Today is something different. As part of a Sourcebooks Blog Tour, Anastasia Forever is Joy Preble’s third and final installment in the Dreaming Anastasia series. I have not yet read the series, but I keep seeing the covers and wanting to read them.
A magical trilogy blending Russian folklore, mythology and history, in ANASTASIA FOREVER Anne Michaelson, a teenager bound by the witch Baba Yaga, must unlock the secrets of the past, the Romanov dynasty, before they destroy her future. Hailed as “spooky, sassy, sinister and sexy!” by New York Times bestselling author Cynthia Leitich Smith, you can get the lowdown on the DREAMING ANASTASIA series and see the book trailer here!
Here is a bit of background on the scene from Joy:
“The Haunted scene takes place after the Cub’s game. Anne and Ethan go to eat and then see Viktor but before then I had envisioned this sexual tension/comic but serious scene where Anne is angry at Ethan for having turned her life upside down but she doesn’t want to say it and he doesn’t want to say he loves her since he’s come back to find Ben in the picture. So instead, Anne eats. And eats. And it wasn’t really working for me, but it’s funny.”
Thursday, 4:30 PM, Ethan
“Are you going to finish that?” I point to the remains of the enormous pile of onion rings that Anne has consumed along with the cheese and sausage pizza we just split at the little hole in the wall pizza place so close to the El that you can feel the trains rumbling by overhead as you eat. We’re in Evanston where I’ve rented an apartment. But taking Anne there felt like a mistake. A restaurant seemed safer. Pizza seemed safer.
I just had no idea that she ate like this.
“Well, yeah. You need to try some, Ethan.” She plucks one off the plate, shoves it into my hand, then passes me the bowl of ranch dressing. “And dip them in this. It’s killer.”
I try it. It’s not half bad.
We both chew some more, both pretending that this isn’t awkward and that we don’t both remember being chased by Baba Yaga and Viktor and Dimitri to these very El tracks not that long ago. Or that it was on one of those trains that Anne figured out how to work the magic lacquer box that let us access Baba Yaga’s forest and open the door to her hut so we could save Anastasia. It doesn’t take much for me to remember how Anne looked when Viktor almost killed her that day.
Or how I felt realizing what a fool I’d been to trust him.
It’s easier to eat pizza and onion rings and talk about what I’m going to study now that I’m back. Of course we both know that’s not really why I’m back. But neither of us has worked up to the truth.
“See. I knew you’d like it.” She dips another ring in the bowl of ranch, opens her mouth, pops it in, then closes and chews.
“Remember when you made me tea? You still do that? The whole loose tea, tea pot thing?” she asks me around her mouth of onion ring.
“Yes.”
“Well that’s good to know.”
“We need to talk, Anne.”
“We are talking, Ethan.”
I frown at her.
“I’m being difficult, right? That’s what you’re thinking. Anne’s being difficult.”
“Possibly.”
“That’s what Tess keeps telling me, too. Well, maybe she doesn’t use that specific word. But that’s what she means.”
“Anne.”
“Ethan.”
I signal the waitress for a check. This is going nowhere. I need to find out what’s really been going on with her. I need to tell her what I’ve seen. What I suspect. Everything I’ve kept from her in hopes that maybe I could keep it from coming. I am, it seems, no less foolish than ever.
“You know they make great cannoli here,” Anne says as she stabs her fork into the last onion ring and dunks it in the bowl of dressing.
I fish some bills from my pocket and hand them to the waitress who’s returned with the check. “You’re all set,” I tell her. I stand, pull Anne from her chair while she’s still chewing and guide her from the restaurant. Another train barrels by overhead.
“Let’s go out by the lake,” I say. “We’ll walk. I’ll talk. You’ll listen. And we’re going to figure this out, okay. Really. We are.”
“Ben loves me, Ethan. Did you know that?”
Her face is suddenly serious. Somewhere all this onion ring eating has been about this.
“Does he?”
“Yeah, he does.”
She pauses, clearly on the verge of saying something more. It occurs to me, certainly not for the first time, how very young she still is.
“I’m sorry that he’s been dragged into this, Anne.”
“He has, hasn’t he?” She swallows. I catch a glimpse of the Anne I really know – as much as I can say I know her. The one who’s smart and funny and brave. The one I kissed a number of times before I left for Europe and who is now seeing a boy named Ben she says loves her.
“Sucks to be him, huh?” she adds.
Actually, I think, it doesn’t.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?: The Anne/Ethan Romance
Joy Preble
The guiding force of the DREAMING ANASTASIA series is the relationship between Anne and Ethan. Anne knows from the second she catches blue-eyed Ethan stalking her at the ballet that there is just something about him. And in fact, he proceeds to turn her life upside and sideways because it is Ethan who peels back Anne’s normal world and reveals a world of Russian fairy tales brought to life, of a hidden princess and an illegitimate royal son driven by vengeance. When they touch – and I always knew that their story would begin with a physical touch setting things in motion—everything changes.
Anne is no longer just the girl who dances ballet and goes to school and mourns the death of her brother to cancer. She is a girl with power to save a princess, power to right ancient wrongs and ultimately, the power to break a curse that is holding her birth grandmother captive. But power comes with a steep price. And when Anne accepts Baba Yaga’s bargain so she can save Ethan in book 2, she steps into the witch’s forest in a way she has up until then refused to do. Of course, I wanted her to do this for love, even if she has trouble admitting that’s what it is.
This is problem for Anne and Ethan: they do not come easily to loving each other. Or rather, Ethan comes easily to loving Anne, even if he feels that he does not deserve her or a second chance at life. Which is exactly what she gives him when she rides out of the witch’s forest with Anastasia, allowing Ethan to regain his mortality. While Viktor yearns to live forever, Ethan wants only to have what he lost for a cause that was never what he believed it to be: to live and die in the proper time. That he has found the love of his life makes him both deliriously happy as well as guilty as hell.
And Anne, well, she’s a smart girl. Even when she’s not, she has Tess watching her back, making sure she sees things as they are. Anne sees loving Ethan as an impossibility. He is too old even if he looks young. He has secrets and a long, long past. She is only sixteen. And yet I think she loves him from the moment he tells her his story. But she holds back; she is indecisive. In fact, these traits hurt her in all aspects of her life. She has trouble committing. Ethan, on the other hand, is an all-in kind of guy.
So what did I do to these two? I made them inhabit a reverse fairy tale. It is Anne who ends up saving Ethan over and over. It is Anne who is the hero. And ultimately, it is Ethan (no spoilers for book 3 quite yet) who needs redemption and forgiveness before he and Anne can be together. A happily ever after, but hard won. And not without suffering and sacrifice. This is after all, a Russian fairy tale. No one knows endurance like the Russians.
And so it goes: Ethan and Anne, circling and circling love, each running from the other, each doing the hero’s job. The question becomes, will they figure out that they belong together before it’s too late?
Of course they will!
But with these two, love isn’t simple. I think that makes them equal parts of smart and stupid. Not forbidden love. Not crazy love where the passion burns out everything else—and I think we all need some of that in our lives.
When Anne and Ethan finally figure out that they belong together, it will be a love that entwines them like two puzzle pieces, marveling at how perfectly and easily they fit. And how foolish they were not to know it.
