PORT ANGELES — It’ll be a paranormal-fantasy party Saturday afternoon when not just one but two authors make a rare appearance at Odyssey Books.
To begin: Gwen Hayes, who is known to her Sequim and Port Angeles family and friends as Wendy Lester, will unveil her new young-adult fantasy novel, Dreaming Awake, during a reading and book-signing from 3 p.m. till 7 p.m. Saturday at the bookstore at 114 W. Front St.
Released Tuesday by Penguin Books, Dreaming Awake is the sequel to 2010’s Falling Under, which introduced Theia Alderson, a 17-year-old in Serendipity Falls, Calif., who dreams of an extraordinary boy named Haden Black.
He materializes before her one devastating day. As they get to know each other, Theia feels a muscular magnetism — and away we go, “to hell and back again for love,” as Odyssey Books owner April Bellerud put it.
In Dreaming Awake, Theia returns from the underworld, comes back to her high school in Serendipity Falls — and faces down a whole new set of sinister threats.
Meanwhile, Hayes/Lester, a 1988 graduate of Sequim High School, is enjoying glowing reviews across the Internet universe. Details are plentiful at www.GwenHayes.com.
“But it gets better,” Hayes/Lester noted in an email to the Peninsula Daily News. She’s discovered another young-adult author close to home: Lisa Mantchev, whose newest novel is So Silver Bright, the third book in a trilogy starring Beatrice “Bertie” Shakespeare Smith. The teenager is the heroine too of Eyes Like Stars and Perchance to Dream; all are published by Macmillan Books.
Mantchev, who lives with her husband and young children in Joyce, will materialize beside Hayes/Lester on Saturday, to read from and sign copies of her novels.
She too has basked in the light of favorable reviews.
“Magic, love, family and pies all collide in this gleefully imaginative tale of theatre and literature gone wild,” a Realms of Fantasy magazine critic wrote of So Silver Bright. The novel is “wholly satisfying . . . and not to be missed,” the critic added.
Much more exploration of Mantchev’s fantastical world awaits on her website, www.Theatre-Illuminata.com.
“It’s so exciting that there are two YA [young adult] authors in Port Angeles,” said Hayes/Lester, adding she and Mantchev plan to host a young writers’ program in Port Angeles this spring.
“I am thrilled to be signing with Gwen Hayes,” added Mantchev, “as I’m currently reading Falling Under and enjoying it immensely.”
To find out more about Saturday’s signings and the novels themselves, phone Odyssey Books at 360-457-1045.
