Inspiring Reality Through Fiction, a guest post by THIEVES’ GAMBIT author Kayvion Lewis

“Psst. Hey kid, are you looking for an adventure?”

So said the children’s librarian at my childhood local library branch in Shreveport, LA. She’d heard me babbling to my brother about the worldwide adventure I wanted to go on, and how I was totally going to be Indiana Jones when I grew up. The librarian then whipped open her standard issue Shreve Memorial Library trench coat, displaying rows of Choose Your Own Adventure books and 39 Clues volumes–just what I was looking for. 

Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly how it happened. (But if there was a chance that tactic worked, you can bet your books I would have commandeered the ol’ eavesdropping and trench coat technique during my tenure as a youth librarian.)

No one really questions how reality inspires fiction. Authors’ personal experiences reflect themselves in their main character’s journeys. Real life events are retold via allegories. It’s the basis of so many English term papers. This was something that I knew even before I became an author, or a librarian and was the bane of my own existence as a high school AP English student. Be more original, a particularly irritable sixteen-year-old version of Kayvion thought. Aren’t authors supposed to be sooo creative? Why don’t they come up with something on their own? (Then I wouldn’t have had to write yet another essay breaking down Orwell’s allegories. Or god forbid, blubber my way through a socratic seminar. *Shudders*)

So many readers and writers and teachers spend time analyzing and discussing the effect reality has on fiction, but as I enter the author-reader relationship at a different angle, and look back on my librarian days, I find myself much more fascinated by the reverse. How does fiction inspire reality, especially in young readers?

My opening anecdote of the librarian introducing me to the adventure books as a little girl wasn’t quite accurate. While the trench coat part was one-hundred percent real and not at all made up by me for the sake of having an interesting opening, that interaction was wrong for one reason. I didn’t know that I wanted to be an adventurer when I was that young. I didn’t know that until after I read those stories.

The books inspired me. They reshaped my future.

How was I to know that it was my life’s ambition to see the world, solve mysteries, and make friends with people from different continents–or at least, to try to do these things–if I hadn’t read about someone else doing it first? How was I to know what I wanted to do with my life, if I hadn’t read about the Cahills doing it first?

With all the focus we put on the impact books have on young readers’ minds and personhood–building empathy, allowing them to be comfortable with sexuality and relationships, developing critical thinking–it’s natural that any bookish person who works with young readers would have thought about the effect stories have on forming the type of people young readers might become, but what about influencing the tangible lives they could go on to live? Because, as fanciful as it is, there is a brand of young reader–and even older reader–who’ll read something and decide “I wanna do that”. It’s an interesting thought to keep in mind when handing a book off to a new reader, and might even be a good hack for giving recommendations.

There are readers who will see that sweep-you-off-your-feet romance and go looking for their own meet cute. Readers who’ll lose themselves in a supernatural thriller and decide to do some ghost hunting of their own at their (hopefully haunted) local cemetery. Readers–at least one of whom is named Kayvion Lewis–who get lost in a round-the-world adventure and later find themself on a plane headed towards a country where they speak a language you don’t even know. 

Is it childish? Sure. Is it a little fantastical? Absolutely. But it’s real. And what’s the point of being alive if we can’t be a little fantastical every now and then? What’s the point of reading, of stories, if we don’t let them inspire us every now and then? Is it so bad to try and live your favorite story?

Maybe the questions librarians and books sellers can start asking, just every now and then, doesn’t have to be “what do you want to read?” but instead, “what do you want to be?” That might be a more accurate way to help the next young reader find not just their next literary love, but their future.

THIEVES’ GAMBIT by Kayvion Lewis

Nancy Paulsen Books| On sale 9/26/2023 | ISBN: 9780593625361 | Ages 12+ | $19.99

ABOUT THE BOOK:

At only seventeen years old, Ross Quest is already a master thief, especially adept at escape plans. Until her plan to run away from her legendary family of thieves takes an unexpected turn, leaving her mother’s life hanging in the balance. In a desperate bid, she enters the Thieves’ Gambit, a series of dangerous, international heists where killing the competition isn’t exactly off limits, but the grand prize is a wish for anything in the world—a wish that could save her mom. When she learns two of her competitors include her childhood nemesis and a handsome, smooth-talking guy who might also want to steal her heart, winning the Gambit becomes trickier than she imagined. Ross tries her best to stick to the family creed: trust no one whose last name isn’t Quest. But with the stakes this high, Ross will have to decide who to con and who to trust before time runs out. After all, only one of them can win.

“A propulsive, high-octane thriller that kept me guessing until the very end. Full of breathtaking heists, complex relationships, high-stakes tension, and characters I would follow anywhere, Thieves’ Gambit gripped me from the first page, and never let go. You won’t want to stop reading.”

–Alex Aster, #1 New York Times Best Selling author of Lightlark

“Thieves’ Gambit is a masterpiece! I love everything about this book from the twists and turns to the international settings and the characters. Kayvion Lewis has created a fast-paced and dramatic story that had me addicted from beginning to end.”—Natasha Bowen, New York Times bestselling author of Skin of the Sea

“In a manner true to the genre, the pacing is fast, and readers will experience the best kind of whiplash as the story moves from one heist to the next. The characters are also fully realized, and it’s impossible not to root for Ross as she tries to figure out who she’s meant to be. A fast-paced roller coaster of a read.” – Kirkus Reviews

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kayvion Lewis is a young adult author of all things escapist and high-octane. A former youth services librarian, she’s been working with young readers and kidlit since she was sixteen. When she’s not writing, she’s breaking out of escape rooms, jumping out of airplanes, and occasionally running away to mountain retreats to study kung fu. Though she’s originally from Louisiana, and often visits her family in The Bahamas, these days you can find her in New York—at least until she takes off on her next adventure.

Filed under: new books, Teen Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Young Adult Literature