Give the Plot a Vigorous Shake: A Guest Post by Beth Lincoln
We haven’t stopped thinking about the overall winner of the 2023 B&N Children’s and YA Book Awards, The Swifts — and now, there’s even more shenanigans to love. The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues is a wild and wonderful adventure through the streets of Paris. Read on for Beth Lincoln’s exclusive guest post on writing this sequel and what she hopes her readers take away from it.
Hardcover $17.99
The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues (B&N Exclusive Edition)
The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues (B&N Exclusive Edition)
By
Beth Lincoln
Illustrator
Claire Powell
In Stock Online
Hardcover $17.99
The cast of Swifts has grown, despite the growing list of dead bodies. And, more good news, all the fun wordplay is back, along with Shenanigan’s shenanigans.
The cast of Swifts has grown, despite the growing list of dead bodies. And, more good news, all the fun wordplay is back, along with Shenanigan’s shenanigans.
A Gallery of Rogues takes place a few months after the events of A Dictionary of Scoundrels, and if I had to summarize it, it would sound something like this:
When a painting by the famous artist “Pierrot” is stolen from Swift House (and an enormous inflatable bird is left in its place), Shenanigan and her family race to Paris to apprehend the thieves: a bizarre, criminal group of artists known as Ouvolpo.
To have any hope of catching them, the Swifts must team up with the estranged French branch of the Family, the Martinets, who run a mysterious hotel in the heart of the city.
But the more Shenanigan gets to know her cousins, the more she begins to suspect that there’s something afoot at the Hôtel Martinet. And the more Pierrot pieces are stolen, the more it seems that the artist’s disappearance might just have something to do with her Family…
I hope that sounded professional. There’s a lot crammed into Book 2— but then, there was a lot crammed into Book 1, as well. My approach to writing books is to shove in everything I find exciting, or funny, or strange, and then give the plot a vigorous shake. The summary above doesn’t even touch on the reappearance of Uncle Maelstrom’s nemesis Inspector Rousseau, or Pamplemousse’s sister Pomme, or the mob of clowns that surround the Hôtel Martinet, or the murder.
This book is bigger than the first one, both in terms of size (I dropped my advance copy on my foot and almost broke a toe) and scale. I took the Swifts to Paris for three reasons: the first was that the Swift children have spent most of their lives at Swift House, and throughout the first book, Shenanigan is desperate to get out into the world. Her wish is now granted. But the world is an immense, complicated place, and beyond the bounds of their estate, Shenanigan’s map is useless. She’s not on her home turf anymore—even in the hotel she has to rely on her cousin Souris, the bellboy, just to avoid getting permanently lost and dying of thirst in the Hôtel Martinet’s labyrinthine corridors.
The second reason was French. It’s no secret that I love messing about with the English language, and English owes HUGE chunk of itself to French (see: the Norman Conquest, which every British child is forced to learn about in history lessons). Our languages, like the Swifts and Martinets, are cousins. For example, in the sentence “The Inspector regarded his soup with anxiety, as he suspected the diabolical rat chef had poisoned it”, most of the words were either adopted directly from the French or devised from the same Latin roots. A language is a history of the people who speak it, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that languages sharing the same origin are known as “families”.
The third and most intentionally cryptic reason I picked Paris was Art. Who makes it? Who protects it? Who appreciates it? Who owns it? These are questions the book is asking, and they’re questions we all should be asking, too. Eventually, as the mystery deepens and clock ticks down to Ouvolpo’s grandest heist, even Shenanigan asks these questions—once she’s finished scoffing pastries, anyway.
