Today we are very excited to share an interview with the Author Sasha Laurens (YOUNGBLOOD)
Meet Sasha Laurens
Sasha Laurens is originally from Northern California and has livedin Michigan, New York, and St. Petersburg, Russia. She has a PhD in politicalscience and lives in Brooklyn. Her first novel, A Wicked Magic, was published in2020. Find her on Twitter @sasha_laurens.
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About the Book: YOUNGBLOOD
High school sucks. Especially for the undead.
“This is the lesbian vampire boarding school story I’ve always needed, but it’s smarter, nastier, and more fun than I ever could have dreamed.” —Kylie Schachte, author of You’re Next
Kat Finn and her mother can barely make ends meet living among humans. Like all vampires, they must drink Hema, an expensive synthetic blood substitute, to survive, as nearly all of humanity has been infected by a virus that’s fatal to vampires. Kat isn’t looking forward to an immortal life of barely scraping by, but when she learns she’s been accepted to the Harcote School, a prestigious prep school that’s secretly vampires-only, she knows her fortune is about to change.
Taylor Sanger has grown up in the wealthy vampire world, but she’s tired of its backward, conservative values—especially when it comes to sexuality, since she’s an out-and-proud lesbian. She only has to suffer through a two more years of Harcote before she’s free. But when she discovers her new roommate is Kat Finn, she’s horrified. Because she and Kat used to be best friends, a long time ago, and it didn’t end well.
When Taylor stumbles upon the dead body of a vampire, and Kat makes a shocking discovery in the school’s archives, the two realize that there are deep secrets at Harcote—secrets that link them to the most powerful figures in Vampirdom and to the synthetic blood they all rely on.
~Author Chat~
YABC: What gave you the inspiration to write this book?
I had been reading a lot of romance, I really wanted to write something fun that played with those tropes. I wanted a bad boy with a heart of gold, but I didn’t really want to write about a boy, so voila, Taylor. She’s a masc girl who’s prickly, sarcastic and so over it on the outside, but inside, she’s all squishy emotions and she’s really afraid of getting hurt. Kat’s her foil: a good girl, who’s had to be a people pleaser to get by, and by doing that, she’s never made the effort to understand what kind of person she really wants to be (hint: a homosexual). By the tumblr alignment chart, Kat looks like a cinnamon roll but would kill you, and Taylor looks like she could kill you but she’s actually a cinnamon roll.
I chose the boarding school setting because it would really put the girls’ different attitudes about authority into high relief. Also, they were roommates!!!!! Which is just fun.
The vampiric atmosphere was almost an afterthought that at first, I just thought would be fun, because I just find vampires so campy and ridiculous. But the deeper I got into Vampirdom, the more I realized there were tropes I wanted to mess with—specifically, age gap romances, the idea that vampires are all ultra-rich, and the fact that they sometimes wear capes just because.
YABC: Which came first, the title or the novel?
This almost never happens, but Youngblood was actually always the working title for this project.
Astute readers may also note that Youngblood is also the title of a song by Five Seconds of Summer, and although the song is totally unrelated to the book, it did inspire the title. While I was working on the proposal, I was in a bar with huge screens playing music videos, in Kaliningrad, Russia, and I saw the video for Youngblood. It has this really cool aesthetic of contemporary Japanese dudes dressed like 50s greasers, riding motorcycles and stuff. I don’t know what the meaning of that is, but it made me think of vampires, and Youngblood just sounds cool. Later, I incorporated it in the story as the name for the new generation of young vampires.
YABC: What do you like most about the cover of the book?
Basically everything? Kevin Wada did an incredible job with the illustration, and he was my dream cover artist, literally. When I started Youngblood, I wanted to write characters cool enough that they could be a Kevin Wada illustration. I never thought that would actually happen, but when I talked about the cover with my publisher, I had to suggest him.
Kat and Taylor are basically exactly like I imagined them, which is really shocking since I didn’t have a particularly good idea of what they looked like. Even though I know what their features (like eye color) are, I can’t imagine characters completely in my head. Despite that, I don’t usually write from photo references, because they never look right. So I was delightfully surprised to see Kevin’s illustration and suddenly see the people I had only had a hazy picture of in my mind.
YABC: Which was the most difficult or emotional scene to narrate?
I can’t really describe this without light spoilers, but they were the scenes related to, as the jacket copy describes it, Taylor stumbling upon the dead body of a vampire, and the emotional fall out of that. Honestly, like any time Taylor got sad about anything? She hates having feelings, but she has so many feelings and no idea what to do with them, and I just wanted someone to give her a hug.
YABC: Which character gave you the most trouble when writing your latest book?
Galen underwent the most change over the course of drafting. He’s a challenging character because he’s incredibly privileged and at the start of the novel, totally without insight into that privilege, which makes him pretty unsympathetic. I wanted to show how his privilege, despite its obvious benefits, is also limiting for him, but doing that without making him a victim was difficult. For example, there was a version where he had experienced some kind of abuse and a version where he was possibly queer too. But those arcs didn’t actually interrogate his privilege; they only diminished it. Eventually, Galen recognizes (with a lot of help from Kat) that he’s always had these unfair advantages and in fact, actual power, despite how personally disempowered he might feel.
YABC: What is the main message or lesson you would like your reader to remember from this book?
So not to get too heavy, but ultimately, Youngblood is about questioning authority and the power structures we live under—whether that’s the schools we go to or the institutions of heterosexuality and class). These structures all build on and reinforce each other to elevate some people at the expense of others. They affect all of us, and understanding your role is the only way we can reform or dismantle them.
YABC: What new release book are you looking most forward to in 2022?
I’m looking forward to The Feeling of Falling in Love by Mason Deaver, Seton Girls
by Charlene Thomas, and How to Succeed in Witchcraft by Aislinn Brophy.
YABC: What’s a book you’ve recently read and loved?
Home Field Advantage by Dahlia Adler is a super fun contemporary romance about a cheerleader and the town’s first female quarterback. It’s a great summer read!
YABC: Is there an organization or cause that is close to your heart?
With each passing day, this country gives me reason to hold causes ever closer to my heart. A few organizations that I support are Just Detention, which aims to end prison rape, the Trevor Project, which provides suicide prevention services for LGBTQ+ youth, and the Black Youth Project 100, which fights for Black liberation using a feminist, queer approach.
YABC: What advice do you have for new writers?
Don’t try to chase the market. It might appear that I wrote Youngblood because it was so obvious that lesbian vampires were having a moment, but actually, when I ran this proposal by a few people in late 2019/early 2020, they said that vampires were still a dead trend in YA and I should pick another direction. I went with it anyway, against advice. Now that was obviously phenomenally good timing, and it was entirely good luck.
Write what you like, or think is cool, or would love to read a book about. Put as much of your own weirdness in it as you want. That’s going to be a lot more compelling than writing to trends that everyone will probably have moved on from by the time you get published.
Book’s Title: Youngblood
Author Sasha Laurens
Release Date: ON SALE 7/19/2022
Publisher: RAZORBILL
Genre: Vampires / Fantasy
Age Range 14 and up
