I am so excited to help reveal the cover of Amy Rose Capetta’s Echo After Echo, a theater-centric f/f YA love story coming this October from Candlewick Press! (And not just because the cover is gorgeous!) Before you see the beauty, here are a few words from author Amy Rose Capetta!
*****
This book came out of two things: being a lifelong theater kid*, and falling in love. I spent a solid fifteen years of my life going from show to show, green room to backstage to onstage, always living for the next cast list, or waiting for the incandescent moment when my work as a playwright was put on its feet. This story started with a beautiful theater, and a girl who loved it. A voice keep dropping words into my ear when I was supposed to be writing something else. The reason I kept coming back, even though I was afraid this story would never find a readership outside of my own head? I was going through a time of serious uncertainty in my own life, and I needed to write a queer love story to give myself hope. It felt like epic love was never allowed for two girls, unless it was tragic. And while it turns out a theater is a ridiculously convenient setting for a mystery, I think the real reason I returned to it for this novel is that I learned to use my voice in the theater, just like the main character, Zara. It’s where I trained to become someone who infuses stories with honesty and truth. And this truth I had—this glowing certainty that tragic endings could be changed and new stories written—drove me to write Echo After Echo. Zara and Eli’s love story was a life-changing experience for me. Now it’s the most important time: when the lights dim, and the audience gets to see what happens.
*A few highlights of my theater life: being in a Shakespeare troupe for four years, performing a monologue on roller blades in front of Kurt Vonnegut (true story), writing a play set entirely in a supermarket, and being a lowly intern at a workshop of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first musical!
And now, the cover!
Debuting on the New York stage, Zara is unprepared—or Eli, the girl who makes the world glow; for Leopold, the director who wants perfection; and for death in the theater.
Zara Evans has come to the Aurelia Theater, home to the visionary director Leopold Henneman, to play her dream role in Echo and Ariston, the Greek tragedy that taught her everything she knows about love. When the director asks Zara to promise that she will have no outside commitments, no distractions, it’s easy to say yes. But it’s hard not to be distracted when there’s a death at the theater—and then another—especially when Zara doesn’t know if they’re accidents, or murder, or a curse that always comes in threes. It’s hard not to be distracted when assistant lighting director Eli Vasquez, a girl made of tattoos and abrupt laughs and every form of light, looks at Zara. It’s hard not to fall in love. In heart-achingly beautiful prose, Amy Rose Capetta has spun a mystery and a love story into an impossible, inevitable whole—and cast lantern light on two girls, finding each other on a stage set for tragedy.
Amy Rose Capetta studied theater at the Stella Adler Studio as a teenager before spending four years in a Shakespeare troupe. Echo After Echo is her first book with Candlewick Press. Amy Rose Capetta lives in Michigan with her partner and their son. You can find her on Twitter at: @AmyRoseCapetta and on Facebook: /AmyRoseCapetta
