asked to write more than one), so building the arc of Jamie and Charlotte’s relationship was paramount. I plotted both their inner lives along with the case that they were solving. I knew where I wanted them to end up emotionally at the end of this first book, and I wrote to that end point. Hopefully you’ll want to know as much as what happens to the two of them as what happens, mystery-wise, in book two!
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Click here to read an excerpt!
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Brittany Cavallaro
Brittany Cavallaro is a poet, fiction writer, and old school Sherlockian. She is the author of the poetry collection Girl-King (University of Akron) and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She earned her BA in literature from Middlebury College and her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, she's a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches creative writing, detective fiction, and lots of other things. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband, cat, and collection of deerstalker caps. Find her at her website, brittanycavallaro.com, or on Twitter @skippingstones.
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So tell me: I would love to know your thoughts on A Study in Charlotte and also, your thoughts on the guest post!
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