Wyatt & Roderick Townley

The Red Thread

Wyatt Townley is a fourth-generation Kansan. Her books of poetry include The Breathing Field, runner-up for the William Rockhill Nelson Prize, Perfectly Normal, a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and her third collection, The Afterlives of Trees.

Wyatt is also a yoga instructor and the founder of Yoganetics®, a yoga system that has spread to ten countries and is home-based in Overland Park. HarperCollins recently published her book on the method, Yoganetics: Be Fit, Healthy, and Relaxed One Breath at a Time. (also available on CD).

Roderick loves to research. For The Constellation of Sylvie (the 3rd book in the Sylvie Cycle) he visited NASA in Houston and interviewed an astronaut who had set foot on the moon. For another novel, he trekked to a castle in England and peered into sewers in New Hampshire. It may seem odd, but even in a fantasy book every fact has to be right.

Roderick has been a journalist in New York, working on the staff of several magazines. He has done a lot, in many places-burrowed into coal mines, visited war zones, interviewed movie stars, opera singers, a former Secretary of Defense, a president of El Salvador. He even ghost-wrote an article for an orangutan. (?!?)

Roderick's newest book is The Red Thread (#908944 - $17.95), "a teen-ager's quest for a dark truth leads her backward in time and across an ocean to the origin of a psychic wound" ~ "How do you avenge-or forgive-your own murder four hundred years after it happened?"

One of our avid Kansas readers, Tina from Topeka, had this to say about Roderick’s The Great Good Thing (the 1st book in the Sylvie Cycle) ~ I read "The Great Good Thing" in one sitting. What an extraordinary book! I'd developed the jaded opinion that there weren't really any new stories out there--everything was just a variation on a theme. "The Great Good Thing" completely blew that theory. Roderick Townley must have an amazing mind to have been able to conceive such a unique idea, then to carry it through the whole story in a way that made sense--wow! Those types of off-the-wall ideas tend to get all tangled up once you try to actually apply them to a story--they're interesting on the surface, but they won't hold to any kind of internal logic, so the story falls apart. But Princess Sylvie's story made complete sense, start to finish...it also had me grinning in several places, thinking things like, "So THAT'S why I'll re-read a book and swear that I remember something from the previous reading that isn't there now--the characters were just ad-libbing a little the first time around."

Thank you ten thousand times for recommending it. Honestly, it's a book I probably wouldn't have read on my own, because I'm not a huge fan of most "fantasy" stories--if you hadn't kept telling me how great it was, I never would have picked it up, and I would have missed one of the best stories I've ever read!

All the writings of the Townleys are available from Book Kansas!