Poverty, prejudice, her mother’s addiction…in her quest for
an education, 15-year-old Thea tries to navigate them all. But will a secret
ultimately undermine her efforts?
Thea
by Genevieve Morrissey
narrated by Nicole Fikes
2025 Page Turner
Book Award winner for Best Historical Fiction & Character Architect Award
Oklahoma
City, 1925
Fifteen-year-old Thea Carter lives in a small garage apartment—Thea’s seventh
“home” in four years—provided by her alcoholic mother’s employer, the morose
and enigmatic Dr. Hallam.
School is Thea’s refuge and she’s an excellent student, but the parasitic Mrs.
Carter’s instability continually threatens her dream of getting a high school
diploma. In an effort to keep her mother employed and the two of them housed,
Thea secretly takes on much of her mother’s work while at the same time
navigating adolescence, friendships, and first love.
Dr. Hallam, impressed by her drive and intelligence, becomes Thea’s unexpected
ally, but in addition to wealth and position, the doctor also has a secret that
could ruin him, and shatter his bond with Thea.
"Morrissey
crafts a wise and moving coming-of-age historical novel with resonant
contemporary themes, meticulous period detail, and flawed but sympathetic
characters who will win readers’ hearts… Lovers of historical fiction and
coming-of-age stories will relish time spent with Thea." —BookLife
'Editor's Pick' review
"Thea is a coming-of-age tale with a lot of heart and charm… Morrissey's
characters truly leap off the pages." —Readers' Favorite review
"The story is one of friendship and
found family, with a heartwarming conclusion… THEA is a moving historical
coming-of-age novel whose characters' compassion and empathy inspires.”
—IndieReader review
**Now available as an audiobook!**
Audible * Amazon
ebook * Bookbub
* Goodreads
Thea is the new historical novel by Genevieve
Morrissey, author of the award-winning Marriage & Hanging and the
popular Antlands science fiction series. She is an avid student of
British and American social history who, through one of those strange little
quirks of fate, spends most of her days talking with scientists. In addition to
writing, Genevieve enjoys reading obscure books, travel, and solitude.
Website * Facebook * X * Instagram * Bluesky * Bookbub * Amazon * Goodreads
GUEST POST
Who designed your book covers?
All of my covers except one are the work of Mark Thomas of Coverness. I love them all, and I think the cover of Thea is his best yet.
The cover of The Complete Raffles, Annotated and Illustrated is the work of Sarah Morrissey, and features an image of Raffles painted by J.C. Leyendecker.
Advice I would give new authors?
I find that people are very free about giving advice to writers. The only piece I ever got that I consciously took is this:
First—write a book (or play, or story, or poem, or whatever your thing is).
Second—revise what you wrote. Revise it again. Revise it again. Revise it until you’re sick of looking at it. Revise it some more. Keep revising it until every sentence is as perfect as you can make it.
Third—open the bottom drawer of your desk and drop your manuscript into it.
Fourth—close the drawer. If you feel like slamming it, go ahead.
Fifth—repeat steps one through four until one day when you open the bottom drawer to drop in your manuscript, you find the drawer full. At this point—and not before—you may proceed to step six, which is to attempt to get your latest work published.
I got this advice (I don’t remember from whom) in a time when people still had desk drawers and manuscripts on paper that could be dropped into them, but as that’s usually no longer the case, a contemporary version of this advice might go:
Step one—measure and calculate the volume of an old-fashioned bottom desk drawer. Measure and calculate the volume of a manuscript printed on 81/2 by 11-inch paper. Calculate how many manuscripts of the calculated volume would be required to reach the maximum capacity of said drawer.
Proceed with old steps one through four until the number of virtual manuscripts you have completed is enough to fill the virtual drawer.
Then continue to step five.
If you are math-avoidant, it may serve as a rough estimate for you to know that my desk drawer—actual, not virtual—was filled by Attempted Book Number Eight. Book Number Nine was Antlands, which sold very well, so I think the drawer-filling technique worked very well in my case.
Do you believe in writer’s block?
Yep. With as much conviction as I believe in gravity. Just keep writing.
Pen, typewriter or computer?
I’m so old I’ve written books with all three. I like my computer best because it makes revisions so easy I have no possible excuse to stint on revising.
How long on average does it take you to write a book?
At first, five years. Then three. Then two. To write THEA took only one. As with any skill, practice is everything.
Who did the narration on the audiobook and what made you choose them?
More than in any other book I’ve written, I wanted to portray the characters in Thea as products of their environments. Thea Carter, the protagonist and narrator of the story, is an Oklahoma girl, so I felt like the perfect audiobook would be one performed by an actor with an Oklahoma accent. But could I get one? I didn’t think a generic “southern drawl” would do. Oklahoma isn’t the Deep South. The experiences and attitudes of a girl born and reared in the Deep South during the 1920s would have been very different from those of a girl raised in Oklahoma City. Consequently, when I opened the audiobook project for auditions, I specified either an Oklahoma, or failing that, a neutral accent.
I should have bought lottery tickets that day, because my luck was certainly in. Almost the first audition I received was from Texan Nicole Fikes, who is was so perfectly familiar with the Oklahoma accent that listening to her read her audition instantly brought back my own!
Nicole turned out to be an excellent actress, able to perfectly convey things like Thea’s mix of youth and premature world-weariness, her mother’s deteriorating condition, and Dr. Hallam’s gradual recovery from depression, using only her voice.
I have the good fortune to be able to say that my audiobook’s narration is exactly how I hoped it would be.
Did you have to adjust/change anything in the book before getting it narrated?
I didn’t adjust or change anything from the written version of Thea before getting it narrated. The words Nicole Fikes reads are exactly the ones I wrote, slightly adjusted—by Nicole; not me—to reflect the Oklahoma habit of, for example, dropping the final “g” of most “—ing” endings. Maybe I should have changed more, but I thought it might be unfair to people who read physical books for the audio version to have different content.
Follow
the tour HERE for special content and a giveaway!
Enter the Thea Audiobook Giveaway Here
No comments:
Post a Comment