Crack the Stone: Q&A with Emily Golus + Giveaway

 

About the Book

Book: Crack the Stone

Author: Emily Golus

Genre: Fantasy

Release Date: September 22, 2023

I am Valshara, the black stone born of fire. Break me, and my edges turn into knives.

Condemned to a slave camp for her crimes, goblin convict Valshara Sh’a makes a death-defying escape to freedom. But navigating Vindor’s treacherous cavern system is only the beginning of her troubles. An encounter with a rogue king turns her world upside down, and a bargain with fairy tricksters leaves her with a human child she doesn’t know how to care for.

As she tries to smuggle the boy through the walls of a barricaded city, Valshara can’t let down her guard. Because somewhere in the darkness behind her, a bounty hunter rises—relentless as nightfall and merciless as death itself.

Emily Golus re-imagines Victor Hugo’s beloved Les Misérables as an epic fantasy adventure about suffering, redemption, and the extraordinary power of love.

 

Click here to get your copy!

 

About the Author

Emily Golus is an award-winning fantasy author with nearly 20 years of professional writing experience. Golus aims to engage, inspire, and show how small acts of courage and love create meaningful change. Her books feature diverse cultures, authentic characters, and cinematic fantasy settings.

Her first novel, Escape to Vindor, won the 2018 Selah Award for Young Adult Fiction, and a spin-off novel, Crack the Stone, won the 2024 Kudos Award for Fiction. Golus lives in Greenville, S.C., with her husband, Mike, who is her greatest supporter. They have two active little boys and enjoy hiking, making Thai food, and exploring small towns in the Carolinas.

 

More from Emily

Crack the Stone is a fantasy re-spinning of Victor Hugo’s redemptive masterpiece, Les Misérables. I’ve taken the major themes and characters of the original novel and recast them within the fantastical world of Vindor. The heart of the story is the same—a stone-hearted convict on the run from the law finds unexpected redemption—but there are new twists and turns along the way.

The Jean Valjean character—now a fierce goblin warrior named Valshara Sh’a—finds herself fleeing through treacherous caverns, an ensnaring forest, and a West African-inspired city under siege. Her pursuer, an expert bounty hunter who has never failed to catch his quarry, is dead-set on returning her to slavery.

Complicating everything is the human boy Valshara rescues from a fairy ring. The precocious and chaotic child not only jeopardizes the goblin’s escape, but starts to melt her obsidian heart.

Crack the Stone focuses primarily on Hugo’s themes of scandalous redemption, legalism, and the transforming love between a mother and child. Other elements of the novel—lovesick Éponine, the red revolution flag, the barricade, the Elephant of the Bastille—have been remixed in unexpected ways to support the redemption arc.

If you’re a fan of the book (or the musical!) you’ll enjoy the fun Les Mis “Easter eggs” throughout. But even if you’re not familiar with the original, you can still get swept up in Crack the Stone’s epic story of suffering, love, and light in the darkest places.

Author Interview

Can you tell us a little bit about what readers can expect from your books? 
 

Sure. My three fantasy books—Escape to Vindor, Mists of Paracosmia, and Crack the Stone—all take place in Vindor, which is a richly detailed world with diverse cultures and a variety of fantasy races (including centaurs, merfolk, goblins, and fairies). I’ve worked hard to make Vindor feel like a real and consistent place, and each book explores a new corner of the landscape. If you enjoy immersive fantasy you can escape to, Vindor is for you! (You can see an overview of the world with custom illustrations and soundscapes on my website portal, WorldofVindor.com.)   

 

When it comes to plots, my goal is to create exciting and surprising adventures. I also like to explore big ideas. What does true courage look like? How does prejudice hurt ourselves as well as others? What does true mercy look like? Though I sometimes deal with heavier topics, my books have an uplifting tone and always point toward hope. 

 

I also work to keep my books as clean as possible, especially because my first two books are aimed at younger teens. Crack the Stone and some of my future books are targeted to older teen or adult readers, but I want my middle school readers to be free to follow along without fear of stumbling into any “adult” content. Vindor books have no profanity, no romantic “spice,” and no graphic violence. I don’t need these elements to tell the stories I do, and keeping them out ensures my books can be enjoyed by even the most sensitive readers.  

 

 

Can you share 5 random facts about this book? 

Ooh, I love random facts. Here goes: 

 

1. Since my book is based off of Les Misérables, I had a ton of characters to draw inspiration from—more than I could ever hope to fully develop. So in addition to the main characters (who are clearly patterned after Jean Valjean, Cosette, and Javert), I had a lot of fun with side characters who are little nods to Hugo originals. They include: 

• Etsuko, the silk merchant’s daughter (Éponine) 
• Mareso, the rich citizen who throws his lot in with the outsiders (Marius) 
• Headmistress Innosa, leader of the House of Mercy (Mother Innocente) 
• Egnatius, the centaur leader of the Barricade (Enjolras) 
• Gangle, the wise-cracking dock urchin (Gavroche) 

There are many more as well! 
 

2. One of the early scenes in the book involves a goblin character called the Bandit King. This is actually a cameo of one of the most popular characters from both Escape to Vindor and Mists of Paracosmia. Vindor fans will immediately recognize him despite his alias. 
 

3. Architecture in the city of B’jeme is inspired by several locations in West Africa (particularly sites in Mali) and from the marketplace district of Marrakesh, Morocco. Many names in B’jeme are inspired by Yoruba and Igbo names (two major languages of Nigeria), while others are Arabic in nature.  
 

4. Tajim’s Wheel, the enormous mechanism that keeps the streets of B’jeme dry, is essentially a real medieval machine. The six-cylinder water pump was invented in the 1500s by the Ottoman mathematical genius Taqi al-Din. 
 

5. B’jeme’s white elephant statue is based on Paris’ infamous Elephant of the Bastille. The 78-foot monument project was abandoned, leaving only the plaster prototype that wasted away in the elements for decades. This eyesore of an elephant statue appears in the original Les Misérables novel as a hideout for the urchin Gavroche, and I found a way to work it into my retelling as well. (But no spoilers!) 

 

Can you share something interesting or surprising you learned while researching for the book? 

 

In the beginning of the book, my heroine Valshara is fleeing through uncharted cave passages, so I did a lot of research about caves and cave exploration.  

 

Before my research, I pictured caves as being open rooms with flat floors and maybe a few stalactites hanging down—but it turns out that’s just because that’s how they look on TV. (There’s only so much set designers can do to dress up a sound stage!)  

 

Real caves occasionally do have large caverns, but mostly they’re three-dimensional mazes of water-worn tunnels, pools, and dead ends. Cave exploring is less like walking around a big room with a flashlight and more like seeing a little hole in a wall and thinking I wonder if I can squeeze though there? The passage to the next space may be above you, or below you, or maybe off to the side. It might get wider as you go, or narrower, it may fill with water, or it may drop off into a bottomless pit. What fun! And did I mention it’s soul-crushingly dark? 

 

For the record, just the thought of all this sets off my claustrophobia (I panic a bit when I have to squeeze under my son’s bed to retrieve a Lego), and I used that terror to fuel the desperation Valshara feels when she gets stuck or trapped.  

 

 

What do you hope readers will take away from the book? 

 

I really want my readers to see the difference between cold religious observation and true heart-level redemption. 

 

I grew up in a legalistic religious background, so in a way my villain represents who I used to be. My religious system taught me to be obsessed with doing particular things exactly right so I wouldn’t fall into condemnation. This mindset feeds an anxiety that regularly pendulum swings into self-righteous pride. It’s an exhausting hamster wheel of an existence. You tend to see other people as tools to help you reach your goals or temptations to get you to compromise your standards. Often you to pull away from others in an attempt to focus on your own righteousness. 

 

Then in college I had a genuine encounter with Jesus and actually understood the Gospel for the first time. When I grasped that I had truly been forgiven for all my sins and shortcomings, and that I was loved not because I earned it but because Jesus earned it on my behalf, the shackles of legalism started to fall away. I was fully known, fully accepted, and fully loved—I didn’t need rituals to keep God happy with me. This kind of Love humbles you, breathing life into a dead heart and transforming you from the inside out. Genuine love and compassion begin to overflow to those around you. 

 

In Crack the Stone, while the Faceless is focused on doing “works” that preserve his own ritual purity, Valshara’s newfound love compels her to risk her life to rescue her friends. And hers are the kinds of deeds that actually change the world for good.  

 

 

 

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Before you go, where can readers keep up with what’s next? 

 

Thank you for having me! The best place to keep up with me is on my website, EmilyGolusBooks.com, where you can find out about the latest news and even enter the Vindor portal to explore the world for yourself. I’m also active on Instagram at @worldofvindor and Facebook at /EmilyGolusBooks. 

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Giveaway

To celebrate her tour, Emily is giving away the grand prize of a paperback copy of Crack the Stone, an obsidian arrowhead pendant, two Vindor stickers, a Vindor mini-map, a Vindor bookmark, and a $25 Amazon gift card!!

Be sure to comment on the blog stops for nine extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.

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