Torment, Passion, and Lauren Kate

I was lucky enough to have squeezed in dinner with Lauren Kate on Friday night, despite the busy schedule for her National Book Store Passion tour. The Manila event kicked off yesterday at Glorietta 5, and Lauren is having another one today at Ayala Center Cebu.

I had a great interview with Lauren last year, and thought it would be lovely to catch up with her after a whirlwind six months (she’s been on tour, mostly). But traffic was horrible last night (I stressed all the way to the interview) and I could see Lauren had a full weekend ahead of her (and a lot of books to sign!), so I mainly ran through the questions that had been plaguing me as I was reading Torment and Passion, which I finished overnight in time for meeting Lauren!

I read Fallen last year and felt I had not read enough of the series to form a fair opinion of it. After reading Torment and Passion, I  think I was right to reserve my opinion.

Torment

In Torment, Lucinda “Luce” Price has to transfer to a new school “to keep her safe,” as Daniel puts it, after the catastrophe at Sword and Cross. Luce goes to Shoreline, a school in California, and despite her efforts to distance herself from her temporary surroundings, Shoreline’s charm is too great to resist, and Luce finds herself making new friends.

Luce’s new friends are Nephilim, students with angel blood, who are specially trained at Shoreline in angelology. She bonds with her roommate Shelby, a friendly guy named Miles, and other Nephilim from Shoreline.

“The reference to the Nephilim was taken originally from the Bible,” Lauren tells me. “But in the Bible, they’re giants and they’re evil, and mine are not evil. They have the potential to be both evil or giants, but most of them pose in the same way that the angels pose, as normal high school teenagers. They’re learning about their powers in Torment and are beginning to grasp what they’re capable of.

“I knew she had to be separated from the angels, and I wanted to give her good friends that she could trust. She doesn’t really have that in Fallen; she has Penn, but most of the other characters, she doesn’t know the boundary of their relationship — she doesn’t really know if she can trust them, ” Lauren says. “I wanted to give her stability, so Miles and Shelby came in.”

I like how Luce gains a lot more spunk in Torment, and how, somehow, she has some sense of normalcy at Shoreline — hanging out with friends and actually enjoying it. Although I wasn’t a big fan of the Miles-Luce ship that the book set sail — the abundance of boys in love with the heroine is one of my main gripes about teen paranormal romances, but Lauren explains it quite well.

“Also a surprise — it kind of developed organically, and I had to pull away from it. Obviously, I never meant for her to be with Miles, but I think it’s a very natural thing to happen when you have a very good friend who’s a great guy, and you’re struggling with a relationship, and it leads you to kind of displace that emotion onto someone else.”

Luce also learns more about the shadows that follow her around — they’re called Announcers. The Nephilim’s teachers Steven and Francesca show the class how they can be used as windows into the past. Luce is very curious about them because she think the Announcers can tell her more about her relationship with Daniel in her past lives.

Lauren notes that the Announcers were a stroke of inspiration. “It’s a pure invention of mine. In Fallen, shadows were something she could see, something she was afraid of, and something only she could grasp. Luce had no clue what they were, I had no clue what they were, and in Torment I wanted to empower her, so I gave her mastery of the Announcers. I let her play with them, see what they could do, and stop ,fearing them.

I was just sitting there one day, writing, and I wrote that  she opens up this portal that allowed her to look into her past. It was a surprise to write that, but it felt it significant, especially to Passion, where they become portals that she can travel through.”

I asked Lauren what the Announcers are, exactly, and she says, “I think they’re extensions of the soul. And as each person’s soul is unique, Announcers are perceived in different ways by different people. “

Meanwhile, Daniel draws an 18-day truce with Cam as they battle with the Outcasts — fallen angels rejected by both Heaven and Hell — who are in pursuit of Luce.

Torment supplies some of the information I was looking for in the first book, and although the pace still isn’t as fast as I would like it to go, the showdown at the end of the novel was one of the first scenes in the series that I truly enjoyed.

Passion

After the tumultous turn of events at the end of Torment, Luce realizes she has had enough. She badly wants to understand all that is happening, and believes that the answers lie in her past, so she jumps into an Announcer, and uses it as a portal to her past lives.

Worried that Luce could do something in a past life that would cause disturbances in her future lives, Daniel chases after her, followed by the angels, and even Shelby and Miles.

The book takes us to different lifetimes of Luce and Daniel’s doomed relationship: Luschka and Daniil at the brink of the Nazi invasion of Russia; Lucia and Daniel in Milan in World War I; Lucinda and Daniel in the Helston, England in the 50s; unnamed past selves in Tibet; Princess Lys and Daniel in Versailles in the Renaissance; Lucinda and Daniel in Elizabethan London; Ix Cuat and Daniel in the Mayan period of Mesoamerica; Lu Xin and De in ancient China; and Layla and Don in ancient Egypt.

Luce interacts with some of her past selves and even the past Daniels, up to the point where her past self is dying. Daniel, on the other hand, arrives late at the scene, always missing Luce.

“In a narrative sense; this works better, that he can’t catch her,” Lauren notes. “But also because Daniel’s Announcers are controlling it — He knows that it’s better to leave Luce alone for a while, he also knows that there are issues he’s got to resolve before he could catch her.”

Lauren discusses the process she went through in writing Passion, and she reveals, surprise, surprise, literary influences for each of Luce’s past lives.

“Each one was kind of its own novella, with its own beginning, middle and end. It was a very different writing process, having to change names, scenes, centuries, language every chapter. The normal kind of flow you would go through for the first draft was not there. It was a lot more episodic. It was harder to write, honestly, but I’m most proud of this book.

I did a lot of historical research, but a big part of it was reading fiction; reading novels that are set in the times and places she is traveling to. When she was in Milan, I read Farewell to Arms. When she was in Moscow, that was Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. When she was in Helston, England, that’s The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, and North and South by Gaskell.”

By chance, I hit the nail on the head when I remarked that I thought the Egypt part reminded me of Aida, especially the tomb scene in the end — I happened to watched Aida last Saturday!

In a sense there was some time travel involved in Passion, and I wanted to know if she found it difficult, because I get dizzy when I read time travel and I imagine it would be a bigger headache to write.

“I had to do it in layers,” Lauren reveals. “Like the first draft I didn’t worry too much about the implications of Luce revisiting, and in the second drafts, I started thinking about what it would mean, her dropping in on this leg and what would change because of it in the future. Everything that has happened in the past has already happened — that was the time travel motto I’d been using. It’s interesting to have both Daniel and Luce narrating what was happening, because Luce is completely oblivious to what was happening, while Daniel was worried about how it was affecting anything. Luce gets warnings from people, like Roland, but it’s definitely not her priority… We see how Daniel’s choices differ from Luce’s because of that.”

I thought Passion was very well-executed, from each featured past up to the overall arc of the story. I was surprised by how much I liked this book. When Lauren was talking about Passion last year, I had a feeling it would be the defining book of this series, and I was not disappointed in that respect.

The Passion tour, Rapture, the Fallen movie, and life after the Fallen series

Of course, I had to ask about the mention of National Book Store in the acknowledgements in Passion, and Lauren remarks, “I enjoyed my last visit to the Philippines. Everyone’s helpful and friendly, and Filipino fans are especially sweet and effusive. National Book Store said I signed books for like 3 hours at the last event — it didn’t feel like that to me. It was fun talking to them.”

Lauren’s been on her Passion tour in the US, Singapore, Malaysia, now in the Philippines, and the last stop in Australia. “It’s the longest I’ve been on a tour,” she notes.

(Earlier, I told her she should eat lechon (roast pig) in Cebu, and she laughed. “That’s what everyone’s been telling me, but I don’t eat meat.” Like Luce, I say. “Yup, that’s one of the things we have in common. But I think, yeah, I’ll try a lot of the fruit down there.”)

Regarding the Fallen movie, Lauren updated me with the latest developments. “I talked to the producers right before I left for this trip, and they are just finishing the script — it’s taken them a lot of time to write, but I think they’re pleased with where the scripts are now. And they’re casting soon.” When asked if any of her casting picks are in the lineup, she rejoins with, “I keep getting asked on who I want to play the characters in the movie, but I’d really prefer to stay out of it.”

We talked a bit about Rapture, too.

“It will be released in spring of next year,”Lauren states (that’s March-April-May here in the Philippines). “Most excitingly, we get to see Daniel and Luce in the present tense, in a good relationship throughout the book — that’s new. We see all the characters return, and there’s more of a team feeling to the efforts they are going through in this book. There’s a big threat to all of the angels and all of the demons and they band together to prevent it from happening.”

The fans will surely be sad when the Fallen series comes to an end with Rapture, but Lauren reveals she has another series up her sleeve. “I’m thinking of a new series, and I’m talking to my editor about it. Another high stakes romance trilogy.”

 ***

Torment, trade paperback, 3.5/5 stars
Passion, trade paperback, 4/5 stars

books #86-87 for 2011