In 2019 our goal is to work with as many debut authors as possible and spread the word about their debut novels. Follow us this year as we pick the mind of the 2019 debuts and chat with them. Also stay tuned for news of giveaways, twitter chats and more!
THE PIONEER ended up on my radar when HarperTeen released their winter 2019 book covers and it immediately caught my eye. Aliens. Space. Terraforming. Sign me up. This book screamed Amber. Bridget was super kind to send me a copy in the mail to read and base some questions off of! THE PIONEER is a not to be missed alien book of this year. Want to hear more of my ramblings on how much I loved THE PIONEER?! Check out my review here!
About Bridget!
Interview!
The Book Bratz: How does it feel that THE PIONEER is debuting this year?
Bridget: I'm dying to have people to nerd out about the world and the characters with. It's like I've binged a really cool show none of my friends know about yet - I really want to geek out about it and I need company!
Bridget: It all started with the Joanna, the main character, and her family. They're struggling with grief and loss in a way that usually only happens in contemporary books. I wanted to create an exciting genre story with really emotional character concerns at its center.
The Book Bratz: What was your inspiration for choosing planet names and made made you choose Tau Ceti e?
Bridget: Tau Ceti is a real star and Tau Ceti e is a real place, though obviously we don't know anything about it. It's a G-type main sequence star, just like our sun, and thanks to the Kepler mission we know it has five planets. Tau Ceti e is the most likely of them to be Earth like, which is why I chose it. Tau Ceti is "only" twelve lightyears away, so if we ever figure out how to break the lightspeed barrier and go to other stars, it's a likely destination for human exploration.
Bridget: Gah! So many opportunities for SPOILERS here. But what I can tell you is that I was very lucky in this, because my husband is a roboticist and a lot of our friends are scientists including one who is an evolutionary biologist. She helped me come up with super cool scientific classifications for my aliens and figuring out what they might be like.
The Book Bratz: Which character was your favorite to write about and why?
Bridget: Ohhhh this is a hard one. It varied as I wrote the book, I think, because as the story evolved I found new dimensions to each of them. But at the end of the day this book is Joanna's story and she is the closest to my heart. She surprised me from the first sentence to the last, and I enjoyed every second of it. But I feel like answering this with my MC is cheating, so I'd say the next favorite is Chris. He goes through so much, and even I didn't foresee who he was going to turn out to be, by the end of the book.
The Book Bratz: Each species in THE PIONEER has it's own unique way of communicating. Was it challenging to figure out which alien species was going to communicate which way or did you know from the start?
Bridget: This was a huge challenge, and it changed a TON over the course of writing the book. At some point, the phytoraptors could speak but they expressed themselves solely in metaphor and fragments of human poetry they'd memorized from stolen human computers. I really wanted both species to feel very different from humans and specific, while still being able to communicate enough to be real characters in their own right.
The Book Bratz: Can you share a secret from THE PIONEER that not many people know about yet?
Bridget: Oooo I have some good ones, but I can't share any of them yet. Let's just say, this won't be the last you see of Tau Ceti e and Joanna Watson!
About The Pioneer!
Title: The Pioneer (The Pioneer #1)
Author: Bridget Tyler
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: HarperTeen
Publication Date: March 5th 2019
Buy The Pioneer: Amazon / B&N / Indie Bound / Book Depository
Summary: When Jo steps onto Tau Ceti E, it should be the happiest moment of her life. After all, she’s been training for as long as she can remember to be a cadet pilot in the International Space Agency. She’s dreamed of the day she and her family would leave Earth forever and begin life as pioneers on a new planet. But now she can’t stop thinking of everything that has gone wrong on their mission: the terrible accident that nearly destroyed their craft, that set their voyage back years, that killed her brother, that left her unable to fly… As Jo struggles to live with her grief and figure out who she’s going to be now, she falls in love with her new world. It isn’t hard. Jo’s team is camped out by a pristine, tumbling river at the base of a mountain range that looks like huge prisms buried in the prairie. The soring crystal peaks transform every sunset into rainbows full of colors human eyes have never seen before. And that’s just the beginning. Tau offers Jo and her family a lifetime of beauty and adventure. Jo throws herself into helping her team, lead by her commander mother, establish their community on this amazing new world. But just when she starts to feel like her old self again, she uncovers a devastating secret her mother has been keeping from her people. A secret that could destroy her family’s pioneering dreams…if they survive that long. With the fate of the pioneers in her hands, Jo must decide how far she’s willing to go to expose the truth — before the truth destroys them all.
Thank you so much Bridget for stopping by and answering our burning questions! We loved THE PIONEER and can't wait for everyone else to dive into this crazy unique world that Bridget created!
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