Finding Wonderland and Believing in the Unseen with YA author Sara Ella

Links to Things Discussed in this Episode

Purchase a Signed Copy of Sara’s books through Changing Hands Bookstore (don’t forget to ask for her to sign it in the order comments!): https://www.changinghands.com/search/site/Sara%20ella 

Purchase The Looking-Glass Illusion: https://www.amazon.com/Looking-Glass-Illusion-Curious-Realities/dp/B0BXNKR57K/ 

Purchase The Wonderland Trials: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621842142

Sara Ella’s Website: https://saraella.com

Sara Ella Instagram: @saraellawrites

September Goodies Giveaway: https://kingsumo.com/g/ftix57/september-goodies-giveaway

Full Episode Transcript

Introduction

CJ Milacci:

Welcome, my friend. You are listening to Read Clean YA with CJ, the podcast for teens and young adults who want to explore exciting worlds, deep themes, and epic stories without the objectionable content. I'm your host, award-winning young adult author CJ Milacci, and in this episode we are going to have an author interview with my friend and fellow young adult author Sara Ella. 

Once upon a time, Sara Ella dreamed she would marry a Disney prince and live in a castle. Now she spends her days homeschooling her three Jedi in training, braving the Arizona summers and reminding her superhero husband that it's almost Christmas, even if it's only January. When she's not writing, Sara might be found behind her camera lens or planning her next adventure to California, a lover of fairy tales she believes happily ever after is never far away. Sara, welcome to the show.

Sara Ella:

Thank you so much for having me, CJ.

CJ Milacci:

I'm so glad to have you here. I love your books and your stories. You just create these fabulous, fantastical worlds, and I am so excited because today we're going to get to talk about your newest book, The Looking-Glass Illusion in the Curious Realities duology. And book one, if for anyone who doesn't know, is The Wonderland Trials, which is also a fabulous story. So I'm currently reading book two and loving it, and I so enjoyed The Wonderland Trials. So if you could just tell us a little bit about the stories, that would be great.

Diving Deeper into the YA Curious Realities Duology

Sara Ella:

Absolutely. So the Wonderland Trials is what it sounds like. It's a retelling of Alice in Wonderland. It's a YA dystopian fantasy with a pinch of sci-fi. And it follows a girl named Alice who lives in a future version of Oxford. In Alice's world you have Normals and then you have Wonders, Wonders who were born with the Wonder Gene, but it's illegal to have the Wonder Gene. And so Alice believes she is Normal. Soon her sister gets arrested and she goes on a topsy-turvy adventure of being invited to play in the annual Wonderland Trials, but she has to find her way into Wonderland, which is in sort of like a virtual reality type world in order to be able to play. And so that launches Alice off into her adventure. 

She finds out that the games or the trials are not what they seem, that players go missing every year, and she has to work with her team, Team Heart. in order to discover what is happening to the missing players and where the real Wonderland has gone off to. And that launches her into Book 2, which is the Looking Glass Illusion, which follows Alice and her team as they go through the final trial of the Wonderland Trials, which is the Heart Trial.

CJ Milacci:

Yes. Oh, so good. I can't say enough how much I've enjoyed this series. It's so much fun. And like I said, I haven't finished the second book yet, but I'm into it already. And I love how you've woven all these different things together because you have the fun of fairy tale retellings and then this fantasy world, but then some sci fi elements and the dystopian kind of feel as well. And all of those things are things I love, and you just wove them together in a beautiful way. It's such a fun, fun story, as everyone can hear just hearing you talk about it now. So yeah, it's fantastic. 

How did the idea for the duology come about?

Sara Ella:

So I wanted to do a duology because I feel like I guess I never do the same thing twice and so I tackled a trilogy, then I tackled a standalone, and now I decided, hey, let's try a duology. But it fit really well with Alice in Wonderland because of Lewis Carroll's two original stories, which is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there. And so I knew a duology is perfect if I'm going to retell these two stories. And that's really why I wanted to tackle the two book series. And I thought, hey, this will be easier than a trilogy. And of course, it presented its own challenges. 

But I love Alice. I've always loved Alice. I grew up loving Alice in Wonderland. I played Alice at Disney in my college years. So that was something where it felt like coming full circle to write a retelling of Alice in Wonderland. And thankfully, Enclave Publishing, my publisher, agreed.

CJ Milacci:

Yeah, that's so neat. So it is fun because you actually pretended to be Alice for a while and then you wrote her story, which is a neat thing that I don't think a lot of authors can say about their books. So that's very cool. 

Do you feel like your Alice is similar or different to the original Alice in Alice in Wonderland?

Sara Ella:

I would say that she is both. So she has a similar elements. I always say that there's always a sprinkle of Disney in my books. I grew up watching Disney classics, the original Disney animated films, going to Disney parks. So there's always going to be a little bit of that inspiration in my books, but I always like to make my characters my own. And so Alice in my books definitely has that curious, no-nonsense type attitude in a similar way that Disney's and even Lewis Carroll's Alice has. But she also has some different things that she's dealing with. 

She's dealing with the fears of being alone and so she tends to push people away because she really doesn't have any close friends. She was raised by her older sister and she doesn't know what happened to her parents. So she's kind of a loner, she's kind of doing things on her own, and what I really love about my Alice is that she wears glasses, so in that way she's very different. She has a stigmatism, which is something I've dealt with my whole life, and she also loves to play games. She's a card player, she's a pickpocket, so in that way I would say she's definitely very different from the little girl Disney version.

CJ Milacci:

Yes, definitely. But I love the card playing pick pocket version so much. It kind of makes her feel more modern in some ways because the Disney version can feel like the childhood version and this feels like the teen version, the young adult version, which is where this book fits. So of course it would. But it makes Alice kind of a cool new character in some ways. And yet you do hold to so many of the things that would be the reason somebody loves Alice from Alice in Wonderland. 

When a fairy tale retelling can do that, when it can hold true to some of the heart of the fairy tale that we love, but yet bring its own twist, I think that's what makes fairy tale retellings so much fun and really come to life on their own. Because we want something new, but also the same as what we love. And I think you did that really well. 

I love games and puzzles and card tricks and all of that stuff. And you have that, especially in the Wonderland trials, they're all throughout that book from the beginning and then through the story. And you have so many different types of games and puzzles in there. How did you come up with all of that? I know there's some of that is maybe in the original book, but you've gone above and beyond in what you've added into your story.

Sara Ella:

Yeah, that's a great question. I love games. I love games. I love competition. And I felt like a lot of the Alice in Wonderland retellings that were out there were really focusing on the madness aspect or the darker aspects of Lewis Carroll's world. And while I don't see anything wrong with definitely exploring those themes, it wasn't the kind of theme I wanted to explore. I loved that so much of Alice is centered around games where you have the soldiers of the queen are cards, and you have croquet. Everything just felt like there were games. Even the riddles that the Cheshire cat gives Alice are games in my mind.

CJ Milacci:

Yeah.

Sara Ella:

And because we love games in my family, and actually if you read the Looking Glass Illusion for those who are listening, I think by the time this comes out it will have released.

CJ Milacci:

Yes.

Sara Ella:

You can see in the dedication that the second book is actually dedicated to my daughter Whom Maddie Hatter is named after and it says to Maddie who loves games. Because she is my she is a girl after her mama's heart. She is competitive She's always the one saying let's play a family game tonight. And then the second part of the dedication says to Janelle also who taught me how to play this one because my friend Janelle taught me how to play chess 

So I love the game aspect and I just wanted to make Alice's world something, especially with the Wonderland trials that she's in, to be something that readers could feel almost like t