The Order of the Banshee
by Robyn Singer
GENRE: Sci Fi Space Opera
BLURB:
It’s been five years since Yael and Molina reunited. Yael is one of the richest and most infamous thieves in the universe and a member of the Order of the Banshee. She is rising through the ranks of the elite organization with her wife and her ride-or-die best friends, Aarif and P’Ken, at her side, and she’s even running her own school for thieves. Molina, former captain in the universe’s premiere peacekeeping organization, the Sunrisers, is happily married to Yael and tells herself that’s enough.
Their seemingly perfect lives are interrupted when they receive news of the death of Molina’s father. When Molina returns home for his funeral, she reunites with her former friend and now enemy: Kaybell, the emperor of the Cykebian Empire. Kaybell, eager to mend the relationship, informs Molina that her father was murdered and offers to help Molina find those responsible and bring them to justice.
While Molina and Kaybell hunt the people responsible for her father’s death, Yael is hunted by an invincible assassin – one with a terrible secret. These two seemingly unrelated events are more connected than Yael or Molina could possibly imagine.
Excerpt:
“Yael, you must get up and shower,” P’Ken declared, standing right over me, both hands on her stick.
“Seriously, you’re starting to stink pretty bad,” Aarif followed, standing right next to her.
“Waaaaaaaah!” I cried, curled up in a ball in my bed. “I miss my Moli!”
The past few days had been absolutely miserable. For security reasons, I couldn’t contact Molina while she was on Cykeb, and living in the school without her around was too weird. As much as I’d been staying in bed, I couldn’t even sleep in such a big one without her. My only comforts had come from my endless supply of beer, instant ramen, and gummies, the bottles, cups, and bags they’d come in all over my bed and floor.
“She’ll be back soon. And then you can make up for lost time.”
“For now, however, you promised Shun you’d spar with her today, and a thief of your distinction shouldn’t be gaining a reputation as a lying thief.”
“Come on, let’s get ready for the day.”
I groaned for an extended period, rubbing my temples. “You’re not my parents.”
“Obviously not,” P’Ken rolled her eyes. “My child will never be allowed to make their room a pigsty.”
Aarif plopped down next to me, shaking the mattress. “We may not be your parents, but we are your family. We want to help you.”
I shook my head. “You can’t.”
What do you like best and least about your characters?
This a fun thing to talk about, honestly. It’s my philosophy as a writer that characters
come before everything else. If you don’t have likable, complex, and/or relatable characters, it
doesn’t matter how strong your prose is, how well-built your world is, or how dramatic your plot
is; your story does not work. It’s for this reason that the bulk of my time when writing a new
story goes into fleshing out my main cast as much as possible. And as a result, there’s a lot to
love and a lot to hate about most of them. Because there’s so much to say about them, I’ll just be
discussing my two lead protagonists: Yael Pavnick and Molina Langstone.
Yael was specifically designed to be everything I would have wanted in a hero as a kid. I
love how smart and strong she is, I love how she’s confident against whatever stands in her way,
and I love the way she goes out of her way to help people, and cares so incredibly deeply for the
weird little family she’s assembled around her. I also love her for the representation she provides,
being a Jewish, Autistic, ADHD lesbian, much like myself, and how some of this is reflected in
her major weakness: her lack of social skills. But what I think I like best about her is the way
that, in response to her childhood dreams being crushed and the images of her idols shattered,
she forged her own path that went against everything she’d ever been taught to believe. While
she once desired to be a member of the intergalactic peacekeeping group, The Sunrisers, an
organization whose true purpose is protecting the ruling class and maintaining the strict status
quo, she’s now a thief, one who believes that everyone should be free to live however they see
fit. If I could smack Yael over the head for anything, it would be her insensitivity. It’s not her
fault, my baby’s deeply Autistic, but while she loves her family, she can also be deeply ignorant
of their feelings. And it’s this issue that causes most of the problems in both The Order of the
Banshee, as well as the previous book in the series, The Sunrisers.
As for Yael’s wife and co-protagonist, Molina, what I love most about her is how
tragically real she is. Molina isn’t nearly as capable as Yael, nor is she as fun to read about, but
you’d probably get along with her much better if you met her in a cafe, as the one thing she does
have over Yael is that she’s capable of masking her Autism and acting appropriately in social
situations. While Yael shouts everything on her mind and energetically leaps into every situation
with reckless abandon, Molina is calm, patient, and insecure. For all her hard work as a child, she
could never keep up with the unrivaled prodigy that was her bestie, Yael. Unlike, Yael, however,
Molina did end up joining the Sunrisers and continued to be brainwashed by their propaganda,
only to abandon years later to be with Yael, both out of a sense of morality and a desire to be
with the woman she loves. Only, as we see in The Order of the Banshee, sometimes throwing
away everything for the person you love isn’t worth it. For Molina, the emptiness inside her only
made her lifelong resentment of her wife even worse. Her story is a painful one, but there are so
many aspects of it I feel people can relate to. What I most hate about Molina is every decision
she makes in the final chapters of The Order of the Banshee. The actions she takes in response to
all the pain she’s in and all the strife she’s dealt with only serve to hurt herself and everyone
around her, and I’m sure readers will be shouting at their books, begging for her to stop.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Robyn Singer is a lifelong New Yorker, and since she was a kid playing with her action figures, all she’s wanted to do is tell stories. She went to SUNY Purchase to get a degree in Playwriting & Screenwriting with a minor in Film and has produced several comic books, but she’s always had her eye on becoming a published novelist.
As an Autistic, bisexual trans woman, diversity and inclusion in stories are vitally important to her, and she seeks to represent as many groups as possible in her work. While she wants to show characters of marginalized groups experiencing joy, she also draws inspiration from real-world problems which bother her.
The Sunrisers (Cinnabar Moth Publishing, November 2022) is her debut novel. Order of the Banshee is book in the The Ricochet Trilogy. Robyn was the author in residence for quester 1 of 20222 for Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections. She writes novels and short stories of all genres and for all ages, and she continues to produce comic books. Her ongoing series, Final Gamble, began publiscation by Band of Bards in 2022.
See her ramble about her passions on Twitter
Follow her Instagram
6 comments:
Thank you so much for hosting today. It's appreciated.
I enjoyed the excerpt. Sounds like an interesting story.
This sounds like a good book and I really like the cover.
Good excerpt and cover, this sounds very good
Enjoy your weekend!
looks like a fun one
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