This Rebel Heart is one of 2022’s most provocative fantasy novels — read an excerpt here

polygon.com:

Katherine Locke is an award-winning author whose work spans picture books, young adult, middle grade, and romance novels. Their upcoming YA fantasy, This Rebel Heart, is set in 1956 Budapest, a city that has been drained of color since World War II. The novel follows Csilla, a young Jewish newspaper typist who’s preparing to flee to Israel with her aunt. Csilla has a special connection with the Danube River that runs through Budapest — it whispers to and protects her, and it saved her family from being taken by Nazis in 1944. But the river could not protect her parents from being executed by the Soviet police seven years ago.

Now, after her parents’ public exoneration sparks civil unrest, Csilla worries who in her life she can trust. But when a student revolutionary and an angel of death enter her life, she discovers the support and inspiration she needs to find her voice and make a painful choice: Does she fight to survive or to free the country she loves that has never loved her back?

Below, Locke introduces the first chapter of This Rebel Heart,due out on April 5.

When I sit down to write a book, I need to know the first line. After I have the first few lines, I go to the very end of the story and write the last chapter. This almost never changes. I need to know how it ends before I can really begin.

The first line of This Rebel Heart came to me quickly.

When she woke, she woke in pieces.

I didn’t know at first who she was, or what I meant by she woke in pieces. Did I mean it literally? Figuratively? Did it matter? And who was she?

I kept writing.

The story unraveled on my screen, beneath my fingertips, the way a river unravels ahead of you, cutting through the land until it disappears, glittering into a horizon.