The Blog

Readers ask me whether the plants in Sorrowroot are real. The honest answer is: about half. Sopatra's garden grew out of the one outside my own window in a quiet corner of Ohio — where a Rose of Sharon bush has bloomed outside my kitchen window through every season of writing this book, patient as a lighthouse. When I needed to know how wisteria hangs in morning light, or what a dogwood sounds like when it's full of birds, I didn't have to imagine. I had to look up.

The other half I planted myself. Livia grows up in a garden that is also a pharmacy, with a father who teaches her the names and uses of things the way other fathers teach the alphabet: Silverleaf for injuries of the flesh. Moonpetal for fever. Sorrowroot for wounds of the heart. Three plants, three uses — and if the last one stops you, it stopped me too. That's the recitation the whole trilogy grew from. Silverleaf is the generous one, blanketing the ground where it's needed most. Moonpetal keeps its own hours — pale, cupped, shy of daylight, opening only after dusk — a flower that does its counting while you sleep. And sorrowroot: small, pale blue, unremarkable next to the garden's showier blooms, with petals creased like the pages of a book left open too long. The flower nobody would pick first. Her favorite.

But a garden with nothing dangerous in it is just a bouquet. Sopatra has her teeth: deep in the garden's oldest corner grow the corpse flowers, beauty and decay fighting for dominance — because paradise, in these books, is never quite what it claims to be. And standing over all of it are the elders: the olive and the oaks, the trees that have been listening longest. In Sopatra, the roots of things are all connected, and nothing that happens in the garden happens alone. That's not just botany. That's the whole book.

If you'd like to walk the garden properly, I've put together an illustrated Field Guide to the Flora of Sopatra — engraved plates, habitats, preparations, and the margin notes of a certain gardener, in his own hand. The first three plates are open to everyone; the complete six-plate edition, including the plants the guide warns you about, is my welcome gift to newsletter subscribers.

And no — the trees of Maitreya aren't in it. The soldier's tree is a different post, for a different day.

Varick walks into this story a monster. Every reader who felt Livia's love for her father instantly wants Varick, aka Death himself, to pay for what he's done. And in a black-and-white world, that's exactly how he would stay on the page: cold, brutal, and unforgivable.

But as the author, I knew who Varick was in the prologue that I decided to leave out of the final manuscript: a soldier who's loyal to the kids he protects, a man who's obedient to an unfair oath, and a person who's carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. He's not evil. He's not cruel. He's someone who's lost his way and is whispering "Forgive me" into the night like a prayer.

And that's the thing about prayers: they reach who they're supposed to. Livia has every reason to want Varick dead in act one, and so does the reader. But she's also intuitive — a girl who knows that trusting her heart is a far better bet than ignoring it completely. She doesn't want to feel compassion for him. And yet she does, because the good parts in her recognize the broken parts in him.

That's a real love story to me. Two people who really complement each other, who aren't the easiest match but who the universe roots for because they just make sense together.

The prologue is my way of letting readers sneak a peek at the enemy before he arrives and does what monsters do. Because once you've seen that other side of him, a part of you inevitably breaks knowing that his prayer for forgiveness reaches her before he ever had a reason to ask for it.

And it makes the epilogue land that much harder, when we finally get back to Varick's POV after being in Livia's throughout the entire novel. He's undone, the reader's undone… and I'll say nothing about where she is.

But the wind still knows the way…

I started writing Sorrowroot a decade ago, shortly after I lost my father. It was sudden—the kind of loss that doesn't knock before it enters. And he wasn't just my dad. He was my very best friend. The person whose voice I checked everything against. And then one random day, the voice I trusted most was gone.

Except that isn't quite true, and this book helped me realize that. His words didn't leave when he did. They still guide me just as much today—in big decisions, in small hours, in the way I measure what really matters.

So I wrote a girl who grew up in a garden with a father who taught her everything. History, healing, honor. “Silverleaf for injuries of the flesh. Moonpetal for fever. Sorrowroot for wounds of the heart.” And I wrote what happens to her when he's taken without warning—and how everything he planted in her keeps growing anyway.

People sometimes ask about the title, Sorrowroot, because it's an unusual word and admittedly a little strange on the tongue. The reason I chose it is because of how it surprised me when I wrote it: when Death kneels before the girl with a flower for the grief he caused. And just like a flower, the darkness of rock bottom is often where real growth begins.

The valley in Scripture isn't a place you're left; it's a place you're walked through. And the flowers that grow there are the resilient kind.

So this book is for him—my first reader in everything, who never got to read it. And it's for anyone carrying a voice they can no longer call. Keep listening. What they planted in you is still growing.

People ask where the trilogy's name comes from, and the truest answer is a parable. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells of a sower who went out to sow — and what strikes me every time is how recklessly he scatters. Seed on the path, seed on the rocks, seed among thorns, seed on good soil. He doesn't audition the ground first. He throws grace everywhere and lets the soil decide what it will do with it.

That generosity became the spine of these books. In my story, the wind carries what the empire tried to bury — whispers, seeds, words, a boy's prayer, a flower's pollen — and drops them in the least promising places. A sealed garden. A hardened soldier. Soil no one would have bet on. Windsown means exactly that: nothing you were given landed on you by accident, even when the ground you were standing on felt like rock.

And the parable is honest about the thorns and the scorching sun — that's what I love about it. It never pretends every seed makes it. Some of my characters are the hard path. Some are choked by what the world told them to want. The question the whole trilogy asks is the question the parable asks: what kind of ground will you be, when the seed lands on you? Because it will land. The Sower is not stingy, and the wind knows the way.

In 1945, near a town in Egypt called Nag Hammadi, a farmer digging for fertilizer struck a sealed jar with thirteen ancient books inside — texts buried sixteen centuries earlier, most likely to keep them from being destroyed. Among them was the Apocryphon of John: the "secret book," a revelation the apostle receives when the risen Christ appears to him in grief and doubt. Other texts from those early centuries tell of Mary Magdalene, the disciple who stayed, quietly relaying teachings entrusted to her alone — and being doubted for it, because who would hand the deepest truth to someone the world counted least?

I'm a storyteller, not a theologian, and Sorrowroot is a fantasy, not a doctrine. But those images went into me like seeds and would not stop growing: truth buried in the ground to outlast an empire. A book that survives because someone loved it enough to hide it. A whisper handed to the overlooked. If you've read my synopsis, you can see the fingerprints everywhere — a Lost Book an empire buried generations ago, and a sheltered girl no one counted who carries the whisper anyway.

What moves me most isn't the secrecy — it's the patience. A jar can wait in the dark for sixteen hundred years, and the words inside lose nothing. My characters live in a world where remembering has been made a crime, and still the truth just... waits. Under the sand. Between pressed pages. In the heart, which — as Livia's father taught her — cannot be deceived. Empires spend everything making people forget. The ground remembers for free.

Every book has a word that arrives before the rest of the story does. For me, it was sorrowroot — a name I had before I knew what the flower looked like, what it meant, or who would be holding it.

I knew two things going in: it needed to be small and unremarkable enough that a girl who'd grown up surrounded by rarer, showier blooms would still call it her favorite. And it needed a use — "for wounds of the heart" — specific enough to mean something the first time it's said, and devastating the second.

The color came last. Pale blue, the kind that shows up in a clear sky or a robin's egg, with petals creased like the pages of a book left open too long. Once I had that image, the rest of the symbol built itself: a flower that looks delicate and is anything but, handed between two people who have every reason not to trust each other.

That's usually how it goes for me. The name shows up first. The meaning catches up once I've spent enough time sitting with it.

Sopatra needed to feel like paradise before it could feel like a cage. That ordering mattered more than almost anything else in the early drafts — if the reader doesn't fall in love with the place first, the moment it turns on its own people doesn't land the way it should.

So I started with what Livia would actually love about it: a library with a stained-glass dome, a garden that responds to her, animals that follow her into bed at night without being called. Soft things. Safe things. The kind of world a protective father builds when he's trying to keep his daughter from ever needing to be brave.

The wrongness had to live underneath all of that, not instead of it. Paradise as a design choice, not an accident — a place built to keep someone from remembering who she really is, dressed up in everything she'd ever want. I didn't want readers to distrust Sopatra. I wanted them to love it exactly as much as Livia does, right up until they understand why that love was never entirely hers to give.