Author Q&A: What Do You Hope Readers Take Away from This Book?

The ShelterBox North America Book Club approached me this month for a Q&A. ShelterBox is an international disaster-relief agency that selects books set in and written by natives of the countries they've deployed to, and it was a privilege to dialogue with the group about The Hour of Daydreams.

This question was part of their Q&A. It is one I get often: "What do you hope readers take away from this book?" Here's the answer I gave:

"I hope that readers enjoy and become immersed in the novel, leaving it feeling that all of their questions have been answered. At the same time, I hope it creates an opening for new questions to emerge about memory and stories, how legacies are created, what could be missed, what could be misinterpreted in our own histories and myths, what needs exploration. I hope it leaves you with a certainty, that even and perhaps especially in the most ordinary, in the act of day-to-day living, in the process of reading, magic is alive and real."