Shadow and Bone (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #1)

by Leigh Bardugo

He had seen a woman, barefoot and unflinching in her doorway, face down a row of bayonets. He knew the look of a man defending his home with nothing but a rock in his hand.

I have to admit the prologues and epilogues of the trilogy are some of my favorite parts of the series, maybe because I love writing in the third person. Whenever I'm stuck in a story, I revert to that omniscient storyteller voice. I'll sit in my bathtub and just try to tell the story to myself. It's how I began every folk tale in The Language of Thorns. You may be surprised to learn that, in the outline of Shadow and Bone, Mal and Alina had parents. But when I got deeper into my research, I learned about some of the noblemen who had fought the French in the Napoleonic Wars. While plenty of their rich buddies stayed safe in St. Petersburg, these aristocrats journeyed to the front and fought side by side with their serfs, spending long nights in siege with them, learning Russian from them (since many Russian noblemen only spoke French at the time). After Napoleon was forced to retreat, these officers returned home and began to institute changes: some freed their serfs, others opened schools and hospitals to serve them, and others converted their dachas into homes for war widows and orphans. This was how Duke Keramzov and the orphanage at Keramzin came to be—and our heroes' parents got the axe. Fantasy writers love to kill off parents!