Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

BOOK: Jennifer Lynn Barnes Anthology

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A
LSO BY
J
ENNIFER
L
YNN
B
ARNES

The Raised by Wolves series:
Raised by Wolves
Trial by Fire
Taken by Storm

Every Other Day

Nobody

Dear Readers,

The books you’re reading in this collection were all written during the period of my life when I was a graduate student by day and a writer by night. I started writing
Raised by Wolves
near the beginning of my graduate school career, and the third book in the trilogy,
Taken by Storm
, was released the day after I received my Ph.D.

There are many things that unite all of the stories in this bundle—my love of strong female protagonists and an emphasis on female friendships; the importance of family and the idea that the people we love
are
our family, whether we share blood or not; themes related to sacrifice and the idea that sometimes there are no good choices; being powerfully drawn to someone because you feel, on some bone-deep level, like the two of you are the
same
—but looking back, one of the biggest threads that I can see tying all of these books together is the role that my scientific background—and my double life as a cognitive scientist—played in the writing of these books.

The Raised by Wolves series, about a human girl who was raised by werewolves, was strongly inspired by the time I spent doing research with pack animals in the wild. In my case, the pack animals in question were monkeys, not wolves, but spending summers as one of the only humans on an island full of wild monkeys has a way of making you pay attention to things like dominance, body language, and hierarchy (see also: the time I didn’t realize the monkey standing next to me was the alpha of the whole island and I maybe, kind of, tried to get him to move along, and he proved to me that in the great battle of Jen vs. the Alpha Monkey, the alpha monkey will always come out on top).

Every Other Day
was similarly inspired by science: in the world that my protagonist, Kali, lives in, the creatures of myth not only exist—they were discovered by Charles Darwin on his voyage on the
Beagle
! Kali’s character also owes her nature to my double life: she’s a superpowered demon hunter whose powers only work every other day, and on the off days, she’s completely human. I have no superpowers (that I know of), but I was very much living an every other day kind of life while writing the book: every other day I was a writer, and every day in between, I was researching human psychology instead.

The theme of being pulled between two worlds is widespread in fiction—particularly coming of age stories, where characters are caught between adolescence and adulthood. For Kali and Bryn, the battle between their dual natures is fierce. Bryn was raised like a werewolf, but she’s biologically human. It’s Nature vs. Nurture in its purest form: if you were raised like a werewolf, how human could you be? For Kali, the answer to the question “What am I?” literally changes every twenty-four hours. Ultimately, both girls have to figure out not only
what
they are and how they fit into their respective worlds, but
who
they are and who they want to be.

Also included in this collection is a bonus short story, featuring Lake from the Raised by Wolves series. Like my other protagonists, she’s caught between worlds, both by virtue of being a werewolf and by virtue of being female, a rarity in the werewolf world. She’s powerful, but objectified—and in “Sweet Sixteen” you get a hint of the fact that she has her own reasons for feeling like she doesn’t quite belong in this world.

I hope you enjoy these books—and the girls at their heart—as much as I enjoyed writing them. At the end of this bundle, you’ll find a teaser for my newest book,
Nobody
, a romance about two supernaturally unnoticeable teenagers: a boy who has been raised as an assassin and the girl he is sent to kill. It’s a book about feeling invisible—and finding the one person who actually sees you.