Interview with Julianna Baggott + Giveaway; Signed ARC of Pure!

Hi everyone! Today I have an accomplished author with me – Julianna Baggott – who will answer a few questions about Pure. I hope you like this short interview!

What or who inspired you to write about Pure?

PURE is dedicated to my daughter -- now 16. I read an early riff to her, just something I was playing with -- a girl in a cabinet thinking about how the OSR will come for her -- in the rubble fields or in the middle of the night ... And my daughter said it was the best thing I'd ever written. I bullied on. 

How did you build the world of Pure?

Slowly over time. PURE was a novel that I worked on when I had a spare moments, in between other deadlines and commitments. I felt like I was always rushing to get back to that world. There are small pieces of these characters that showed up before the world of PURE -- or around the same time but I just didn't know how they fit. It was a novel that, once I was in deep, worked its way into my dream life. I had hugely vivid dreams while writing the book, ones that wound their way into the pages.

Can you tell us about the ‘apocalypse’ of Pure?

Over the course of the novel, you get a feel for American culture right before the Detonations -- ruled by fear and paranoia and deep conservatism that creates an era of oppression in the name of safety and security. Although the environment is wrecked and there's grave fear of viruses, in the end, it comes down to bombs -- a cocktail of bombs that lead back to those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a secret science that I claim was created in the wake of WWII.   

Why are the have-nots mutated or marked?

The Detonations are a cocktail of bombs -- which include nanotechnology that interact with the human body. 

Can you tell us about Pure’s society and its class struggle?

Pressia assumes that the Pures have it great, but the culture inside of the Dome -- as seen through the eyes of Partridge -- is suffocating and rigid and confining. 

Pure will be a movie in the near future! Which actress do you think will be a good Pressia?

Well, I won't have any say in this whatsoever, but I really think that Hailee Steinfeld would be wonderful. 

Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Julianna Baggott has published fourteen books over the last ten years with five novels slated for publication in the next four years. She began publishing when she was twenty-two and sold her first novel while still in her twenties. There are thirty-one foreign editions of her novels to date.

She also writes bestselling novels for younger readers under the pen name N.E. Bode as well as under Julianna Baggott. The Anybodies trilogy was a People Magazine pick alongside David Sedaris and Bill Clinton, a Washington Post Book of the Week, a Girl's Life Top Ten, and a Booksense selection; The Slippery Map (fall 2007), and the prequel to Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (2007), a movie starring Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and Jason Bateman. Bode is a recurring personality on XM Sirius Radio.

Baggott also has a highly acclaimed career as a poet, having published three collections of poetry and having been published in the best literary publications in the country, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and Best American Poetry.

She lives in Florida with her husband writer David G.W. Scott and their four kids, and is the assistant director of Florida State University's Creative Writing Program.

Giveaway: Signed ARC of Pure

*CLOSED*

A dystopian novel about a society of haves, who escaped an apocalypse in a futuristic dome-covered city, and have-nots, who survived the nearly destroyed outside world. The have-nots are almost entirely marked or mutated in some manner.

PURE centers around the story of Pressia, a 16-year-old survivor with a doll’s head fused into her left hand, and Partridge, an unmarked Pure who has escaped the Dome to find his mother, certain that she has survived the cataclysm.

Julianna was so generous to offer a signed ARC of Pure – one of the very first copies of Pure – to one lucky reader!  

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