Paula Xiberras
Jaclyn Moriarty was in Tasmania this year for the Tamar Writer’s Festival and she is ‘annoyed’ she didn’t get to stay longer or has been able to visit ‘beautiful Tasmania’ more often, yet a previous trip to Tassie remains with Jaclyn.
Her first visit to Tasmania as an eight year old when her sister was a baby, involved an incident when Jaclyn’s sister hit her chin on the bunk bed, so what was going to be a school excursion turned into a visit to the hospital! Everything turned out okay and that fits in nicely with Jaclyn’s writing which doesn’t shy from tackling challenges but overall inspires us with confidence and optimism.
Jaclyn’s latest novel ‘A Tangle of Gold’ is the third instalment and completes the ‘Colours of Madeleine’ series trilogy, the previous two titles being ‘A Corner of White’ and ‘The Cracks in the Kingdom’.
In this novel plans are afoot to return the royals from our world to their own with the potential of such an enterprise closing the way between worlds. Madeleine and Elliott, for the sake of their own future must prevent this happening.
Jaclyn says she stays close to reality even in a fantasy novel such as this because ultimately people reading the book need to identify with the characters and scenarios and have stories that resonate with their own lives. The characters face the same obstacles we do in our lives, even if they are in an obscure, distant world. Jaclyn doesn’t classify her writing as representative of the fantasy genre but instead believes she ‘plays around with it a bit’.
When I ask Jaclyn about the origin of the names of her characters she tells me that no one has ever asked her that before! For the record the names are taken from the names of stars and planets.
With many young adult novels dystopian and dark, Jaclyn says she prefers to create a positive and happy ending for her readers. To see how Madeleine and Elliot’s story concludes read on.
‘A Tangle of Gold’ is out, now published by Pan Macmillan Australia
