Blog Tour: TALES OF THE FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS by C.W. Allen

 

Tales of the Forgotten Founders

by C. W. Allen

 

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GENRE: Middle Grade Fantasy

 

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BLURB:

 

Zed and Tuesday ought to be living the good life. After all, it’s not every day two kids take down an evil dictator and their mom gets put in charge of an entire dimension. But after moving into Falinnheim’s palace, they learn that life as royalty isn’t as carefree as they’d imagined.

 

Mysterious hidden passages aren’t the only secrets lurking within the palace walls. When the siblings discover a stash of banned books, they realize everything they’ve been told about Falinnheim’s history might be a lie. And though contact between worlds has been cut off for centuries, returning home might not be as impossible as their parents claim.

 

Could the adventures of a runaway monk, a reluctant viking, a silent ambassador, and a rebel librarian hold the solutions to both problems? To find the truth, Tuesday and Zed will have to learn the stories of Falinnheim’s forgotten founders.

 

 

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Excerpt One:

 

For some odd reason, Bastian started laughing. “Now you’re just messing with me,” he said, wagging an accusing finger at Tuesday. “London’s imaginary!”

 

Tuesday stared at him, perplexed. “No?”

 

“Oh come on,” Bastian insisted, “London’s in a bunch of stories. Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes both talk about London, and they aren’t real either, you know.”

 

“Wait, now you know Sherlock Holmes, too? He wasn’t in any of the books you showed us.”

 

“That’s because he’s not from a book,” Bastian said with a shrug. “Here, see for yourself.” He scooted over to the jumble of papers on the crate shelves and pulled out a dog-eared magazine. He flipped past several black and white illustrations until he found the page he wanted, then handed it to Tuesday.

 

“The Valley of Fear,” she read aloud, “a new Sherlock Holmes story by A. Conan Doyle.” Her eyes flicked to the page heading. “The Strand magazine. January, 1915.”

 

“See?” said Bastian smugly. “London’s just a place from stories. Like Oz, or Neverland.” He laughed again. “I mean, it’s not like there’s really a land called India full of talking animals, just because The Jungle Book says so.”

 

Zed tried to break the news to Bastian without making him feel stupid. “Look, we know the stories are made up, but those are all real places. Well, not all of them—Neverland and Oz are imaginary—but India and London are real.”

 

“Have you ever been there?” Bastian argued.

 

“Well, no,” Zed was forced to admit. “But I’ve seen them on maps.”

 

Bastian just rolled his eyes. “Stop trying to prank me. Next you’ll be saying there really are giant wind storms in a place called Kansas.”

 

“There are!” Tuesday protested.

 

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If you could sit and chat with any author (living or dead,) who would it be and what 3 questions would you ask?

 

Here’s the thing: it’s hard to meet your heroes. You run the risk of discovering they’re actually people. So rather than an author I admire immensely, and whose writing directly influenced mine, I think it would be safer to chat with someone I simply find interesting. Agatha Christie is the indisputable Queen of Mystery, but her writing was also laced with classism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. The colonial era British Empire worked hard to instill these viewpoints in its citizens, probably because it’s a lot easier to justify taking over the world if you think the rest of the world needs you to fix it. I can’t entirely blame Agatha for being influenced by the environment she lived in—but all the same, I wouldn’t exactly call her my hero. So for this exercise, she’s the perfect interview subject.

 

The Queen of Mystery created one real-world mystery of her own. In December 1926, Agatha Christie went missing for eleven days. She left her young daughter with a house maid and drove away without an explanation. Her car was found abandoned, with the headlights still on and her luggage left behind. Her philandering husband was suspected of having murdered her. Fellow mystery writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hired a clairvoyant to divine what had happened to Agatha. Things were looking grim—until she turned up in a hotel in Yorkshire, claiming to be a South African tourist named Theresa. Witnesses claimed that when her husband came to identify her, she didn’t seem to recognize the man she had been married to for the last twelve years.

 

Agatha Christie lived forty-nine more years and went on to a celebrated career, during which she gave countless interviews and even wrote an autobiography. BUT SHE NEVER EXPLAINED WHAT HAPPENED. Did a nervous breakdown bring on a bout of amnesia? Was it a publicity stunt? Was she getting back at her unfaithful husband? Did she just need some alone time? I have waaaay more than three questions to ask her. Of course, I can’t be sure that her answers would be true. But knowing Agatha, it hardly matters. Whether unvarnished truth or wild fiction, whatever she had to say on the matter would be a fascinating tale.

 

 

 

 

  

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

C.W. Allen is a Nebraskan by birth, a Texan by experience, a Hoosier by marriage, and a Utahn by geography. She knew she wanted to be a writer the moment she read The Westing Game at age twelve, but took a few detours along the way as a veterinary nurse, an appliance repair secretary, and a homeschool parent. She writes long stories for children and short stories for former children. When she’s not writing, she helps other writers hone their craft as a board member of the League of Utah Writers.

 

Her debut novel Relatively Normal Secrets is the winner of the Gold Quill Award, being named the best children’s book of the year by a Utah author. The Falinnheim Chronicles series continues with The Secret Benefits of Invisibility (Cinnabar Moth, 2022) and Tales of the Forgotten Founders (Cinnabar Moth, 2023). She also has shorter work published in numerous anthologies. Keep up with her latest projects at cwallenbooks.com.

 

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GIVEAWAY 

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