GYDO: Bethany Hagen

Bethany Hagen, Author of Landry Park

I think it's true that most authors write the kind of books we love to read.  Or perhaps, more accurately, most authors write books that combine elements from all the things they love to read.  Some of my favorite books are books where the author blends together things that seem separate, like magic and the mafia in Holly Black's Curse Workers series, or Nazis and Peter Pan like in Code Name Verity.  

The world of Landry Park is a similar blending of elements.  Here's the formula for how the future-historical, science-fiction romance world of Landry Park came to be:

1. Take one lifelong obsession with Gothic novels, most of which feature a prominent or fundamentally important estate like Manderley or Thornfield.

2. Take the classic novels of manners, Jane Austen's in particular, where the conversations happen during country reels and games of whist, and where everyone is always looking their best.

3. Take Gone with the Wind where an entire way of life is interrupted by a rude moral awakening and war.

4. Take Cold War paranoia and obsession with all things nuclear:

et voila!  Landry Park!

So like the Gothic novels and the Austen novels and Gone with the Wind, Landry Park features a stratified social order, where the leisure class is defined by their ties to inherited land and dominance over cultural and political structures.  This is the class my main character is born into, and she spends her days studying philosophy and history, preparing to take over the family estate, and her evenings dressed in ball gowns, promenaded in front of potential husbands.  Which isn't to say that this is a novel about the suppression of women into traditional gender roles (which is certainly an important topic.)  Rather, Madeline, as heir to the most powerful estate in the nation, is being pressured to marry so that she can carry on the Landry family line and ensure the family's survival in the next generation.  The fate of the family and the gentry way of life rests on her shoulders, and that is what makes her discoveries about the world she lives in all the more crucial.  With Madeline lies the power to make the world of gorgeous dresses, sumptuous dinners and glowing blue lanterns grind to a sudden halt.

Landry Park Blurb
Madeline Landry is born into a world of influence and luxury, a world of estates and gardens fueled by nuclear power and maintained by a caste of people called the Rootless. When a Gentry girl is attacked, it is the Rootless who are blamed, even though Madeline knows better.
As she searches for the truth, she can't escape the rumors of revolution and retribution circulating through the ballrooms, and neither can she escape the city's new golden boy, Captain David Dana, who has secrets of his own. Soon, she finds herself forced to choose between her duty and her desires, her ancestral destiny and her conscience, and her choice will shake the very foundations of the world she was born to rule.

Author Bio

​Librarian by day, Bethany Hagen is the author of the forthcoming LANDRY PARK, set to be released from Dial February 4th, 2014. She lives in Kansas City with her husband and two children.

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