Maggie Kirton writes of dragons, epic adventures and worlds filled with fantasy, but she never imagined her book would be nominated for a Canadian Book Club Award.
When the Callander author received the email saying she had been nominated, it was one of those moments “where your jaw hits the floor, and you pinch yourself to make sure it’s real. It’s very much an honour because it’s a Book Club Award, so it’s from the people enjoying the book in book clubs throughout the country.”
Her book, The Boy Will Fight, is the first of the four book Sagaman Kessler series. The Boy Will Fight is nominated for best fantasy novel. You can vote for the novel by registering with the Canadian Book Club Awards and becoming “a verified reader.” It’s free to sign up and allows your vote to count.
The eBook edition of Sagaman Kessler – The Boy Will Fight is available to download for free from Amazon.
“It’s a character driven storyline,” Kirton emphasized. “These characters live in a world where dragons fly around, and people come back from the dead, and shape shifting occurs. But the characters are the focus, and the main character, Kessler, is a very emotionally flawed character, and he grows through the series, throughout all four books.”
Indeed, the books deal with loss, “the atrocities of war,” and “all of it is very human, and relatable to the world today,” the author noted.
Kirton became known on the literary front after her first book, a memoir of her childhood, resonated with readers. My Firefly “was a best seller for four years,” on the Amazon charts she said, but she still wanted to complete what she refers to as her “big red book.”
See, when Kirton was a little girl, she “had a big red book of Grimm’s fairy tales.” She became enthralled with the book, even though at the tender age of three she couldn’t read. Still, the book entranced her, the words – although indecipherable – stood out, and she began noticing patterns, the same letters would appear through the text, and the building blocks of the written word captivated her young imagination.
“That language, the written word was so powerful to me at that age that I would go to bed with that book underneath my pillow, my hand between the pages, hoping the words would come to me in my sleep.”
Those memories lasted a lifetime, and “I always wanted to write my big red book.”
After completing her four-book Sagaman Kessler series – all with red covers – Kirton has made that dream materialize and those words have come to life for readers across the land.
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
