by Phoebe Farag Mikhail

Every year, I choose one book that embodies the focus of this blog, building stronger communities by strengthening authentic relationships. Yes, I am aware it’s 2020, but 2019 was so busy and eventful (more on that in a future post), I didn’t have the chance to announce the book of the year. However, I did READ the book in 2019, and couldn’t put it down.

Xenia the Warm-Hearted is Grace Brooks’ fourth book in her Every Tuesday Club series for middle grade and young adult readers (as well as this adult reader!). I’ve featured the earlier books in the series on the blog before, and every book just gets better and better. The series begins when five girls randomly get thrown together every Tuesday at church while their parents have a meeting. They aren’t friends in the beginning, but their relationships develop until they’ve become a community of sisters that help each other overcome challenges. Their community isn’t limited to their club – they get help from their church community, their families, and the broader community as well.  Xenia the Warm-Hearted faces one of the most difficult and dangerous challenges so far.

I had the opportunity to interview Grace Brooks about this book and the Every Tuesday Club series, and surprise her with the announcement of her book as book of the year! In honor of the book of the year award, I’ll be giving away one book from the Every Tuesday Club series to one lucky reader! To enter, subscribe to my email newsletter and then comment below telling me which book you would like: Queen Abigail the Wise (book 1), Vanessa the Wonder-Worker (book 2), A Year with Every Tuesday (book 3), or Xenia the Warm-Hearted (book 4). Current subscribers need only comment. Giveaway closes on Monday, February 10th at 11:59 pm EST, US addresses only please.

And now to the interview! You can watch it or scroll down to read the transcript, edited for length and clarity.

Phoebe:              … and welcome. I have with me Grace Brooks, the author of a fantastic middle grade fiction series that I just love. It is called the Every Tuesday Club. And at the end of 2019, the fourth book of the series came out, Xenia, the Warm-Hearted. The series starts with Queen Abigail the Wise, then it continues with Vanessa, the Wonder-Worker and then you have a short story collection and it’s called A Year With Every Tuesday, and then the newest one, which is Xenia, the Warm-Hearted. I’ve already told you how much I love the series. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, where you go to church, a little bit about family.

Grace:                 Okay. I am living right now in Las Vegas. I’ve been here last seven years with my husband Greg. We go to St. Paul the Apostle Orthodox Church here in Vegas. I grew up in a military family so we traveled around constantly. I have memories from England, from Virginia and Georgia and California and we just dotted around all the time. When I settled down in my twenties, in Southern California. That’s where I converted in the Orthodox Church with that Evangelical Orthodox Church movement that people know of and so that was mid to late eighties. In my twenties, I met my husband Greg and we were married in Saint Barnabas Orthodox Church in Costa Mesa there, I’ll give them a shout out. And moved from there to Indiana, to Kansas City, to Phoenix and now, Las Vegas. I was an art major and then became a graphic artist and worked with newspapers, became a freelance graphic artist and that’s what I do for a living. And then a couple of years ago I started writing books out of nowhere.

Phoebe:              And that explains all the fun illustrations that you have in these books!

Grace:                 It’s a smart business decision when you’re self published because you get free labor, but it was also a bit self-indulgent. I knew exactly what was in my head and it was so fun to do. Especially with the first book, I may have needed to go back and forth from visual to verbal and verbal to have pictures that it’s like, “Okay, I know what this looks like and so let me draw this.” And that would bolster, “Okay, now that I see what it looks like,” and sometimes they would go back and forth. I’d have one when I didn’t have the other.

Phoebe:              So the illustrations helped you in the writing process itself?

Grace:                 I think so. And then as the books have gone along, my characters age up. The illustrations have gotten less and less. And that’s the thing. I’m always waiting for someone to complain about that if they really love them. They’re very cute in the first one and I loved doing them. With every successive book, I found that they were interfering more than they were helping. And so by this Book Four, there’s the cover and there are no illustrations, but part of that is the material. I just couldn’t see my cute illustrations fitting in as you go along in the book. It just would be almost jarring and so I made a decision as they’ve aged up to dial down the cuteness.

Phoebe:              Right. And I can imagine too that it’s harder to illustrate the more serious the challenges that they face come up.

Grace:                 That was my other real problem is that I just wasn’t the illustrator I needed to be for things… there’d be moments in the book that required a very specific look on a person’s face or something. And I wasn’t the one to get it because it’s not my first calling. Although I should mention along the way in my work world report, that I illustrated a book for Ancient Faith [Publishing]. They had a picture book of the Littlest Altar Boy, which was a very cute concept and gave me a lot of fun and an opportunity to show what’s going on in this little boy’s head.

Phoebe:              Well, then let’s go back a little bit to the writing. What drew you to writing and writing specifically this series of novels?

Grace:                 All right, let me answer that in two parts, so writing on one hand and then the series on the other. Writing, I became aware when I was getting into my twenties I needed to decide “What am I going to do for a living,” type of thing. And I remember going back and forth… I could see myself doing something with art. I could see myself doing something with writing. I was very drawn to both of them and it was almost like a wheel it would go around. At the time that I had to pick a path, I happened to pick art and that’s what took me into art and graphic art and all that stuff. I never stopped really loving the idea of writing and words and all of that. It’s just something that is on your heart or it’s not I suppose or something. I knew that whatever I did had to be creative.

It didn’t surprise me that I was writing. I’m a lifelong journaler. I was doing an Orthodox blog for some years. It’s so many years ago, it’s dinosaur years in the blogging world, but I was doing it back in the early 2000s and then I think I just stopped a couple of years ago. But writing as a way to just unload yourself, to unpack things and try and just put thoughts in order, was always very attractive.

As far as this series… So these thoughts were blubbering around. I’m getting to a place where it’s like, “Oh boy, I’d like to write something.” I had a couple ideas, they weren’t very good. Meanwhile, I’m living out my church life and seeing this need that I felt more and more pressing of like, “Why is there no fiction in this space? Why is there nothing for kids that are just really picking up serious books and wanting to read? Why don’t we have anything? Why doesn’t somebody do something?”

[As for the series], The encounter was a family that I knew, that’s what lit the fuse. Just a very sweet family and we’re all still in touch. But their two girls who reminded me of me at about 10 years old. Very creative girls ages 10 and 12 that just had stories in their heads and things and songs and pictures and all of this. And because of that, were having a little trouble paying attention in church and attending in church and taking in all this church information.

They reminded me so much of me at that age and the services that I was going to… With these Protestant services that are much shorter, I really can only imagine how hard it is with an hour service, hour and a half. I don’t know how they do it. I remember looking at them and I was like, “What do I wish that somebody had told me? Since I see myself so much in these girls, what do I wish somebody had been able to communicate to me about being in church and why it matters? Why should I pay attention? Why should I…?” It’s like, “I really have pretty good stories in my head.”

That was what led to Queen Abigail the Wise. “Yes, I remember. I remember being 10. I remember that other little things outside the door were so much more interesting to me.” That was the question. The fun of it at that point for me, is… It’s almost a math formula, at that point. I am now solving for X. The successful book will answer that question. What do you tell somebody when they’re that creative and want to have fun that happens to be outside of church?

From that one question, two answers, that I thought of. One is, I wish that somebody had told me that life goes on in church. That the life in church, it is the good stuff … sometimes when you’re 10, 11, 12 you think the things that matter to you all begin outside the doors. It’s like, “No, there’s life in here.” You may not see it all the time, but because… Especially in the Orthodox church, of course there are certain rules to how you do things and it looks a certain way and when the priest says this, we all say this and it can look so formulated.

It’s like, “No, you really, you have to open your eyes. This is where you meet the Lord. This is where it all begins or else what happens outside doesn’t matter. If all you have is that, then you don’t realize what you’ve lost and the world isn’t going to tell you because there are some things they don’t seem to know.” That was one thing: open your eyes to the life that’s going on right here. Just because there are worship services doesn’t mean we’re not also people.

Phoebe:              But from what you’re saying, what’s interesting though, and what I love about the books is despite the fact that in the back of your head, you have this, I guess lesson or a message, it doesn’t come across as a didactic story. It’s very much in her shoes, when we’re talking about Abigail, and in fact, all of them. The story is very much in their shoes, really from their perspective. And there actually isn’t much preaching or teaching going on so much as they’re going through life and facing different challenges and connecting to their community to try to overcome them.

Grace:                 It helps to have an inner ten-year-old. With Abigail… her problem to solve is that she doesn’t pay attention in church. She’s getting in trouble for it. She has this discussion with her priest and he shows her an icon that her idea is, “If I can have that, I think I can do this.” And from that point, it’s like, “Okay that’s the quest of the first book,” because he makes a deal with her. “I will get you that icon if you’ll go to work,” on what is her mission in her heart, which is she wants to help people. She wants to do things that matter. She in turn, reaches out and says to herself, “I need some help,” and gets these other four girls that they all have been thrown in together in church in an accidental way, don’t really have that much in common or care for each other. But she just decides, “We’re going to be a club.” She’s one of those people that that is just walking round with little plans all the time.

Grace:                 It gave me a chance to marry up a fondness that I had growing up, that I had a reason to believe was universal of, girls love having little clubs… Wouldn’t it be great if we all did these things together? And so that becomes the Every Tuesday Club that I follow as they get older and everything. But the idea was to, in the first place, replicate these books I remembered very fondly when I was growing up. I liked the Beverly Cleary series; Ramona and Beezus and Ellen Tebbits, and I can’t even remember all the names. I just loved them.

Phoebe:              Henry Huggins.

Grace:                 Yeah, I especially loved him and actually tried to reference him a little bit when I had the Xenia book because she’s a problem solver too. He has this interesting problems to solve and wouldn’t it be exciting? I just remembered those so fondly that I thought, “Surely, that’s still close to a tweener’s heart.” To do something that’s meaningful somehow and yet, you’re also having… It’s like, “Tell me how to interact. Tell me how this is going to work with my little friends,” because sometimes it works and sometimes stuff happens and I don’t know. And that, the other interesting part for me in doing this series is this is trying to figure out life things that go through your whole life. I mean, I’m in my fifties and it’s still like, “I’m still trying to figure that out.” Like, “Oh, we had this interaction and it went wrong and what happened?”

Yeah, there are life lessons and stuff, but I don’t want it to feel like life lessons. As soon as it feels like that, it kills a lot that’s good about it.

Phoebe:              Yeah, it kills the story. Nobody’s going to pick up a novel for a life lesson. They’re going to pick up a novel for a great story. I’m reading these books right now as eBooks because my kids are still a little bit too young for the series, so I’ve purchased them for friends and then I’ve read the books myself as eBooks. And I remember at the time, I’d finished Queen Abigail and Vanessa the Wonder-Worker had already come out and Kindle tells you, “Do you want to read the next book?” And I clicked yes and started the next book right away because I really, as an adult, I was really engaged in the story and in their friendship, in the problems they solve and also just the friendship that blossoms, right, because they weren’t really friends in the beginning and how they grew into them. I was wondering, did you have a group of friends like this growing up that you could draw on?

Grace:                 No, I almost wonder if it’s wish fulfillment or something because I had nothing like that. Because we moved around so much, I wish I had had friendships that went on that many years. But like a lot of military families, my family, we were a very tight unit. I was especially close, close buddies with my next oldest sister who’s three years older, and we would have little clubs. We’re just two, but that’s how prevalent it is. We’d make up a club every, I don’t know, year, two years or something.

When I thought about these five girls… They have very different personalities and I don’t know where it came from exactly. But I realized I broke up my own personality into five parts. I have Abigail, who’s this creative sprite and just has ideas, kooky ideas, all the time. And is in a way, a perpetual child. She doesn’t understand rules and she doesn’t know why everybody doesn’t just get out of her way and let her do things.

Vanessa is a little more brassy, a little more worldly. She’s more mature about people, but she can come off a little sarcastic, a little smart-alecky. Photini is this very goody, goody, almost prissy church girl. Xenia is very geeky and nerdy and has a way of saying things that just surprise people, they don’t know where that came from or what they should do. They come off inappropriate almost. And then Maggie is just this very sweet girl that people can approve of. She comes from this good family. She’s very pretty and she says the right thing and all of that.

Having conversations with all five of them was very easy for me to do. You get back some surprise feedback afterwards and a compliment that I got that I never even thought about at the time, is people would say, “For a book with five girls talking, sometimes at the same time, it’s great that you’re so clear on who is speaking and where they’re coming from.” And I’m glad because there were things I just didn’t consider what a challenge I was giving myself.

Phoebe:              Because you would have to inhabit each personality, and they’re very quirky in their own ways, each one.

Grace:                 And I really do. Like a good grandmother, I love them all. It hasn’t been that much of a chore to go from writing from Abigail’s point of view, from where she was coming, from her inner voice, over to Vanessa. And that was the first one that I was worried about. When I was winding up the first book, I’m already thinking, “Boy, this could be a series. Boy…” And self, “What are you getting yourself into? If you write a second one, everyone thinks you go all through it.” But from feedback I got from some other young readers, actually, especially the girl in the family I was talking about, one of the first things she said is…Because I said, “Who are you? Of the girls, which one are you most interested in?” “Vanessa. I want to see what happens with Vanessa.”

And Vanessa, I thought would be the hardest one for me. I’m probably a smart-aleck, but in life, in my interactions, that was never who I was. I was probably more of the reticent prig. It turned out to be very easy to get into Vanessa. And then I took a break from getting inside the girls. I had stories I wanted to just gather together so the third one is almost a break with that and it’s more advancing the plot of this club, of maybe their life together, of growing up.

And then you come in to Xenia, who I probably was secretly dying to do a Xenia book from the beginning because I love the geek personality. It cracks me up all the time looking back on all these times and I thought I was being brilliant when I’m 12 and I said something so weird that nobody could think of it. It was like, “What is wrong with everybody?” And now I look back, I was like, “No, I get it. I get it. I know why they couldn’t see it. That was really weird.”

Phoebe:              Yeah. Well, that brings me actually to my next question about Xenia, specifically. As the books progress, the challenges do get a little bit more serious. Even Vanessa’s challenges… They’re not ten-year-old challenges anymore, both in family and also at school. But when we get to Xenia, and I don’t want to give away too much in the book, Xenia faces some really serious stuff. A lot of stuff that we hear about in the news right now. Why did you pick Xenia to go through that?

Grace:                 That’s an interesting question. It’s like I almost felt I didn’t pick Xenia for that. When I got to Xenia, the struggle, that struggle, became the most prevalent way to answer the question to solve:  what does it take [for these girls] to wake them up to the reality of the faith that we talk about?

If you’ve grown up in church, you’ve received information. You’ve been brought to church, you’ve seen the icons, you’ve gone to the feasts and all this stuff. But my observation about cradle Orthodox that I think is true and I know is true as a convert, there are… And sometimes it’s multiple moments, but there are moments when it just is alive. You come to this moment of crisis… You have many of these little decision points in your life. What do you believe right now? You’ve been hearing all this. You’ve been taking in other people’s information. Right now, you, this person, do you believe this or not? Do you believe in the reality of God alive this moment, all knowing, all powerful, active, intelligent … Do you believe that and you go this way, which is a much harder path or are you going to just pretend you didn’t see that and you just keep going the easy way?

That was the solving for Vanessa of what would it take for a girl like this who’s very worldly and would be rewarded by the world for going in a very glam direction. What does it take for her to have this moment of truth? And then, coming to Xenia, who can be very detached and the danger of that … I make her a gamer, getting into the gaming culture because I also understand that. But the problem is getting dissociated from where other people are because you’re busy being… You have your own intelligence and I have this dialogue that she has from time to time in the book. Her brain just tells her things. She’s crazy smart in some ways, in book learning ways. She’s terribly obtuse about people.

But my question to myself, it’s like, “Okay, being that way, what are you going to do? What is your moment of truth and what does it look like?” I think even Abigail is a bit of a gritty book in some ways. In terms of, I really was looking for crisis moments that you couldn’t just go, “Oh that’s cute. Oh, that doesn’t matter.” No, these things matter. They’re terribly important. And in order to make the point, I made them things that had more and more of a real world application. Xenia’s was the hardest and I am still conflicted about. With this book, I really need to tell parents, it’s like, “If you think this is for your eight year old, please be careful.”

It’s not what I’d call R rated. I consciously stay away from ridiculous sexual situation things that you see on television for a young audience. I think that’s crazy, but I’m not drawing back from how just gritty things can become. So in answer to your question, that struggle picked Xenia I almost feel. When I was thinking of her, again, when I’m putting myself in that place, it’s like if I’m thinking about what I want to tell somebody who is having those problems of “I don’t know how to relate to people. I don’t know why I should try hard to relate to people. They’re very difficult for me. Meanwhile, I have screens that I can sit in front of. I can just unhook from all of that.”

She has to go to work on this. I have my gimmick of these girls as they come to a problem at the beginning of the book, they almost make a deal with the priest. And I think I just said at this point, it’s what they do with this club. You make a deal with the priest.       And that sets out what their journey is going to be and what the goal is at the end. But what happens along the way is how it gets interesting.

And Xenia’s begins with, “How do I relate to people? How do I just be better?” And she’s going at it in this very book learned, intellectual way of “Well, I’ll read up on it and I’ll go online and I’ll do this stuff.” And she begins to find all of the ways that that just does not work. I have so much fun with her and it’s almost self-indulgent. I love my characters, but I love the comic relief of my characters and I have way too much fun with these very self conscious, terribly earnest approaches that she takes that are really so off.

But along the way, when you start even trying to do that, my little hypothesis is you will begin to find what’s really going on with people. It can be shocking sometimes and it can be hard, but it is also where life is lived out. If you’re going to draw back away from that, you’re going to live in a hermitage. This is how it works with real people. And the problem it begins to be about encountering that there really is good and evil in people and what do you do about that and what happens with that?

It was really hard to write because it’s very scary. It gets very intense and very scary. I’m going to tell a tale on my priest, I hope he won’t mind. But he’s ex-military. He’s one of the first ones to read this book. He’s one of three people that gets to read it in advance and he messaged back and said, “That ending is really scary.” It really came to… almost nightmarish to write through. Like I said, I’m very conflicted about that. I hope it is not… I hope I don’t have to add a trigger warning, but to make the point I wanted, I really did not want people to miss that the language that we use in the church about the fallenness of this world, which I think kids, if they’ve grown up in the church, you hear it, you hear it. We have very strong language and that comes through in our hymnology and our prayers about the fallenness of the world. But if you’re a tweener, you’re a teenager, now, what does that actually look like and what do you actually do about it?

Phoebe:              This book is very, very clear about the fact that there is evil in the world and that ending, it gets really frightening because she does face, unlike the other ones, she does face real danger, and that is frightening. At the same time, these things do happen. Perhaps not the specific situation that she was in, but these things happen to children her age and younger and so it’s something that needs to be faced. I was sitting with so much tension but I couldn’t put it down. I just had to find out what was going to happen.

Grace:                 One of the guys who was reading it said, “I read through the last 300 pages in one sitting,” Which is again, it’s one of those compliments I wouldn’t ask for but it’s terribly good. One of the things I really wanted out of it was this isn’t an awareness campaign about domestic violence or child abduction or anything that could be on Law and Order SVU or something like that. Because I think the real situations are actually much more dramatic than that and they’re very different. You have everybody watching out for a thing and missing what happens in their real life. But yeah, it’s too bad for it to be gritty.

And my thought to myself is, If I’m in control–and I’m not always–of what ideas come to me, I really would like for the next book to not be a white knuckle thing like that. But really, I’m led around by what ideas come to me and people say, “Well, what do you do next?” It’s like, “I don’t know. I wait until the idea and then I’ll know.”

Phoebe:              There’s this one scene in the book that’s a side character scene that I just loved and that’s when she gets Photini involved. And there’s a moment, I don’t want to give away too much, but this does happen a little bit earlier in the story, where Photini does something really judgmental and Xenia calls her on it. And she steps away, goes to a corner and have some quiet time with herself. She may have been praying the Jesus Prayer or something and then she repents of what she does and she apologizes to somebody for it, which completely disarms everybody. Nobody expected that from her. Even I almost didn’t expect it because she does come off as the more prissy, “I know a lot about church” personality, and yet, she is sincere about it.

Grace:                 Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Phoebe:              Yeah. And that scene, I just loved it. And then you wonder, so is Photini next?

Grace:                 I’m pretty sure that Photini is next. Careful readers will note that I often at the end of the book, am writing myself a check of, “Okay, I’m putting something out there that I will have to get back to.” At the time I do that, I really have no idea what I’m doing. At the end of the Vanessa book, I have this holy person that they’ve come in contact with, almost give what amount to prophetic utterances about what will happen with each of them. That is revisited in the third book. It gets referenced that they remember and that one of the things she said, which I felt safe in putting in the second book, is that she says, “Well, I think Xenia will go next.”

Phoebe:              I’ll have to go back and read and find out what’s going on!

Grace:                 I have a lot of fun with little inside jokes, with developing up other characters and things that I hope are not just ridiculous if you don’t care that much.  I originally had a different ending that had Photini much more involved and I just decided I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner that much because I really didn’t know where I was going with the next one. There were a couple little things in this book that are pointing to the Photini book. And so, I’m pretty sure that’s the next one.

What I exactly I will say about Photini, I don’t know. It will be that same idea, my solve for X of someone like Photini, this hyperdox “I’m just so perfect” person. In school, it’s that goodie goodie. And in church, it’s just the one who is so out there sometimes that you’re having trouble not rolling your eyes. But to get back to what you’re saying, I really love Photini. I love putting her into things because she’s such a good place holder for both the sincere moments, but also the ones that, if we’re going to be really honest with ourselves, that are a little insincere. The way I read this person who’s in this very pietistic family that’s a little odd, that there really is something that’s totally real. There is something that is genuine, that she cares about the faith. There’s also a lot of this superficial trappings.

That combination is what makes her such my comedy relief. In this one, Xenia reaches for her, specifically. At some point in the book, Xenia who has been trying all along to just do it by herself, “nevermind the club, that was everybody else. I do things on my own.” She finally just is flat busted and realizes, “No, I need these guys. These are my friends. I need them or I will not make it. This thing that I’m doing with these other people is not working right and it’s blowing up. I need my friends.”

And the first one that she really reaches out to is Photini, brings her along, and then as you say, this thing happens and it’s supposed to work out well. Photini is supposed to help. It all goes really, really badly and in exactly the way that it was bound to, given that Photini is pretty out of it and that the other kids in this group are the type that you just meet all the time who are in their own character arc but they’re really pretty raspy and have their own problems.

One of the things that I knew about [Xenia] is she is going to need help. This moment of crisis that I think of, that I talk about … What I have been finding with every one of the girls in this series is, they all need help. Abigail needed my priest, Father Andrew, who is this larger than life, perfect priest. But she needed him to guide her through the process. Vanessa, needed the other girls, but she needed this holy woman that she just encountered and then came along. So when it came to Xenia, I don’t think she’ll lean on the priest. She needs her friends. She doesn’t know she does, but she does … Okay, she has to reach out to Photini and learn something and that’s what that moment is actually all about, is in the end, Xenia needs to see that scene that happens just like that. It’s not that Photini gets along any better with people than she does, it’s that she has a different toolbox. So even though she can come off a little superficial sometimes with her churchy stuff, the fact is, when it all goes badly and it’s an absolute disaster, her response, even though at the time it’s a crowded room and there’s grownups around and stuff, she just withdraws.

It’s like, “I need to get in touch.” And it’s both, “I need to ask for help from God.” And she’s that person where it’s like, “I need to pray right now.” And Xenia is looking at her and is like, “What are you talking about? Things are happening.” She withdraws and she prays and when she prays, when she’s quiet in her heart and plays back the tape of what happened, she knows that it’s like, “I can’t control what the other kids did, but I was wrong. The way that I blew up and stuff that some of the things I said are just wrong and I can’t leave it like this.”

In real life I have never seen teenagers do something like that and I don’t even know if I were 14 or 15 and a teenager came up and said, “I want to apologize to you. What I did was wrong,” and just basically that. We’d all just not know what to say next. But I needed that scene because everything that happens with Photini and then with, even with my other character Maggie and things that Xenia has just seen about how Maggie interacts, they all feed her ability at the very end when everything blows up. And it is really this basic, almost life and death situation. It’s like, “I need them actually.”

And this is another theme in the book, is that Xenia herself, in spite of being in church, being around these church girls who have now, at least two of them, a very personal relationship with Christ. Xenia is aware that she doesn’t have that. And when things have gone to a point where she really needs help, that my idea is if this is all you had, God would talk to you through that.

If you cannot take him in yourself through in any other ways, he will come to you if it is that extreme and if you ask and speak to you through those people. And you will be able to through them. It’s like, “Okay, I can’t do this for me, but I know what Vanessa would do. Me myself, I cannot possibly handle what’s going on right now but I know what Maggie would do if she was here,” and so on. And that becomes how things are acted out. That still has a lot of power for me. When I first had that idea, it was just crazy exciting and I had to just sit on it for two years until I could put it in writing.

Phoebe:              Yeah. And that’s what I just love. I love every book in this series, but that aspect of this book that is about really relying on your community and it is your community that gets you through this time, sometimes by physical presence and other times just by having had that relationship, you can get through some really, really crazy difficulties.

And so, I would like to let you know that every year I actually choose a book for my blog’s, Being In Community, Book of the Year. And although we’re in 2020, in 2019… I read this book in 2019 when it came out in November, but the year was a very busy year and time got away with me but I said, “No, in January I’ll announce it.” And so I am announcing that Xenia, The Warm-Hearted is the 2019 Being In Community Book of the Year!

Grace:                 Yay! Oh, I’m so proud.

Phoebe:              I’m really thrilled to feature of the book and to feature the series. I think it’s just a fantastic way to, number one, just enjoy a great story. And then also, just a beautiful illustration of how to rely on your relationship with God, your relationship with your community, to get through life, to get through life really. And so, I think it’s beautiful. It’s enjoyable. It’s a series I recommend for any tween going on teen age group and I will say, I don’t even think it’s just girls that like clubs. The boys like clubs too and they make their own. There’s another fun little series for the younger tween, maybe eight or nine, 10, that comes out of England called Horrid Henry and he’s got a Purple Hand Gang where no girls are allowed. It is having a club and your team is a thing I think for that age group.

Grace:                 I have heard from people that’s like, “Oh, please write something for boys.”

Phoebe:              Yeah. Well, just because you have girl characters does not mean a boy cannot and enjoy it because it goes the other way too. Girls read plenty of books with boy characters and enjoy them, as well. So, it’s a great series I think for all ages …  For middle-grade enough and even for adults and I’m really glad that it’s out there. I can’t wait for the Photini book.

Grace:                 Me either. I may take a break, just so I’m clear with everybody. I may take a break and develop up aside series of… Another of those writing myself a check. I may write a mystery series that involves Xenia, which is where I’m going a little bit with the end of this book. I have a character, Mrs. Higgs that I like very much. She may spin off. I also have the restaurant that the church owns and I may spin off into cozies… I don’t know. It really blesses my heart more than I can say that given that I wanted to see things in this niche, but I also wanted to write a good story and do things that would be the book that I would want to read.

That’s probably every author, everywhere. You write what you want to read, hopefully. But that other people like it too and have good things to say is… I often just don’t know where to look because I really, I’m so thankful to God because many of the things people will say truly, “Where do you get the ideas? These are crazy ideas.” And I say, “I have no idea.” They’ll say, especially in my church, they’ll go, “Okay, you’re going to put us in your book, aren’t you?” It’s like, “I don’t think so. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.” Usually, I don’t know those people but I sort of do. They’re an amalgam a lot of times.

A side benefit for me, I wanted to put what I love of church life into a book. It’s so annoying to me that, and this I’m saying as an adult reader, all the secular fiction and some of it is very, very good and all that stuff, but they act as if we don’t exist. They act as, I mean, as if believing people who are also having a human life, who are also really believe in this stuff and bring it to bear on their life choices, it’s like we’re not supposed to be there and they don’t tell our story. And it’s like, “Okay, we better start telling this story. Even if we’re doing it haphazard and maybe some of it doesn’t make sense, I want to tell this story.”

There’s one of the short stories in the anthology book, the third book, that’s just following a baptism. And part of that is because I went to a baptism and baptisms are so neat and this is a thing. If you’re secular, do you ever see something like this? It’s just so beautiful on so many levels. Everyone’s happy. It’s cute and yet it’s heartwarming and it’s meaningful and there’s so much drama in this one service. And what happens… It goes on from there into another direction, but it partly was just for the fun, for me. It’s giving yourself the best assignment. It’s like, “Draw this picture. Show a baptism with all of these little human parts that you know so well and try and make it what everyone relates to.”

Phoebe:              And I think a lot of young people in the church who read the series, definitely feel that connection of, “Oh, there is somebody like me who spends a lot of time here and how do they get through life?” But also those who don’t attend church, it’s also a nice way to get a glimpse really of what goes on and how people live with this faith and worship in this faith and try to go through life with it and what it means for them. Thank you again for this series!

Grace:                 You’re very welcome, and thank you for the high honor.

Phoebe:              Thank you for joining me on this interview and for all my readers, please, if you haven’t already, go out and get started on this series. In honor of the Being In Community Book of the Year, I’m going to give away one of the books in the series. So if you haven’t gotten Xenia yet, I will give away a copy of Xenia. If you haven’t started, I’ll give you a copy of Abigail, Queen Abigail the Wise. If you’ve only gotten as far as Vanessa, I’ll pick a winner and then they can tell me the book that they want because everybody has to read this series. It’s great. Thank you again, Grace, and I’m looking forward to the Photini book.

Grace:                 Oh, boy. All right. Thank you.

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