SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Ava Reid‘s “Innamorata,” released March 17 by Penguin Random House.
Ava Reid’s latest novel, “Innamorata,” ended with such a twist that the author says she would do a $1,000 bank transfer to any reader who was able to predict it.
The epic fantasy novel, released Tuesday from the “A Study in Drowning” and “Lady Macbeth” author, saw her main character, Agnes, slaughtered and posthumously raped by her love Liuprand on the orders of her cousin Marozia, then left dead in the bowels of Castle Crudele. But before the book ends, our omniscient narrator reveals an even more shocking end: Agnes, thought to be barren, is now growing life inside her corpse.
Reid, who has just completed a new draft of the sequel to “Innamorata,” has some further explanation for what’s going on here.
“She inadvertently did accomplish Adele-Blanche’s mission,” Reid told Variety this week. “But it’s important to remember that whatever is growing in Agnes’ womb is just as much Liuprand’s as it is hers. That’s my opaque tease of what’s to come. My other thing was names are really important, and I chose all the names — they’re all pretty much historical names — as specific references. And sometimes they hint to the character’s fate. So I would pay attention to the names of the characters from the House of Blood, specifically, if you want a hint at where the sequel is going. And I would look toward Minoan culture and toward Greek tragedy. There’s elements of ‘The Oresteia’ that are very strongly in the Agnes-Marozia-Liuprand love triangle, down to the symbolic sacrifice of the daughter. And obviously, Agnes having some element of Cassandra’s future sight. We’ll see more of that element in Book Two, as well.”
While Reid is not currently in the process of adapting “Innamorata” for the big or small screen — though she has teased a film project in the works for one of her previous titles — she will say she doesn’t plan on an potential adaption being a live-action project.
“The only way I could see this being done is as an adult animated fantasy, in the vein of like ‘Castlevania,’ because I can’t fathom how one would adapt some elements of this with live human actors,” Reid said. “And I think that because it’s so like classic fantasy, I wouldn’t want it to get the kind of grittier gray aesthetic that a lot of live-action fantasy often gets. If it was like a colorful, bombastic, ’90s era fantasy adaptation — but not the kind of drab, vaguely medieval, gray live-action. No shade, but the trailers for ‘The Odyssey’ don’t look very promising to me, just aesthetic wise. But ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ has made me hopeful for a return to that more, literally and figuratively, colorful era of fantasy.”
See below for more from Variety‘s interview with Reid about crafting “Innamorata” and what’s to come in the sequel.
How did you come up with the idea for “Innamorata”?
Not all books come together in such a way where I know what the book is and what I want it to be immediately. And this was one of those books where as soon as these disparate sources of information came together, I knew from page one what the book was going to be and what I wanted it to be — and that was not a romantasy, obviously. But this book is very meta in a lot of ways, so I did intentionally play with some of these romantasy tropes. Like the “fated soulmates” was something I did almost a parody of in this book. And forbidden love and romance and “Romeo & Juliet,” that was a big influence on this book as well. From Day One, I knew that this was going to be an escalation from what I’ve previously done, but also kind of a return to my roots with “Juniper & Thorne.” I said this one is for the “Juniper” girlies, and I think it really is. And “Juniper” was a book that was so important to me to publish early in my career and set up both the expectation from readers and also helped clarify my own identity as an author. And so I think that set the stage for “Innamorata,” and me being able to write it and publish it with confidence.
Agnes is dead at the end of “Innamorata” — but does that mean she won’t be a character in the sequel?
I will say Agnes is a character in the second book, but she’s not a POV character. And I made a joke in my Instagram Stories, because people ask about Waltrude — they love Waltrude so much, my unproblematic queen — “Waltrude will return in ‘Innamorata: Doomsday.’” Some of the returning POV characters are obviously Pliny, Maleagant (the sorceress from the outer wall), Ninian. What I think readers will not expect is that we have a new central narrator, and this is a character that is more of a side character in “Innamorata.” And the hint I gave to one of the readers was this character has a chapter named after them, but they have not yet spoken a line of dialogue. So that’s my little hint about where the sequel is going. And this sequel will go more in the direction of epic fantasy. Where the first book is more Gothic, the sequel is more epic, grim, dark fantasy and court politics.
What else can you tease about the sequel?
The sequel is also divided into three books, but in this case, it’s kind of three different plot lines. Like in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” you have Catelyn and Rob’s part, and then the King’s Landing section, then maybe Jon’s section, and Dany’s section. So it’s more like that. [In the sequel,] Book One follows a certain set of characters in a certain location, and then Book Two is a certain set of characters in a certain location, and in Book Three, we’ll have them all come together.
We’ll see more of the islanders and the other houses that we haven’t seen so far and how they conceive of the difference between themselves and the Seraphine. You have remember that this is still a very new order of the world. It’s only been about a century since Berengar came and since their old customs were stamped out. A lot of these houses still have memories of what was before, and in Book Two we’ll see that actually quite a few customs did survive the conqueror. We’ll see the looseness of the structure of this society. And we see hints of that with Liuprand feeling like the island is held together by popsicle sticks and Scotch tape.
What did you see as your main influences for “Innamorata” and what are your influences for the upcoming sequel?
I’ve always thought of “Innamorata” as a real, true, classic fantasy. It’s not a romantasy. But it’s also a weird, almost “Into the Spiderverse” of different types of fantasy. You have the Gothic fantasy of manors influence from “Gormenghast.” The grim, dark, epic influence from “A Song of Ice and Fire.” You have the classical Renaissance epic influence from the “Orlando Innamorato.”
And in Book Two, there are a lot of other classic fantasy influences there as well. “The Death of Arthur,” “Le Morte d’Arthur,” by Thomas Malory is a big, big influence on the sequel. Also, “Dune” was a big influence on the sequel. I actually just got tagged in a review that said, “This has the politics of ‘Dune,’” and that made me so happy. We’ve got scheming matriarch, which is one of my favorite character archetypes. This one is a take on a lot of “the chosen one” archetypes, and that trope in fantasy. We’ll see more of the influence of the Cretan history and the Cretan culture, because that was a big part of it, too, and that that will play more of a role, the Greek history. Minoan culture was a big influence on things that are happening in the sequel. My editor, I love the way she describes things, she said the sequel is like a “death metal, chivalric romance.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Source: variety.com
