"Asterwood"

Jacquelyn Stolos grew up in Derry, New Hampshire. She loves tromping through the forest and reading good books.

Asterwood is her first novel for children.

Stolos holds an MFA in fiction from NYU, where she was a Writers in the Public School Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in Joyland and No Tokens. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Stolos applied the Page 69 Test to Asterwood and shared the following:

From page 69 of Asterwood:

Quick and silent, Madelyn followed Fern down the slope to their camp, where Matthew was stuffing the last tent pole into his lumpy pack.

"Cannibals?" whispered Calle.

Fern nodded.

Calle's eyes widened.

"She has our scent," said Fern, tossing Madelyn her pack. "And she'll be after us as soon as she regains consciousness."

"She had two men with her,” Madelyn offered, pulling the pack’s straps over her raw shoulders.

“We’re well aware,” snapped Fern.

Calle gestured toward a tree, where the two men were unconscious, gagged, and bound. A chill tickled down Madelyn’s spine.

“They were here?” she asked.

“Watching us from the bushes.” Fern patted the blowgun in her belt. “I’d say we have a little under an hour to put as much distance between ourselves and them as we can. Cannibals are fast, crafty, and incredibly intelligent.

On page 69 of Asterwood, Madelyn had just been rescued by Fern from an unsettling encounter with a bewitching woman wearing a crown of yellowing bones. The two rejoin The New Hopefuls at their camp where Madelyn learns that cannibals lurk in the enchanted forest of Asterwood, and, in wandering away from the group and interacting with this woman, she’s put her new friends in grave danger. Now they must pack up and flee through the night forest.

The Page 69 Test works well for Asterwood. This excerpt demonstrates the adrenaline and adventure threaded through the novel, while also giving a taste of the friendship dynamics that drive Madelyn, who begins the book feeling like an outsider in her small, New Hampshire town and finds herself over the course of her adventures with this crew of tenacious misfits. More, Madelyn’s encounter with the cannibals by campfire was inspired by Bilbo Baggins’ campfire encounter with the man-eating trolls in The Hobbit. Readers can expect more notes of Tolkien throughout Asterwood. I was a huge fan at the age of Asterwood’s readers (and still am!). The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy was an enormous influence in how I imagined and wrote this woodland adventure.

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--Marshal Zeringue