Sidney, NY – Josh VanBrakle, Sidney resident and author of the award-winning novel The Wings of Dragons, releases his second book on Wednesday, October 21st. The Hearts of Dragons: Book Two of the Dragoon Saga continues the author’s young adult fantasy series about friendship, betrayal, and explosive magic.
The story picks up six months after the end of Wings, as the main characters struggle to overcome the losses each suffered during Wings’ climactic battle. Iren Saitosan has been crippled by his inability to use magic, while his friend Minawë is still reeling from seeing her mother murdered before her eyes.
“It’s a deeper, more personal story than I wrote for Wings,” VanBrakle explains. “I feel like I grew a lot as an author between Wings and Hearts, and with that growth I was able to give more nuance to who my characters are and what makes them tick.”
Don’t expect those characters to always make the right choices either. According to VanBrakle, “What makes these books fun for me (and readers too, I hope) is that they aren’t like traditional fantasy where the good guys are perfect and the bad guys are pure evil. In the Dragoon Saga, characters are flawed. They make mistakes. Sometimes they do good deeds; other times they’re selfish and petty. They may be casting spells and battling monsters, but they are, at their core, human.”
When he isn’t writing fantasy, VanBrakle works as a forester in Walton. He lets his background in forestry fuel the settings in his books.
“The mantra in writing is ‘write what you know,’” he says, “so I write about forests.”
One scene in Hearts stands out in particular to VanBrakle as it depicts a forest fire.
“A few years back I walked through the aftermath of a forest fire and felt the burned earth crunch under my boots. It’s eerie. I couldn’t help but draw on that experience in my writing.”
VanBrakle is branching beyond fantasy for his next works. In addition to the last book in the Dragoon Saga, scheduled to come out in 2016, he’s working with publisher Countryman Press on a forestry non-fiction book for landowners. Tentatively titled Your Woodland, the book also has a planned 2016 release.
You can follow Josh's progress, learn more about the Dragoon Saga, and find links to purchase Josh's books at www.joshvanbrakle.com.
