It’s not the first time someone has given me this feedback in a review: “I don’t like Fae.” “I didn’t think I was going to like her.” And you know what? As the author and creator of Fae Peeters, I can tell you that these people aren’t wrong to think this.

Fae begins her journey as a young 20-something with a massive chip on her shoulder; we just happen to be in the part of her story where that chip gets hacked away at with a dull shovel. She comes into the story already a bit stressed by the mystery of her grandmother’s purpose in sending her to this small, little no-name village, and then her personal trigger gets triggered. Over and over again. If you met her under in any other circumstance she’d be just like anyone else you’ve met. While I admit, in my mind I had written her character to be a little more (okay, quite a bit more) subtle (writing is a learning curve), I’m also not sorry for how she turned out.

For one thing, everything she goes through in “The Gift” means that much more even if you can’t fully sympathize with her; and second, we’ve all been terrible people in the past, especially when we’re younger and still learning how to best interact with the world around us. I know there’s been so many times when I lost control of myself and acted pretty horribly, or said things that were uneducated and as such were straight-up hurtful. It’s human. Not everyone is going to like everyone all the time, and in this way, Fae is painfully human. Even though she can be unnecessarily rude, I still see my own failures to be a good person in her at times when I should’ve been less horrible, and I hope my readers can see that in themselves too.

“The Gift” was never written to be a book to just sit down and enjoy a quick thrill; it’s as much of a mirror to the reader as the actual mirrors are in the story. Judging by how many of the reviews are positive (4.8/5 on Amazon!), my readers have stayed along for the full ride and haven’t quit, and to them, I am grateful.

And that brings us to “The Eve’s End”. There’s a couple of reasons why I decided to set it twenty-eight years after “The Gift”, and one of them is to give Fae the opportunity to mature. She’s still not perfect, she still makes decisions a “great” protagonist wouldn’t, but in that way, Fae again reflects back to us our own humanity because if you put yourself in her situation, you’re not always going to be the hero. We’re not always the hero of our own story because it’s hard. It hurts. And it’s scary as hell. If it was easy, we’d all be heroes all the time. For my readers I believe that “The Eve’s End” will offer some level of redemption for Fae’s attitudes in “The Gift” because now she’s part of the group who knows all the secrets and there are others who do not.

To all the readers who had difficulty reading through the heavy handed attitude of Fae Peeters but didn’t give up, thank you. It was worth it in the end, wasn’t it?

Make sure to look for “The Eve’s End” at your favourite online retailer when it releases on November 17, 2020