Breathess Reads Week: Lili Peloquin!

***(SCROLL DOWN TO SEE MY STOP FOR PRESERVATION BY RACHAEL WADE)***

First up on the Breathless Reads platform is Lili Peloquin! Her debut is The Innocents, a contemporary novel about secrets, lies, and we all know that always ends with a betrayal!

Fiction Freak: A must-ask question: What inspired The Innocents?

Lili Peloquin: To me the most seductive genre combination in books as well as in movies and TV is the whodunit and the soap opera.  I love a story that’s able to mix narrative suspense and hairpin turns of plot with nuanced characters and complex emotion.  And mood, mood is important, too, haunted and smoldering being the ideal.  In other words, scary plus sexy equals the best!  The television show Veronica Mars was great at this.  So is Revenge.  So was the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca.

FF: What was your reaction when you got selected as a Breathless Reads?

LP: That’s an easy one: thrilled.  It was such an honor to be chosen alongside writers like Morgan Rhodes, Jessica Khoury, Fiona Paul and Elizabeth Richards.  Books in the Breathless Reads Campaign tend to do very well both commercially and critically, so, yeah, I was beyond delighted when I got the news!

FF: What's your most HILARIOUS moment?

LP: Do you mean in life in general or while writing The Innocents?  I’m going to assume the later, Nikki!  Earlier in the summer I was at a party at BookExpo America thrown by Penguin.  It was a swanky affair, on the top floor of The Standard in the Meatpacking District.  The actor, Bob Balaban, was a guest.  (He’s written a children’s book that’s going to be released by Penguin in the fall.)  The night before, by strange coincidence, I’d gone to a revival house to see Midnight Cowboy, which came out in 1969.  Bob Balaban has a small role in the film.  He plays a nerdy little pervert hanging around a porno theater and sexually harasses the hero.  I was going to go up to him, ask him if he’d seen any good dirty movies lately.  But I chickened out at the last minute.

FF:Which sister do you think you're most like? Alice or Charlie?

LP: Alice, for sure.  Alice is the quieter, more bookish type.  Charlie is looser, more fun, more up for a good time.  I admire girls like Charlie, but am strictly a fan, have never been one myself.  Too bad for me!

FF: Can you describe Alice and Charlie in 5 words?

LP: Alice: smart, thoughtful, observant, careful, romantic.

Charlie: impulsive, headstrong, passionate, fun-loving, loyal.

FF: Since Goodreads doesn't give us as much details as I'd like...what happens when the girls get to Serenity Point? And since it only mentions Charlie and Alice...who's Camilla? The one mentioned so much in reviews?

LP: This is a tough question to answer, Nikki, because I don’t want to give too much away!  What happens when the girls get to Serenity Point?  Romance and intrigue happen!  The sisters grew up without a lot of money in a working-class section of Cambridge.  Now their mom is married to Richard, a rich-beyond-your-wildest-dreams guy with a romantic, tragic past (his wife and only daughter died the year before), and the family’s moving to his beach house on the Connecticut shore for the summer.  It’s a whole new world Alice and Charlie are being thrown into.  Serenity Point is glamorous and it’s elegant, and so are the people in it. But Alice senses menace, senses sinister forces under the lush, glittering surface, and the possibility simultaneously horrifies and excites her.  Oh, and I’m not even mentioning the Serenity Point boys—all gorgeous, all tormented.

Camilla happens to be my favorite character in The Innocents.  She also happens to be dead!  She’s Richard daughter and was supposed to be very beautiful and very wild.  Alice feels an eerie, almost otherworldly connection to her.

I’d like to say more but I just can’t!

FF: Can you share your favorite quote in The Innocents with us? Non spoilery of course!

LP: Here you go!  My favorite passage:

“Alice wondered if there’d ever been a time when she’d felt so alone.  She knew it was weird—beyond weird, sick, really—to blame a dead girl for her troubles, but she couldn’t help herself.  This was all Camilla’s fault.  Camilla, no longer living and yet the most alive person she knew.  The most powerful, too.  Camilla could come between people even if she wasn’t in this world anymore.  Could do it easy, without even breaking a sweat.  A ghost who taunted as much as she haunted.  And as Alice was thinking these thoughts that she heard it: the high, silvery tinkling.  It might have been the wind chimes hanging above the sliding glass door, reacting to a breeze coming off the ocean.  Might have been but wasn’t, Alice knew.  It was Camilla laughing at her from the other side of death, from beyond the grave.”

FF: What's one 2012 Fall release you've anxiously awaited? Why?

LP: Falling Kingdom by Morgan Rhodes, Origin by Jessica Khoury, Venom by Fiona Paul, and Black City by Elizabeth Richards.  All four are part of the Breathless Reads series.  This answer is a bit of a cheat, though, since I got the Breathless Reads box set a couple months early!

FF: What is your ABSOLUTE favorite book?

LP: Wow, I don’t know if I can pick just one.  I guess if you’re going to force the issue, Nikki, I’d have to say Lolita is my all-time favorite.

FF: Anything else to say to readers/bloggers/aspiring writers?

LP: Hang tough!  The publishing industry’s a notoriously difficult one to break into but the only way to do it is with persistence and hard work.  Also—and I know you’ve probably heard this a million times before—you should be writing every single day.  Even if it’s only for an hour.

Short Author Bio
Here's the official bio: Lili Peloquin grew up in New England, where the first breeze of summer still reminds her of a whispered secret. The Innocents is her first novel.

The Innocents Blurb

Nothing ever came between sisters Alice and Charlie.
Friends didn't.
Boys couldn't.
Their family falling apart never would.
Until they got to Serenity Point.

Contact Info
Lili Peloquin's Twitter