Chocolates, First Loves and Book Crushes: Brittany Cavallaro (Interview)

Chocolates, First Loves and Book Crushes is a blog event featuring debut authors answering questions that I have sent them as they talk  about their Valentine's day routines, love, book crushes and more. For a list of all the participating authors, check it out here.

Brittany Cavallaro is a poet, fiction writer, and old school Sherlockian. She is the author of the poetry collection Girl-King (University of Akron) and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She earned her BA in literature from Middlebury College and her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, she's a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches creative writing, detective fiction, and lots of other things. She lives in Wisconsin with her husband, cat, and collection of deerstalker caps.

FIND BRITTANY: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Tumblr

1.    Have you always seen Valentine’s as an important event? What do you usually do on Valentine’s Day?

• Valentine’s Day was always a bit of a bummer for me when I was a teenager—I went to boarding school, and even when I had a boyfriend on that day, it was difficult to do anything special that didn’t still involve cafeteria food. Now, my husband and I try to go out to dinner someplace we haven’t been before. It’s nice and low-key!

2. What is your fondest memory about Valentine’s Day? Can you go into details about it?

• This is funny, because I love romantic things in theory, but I’m a bit awful at coming up with interesting romantic surprises myself, so I’m almost always on the receiving end. I do remember that having roses delivered to my college dorm room was surreal. I didn’t have a vase, so I had to put them in my water bottle!

3. What has always been your idea of the perfect date?

• When I was younger, I loved late nights walking around a city, hand-in-hand, maybe getting dessert someplace or taking in the view over a bridge. I grew up in a very suburban part of the country, so that was always a dream!

4. Can you tell us about your first love? What was he/she like? 

• I had lots and lots of crushes, honestly. I was a crushing machine, and later, a bit of a dating machine. My high school relationships were all fairly short, intense, and involved giant stacks of terribly written poetry (on both sides). I’ll save them all the embarrassment by not calling them out here!

5. Any book crushes/boyfriends?

• Not ashamed to admit that I am incredibly swoony over Beau from Emily Henry’s THE LOVE THAT SPLIT THE WORLD. The southern accent! (I married a boy from Arkansas. It’s a soft spot for me.) And like everyone in the YA world, I have a vested interest in Gansey in THE RAVEN CYCLE getting the girl without, y’know…dying.

6. Are the characters in your upcoming novel big romantics or total party poopers?

• Jamie Watson’s what I’d call a tempered romantic. Or a realistic one. I think if he were to give himself a some free rein, he’d be right outside the girl’s window with a boombox (or a set of Bluetooth speakers) turned up to eleven. But I also think he’s determined not to get hurt. As for Charlotte Holmes, she’s dealing with some history that makes romance problematic. And it’s not necessarily clear it’s in her nature to begin with—whether because of self-preservation or disinterest, it’s not entirely clear. (At least not to Jamie.)

7. If you can go out on a date with a character in your book, who would it be and why?

• Honestly? Probably Lena, Charlotte’s roommate. She’s spontaneous, effervescent, and a bit unhinged. The kind of person you’d end up breaking into a candy store with at midnight.

Title: A Study in Charlotte                              

Author: Brittany Cavallaro

Publication: March 1st 2016, Katherine Tegen Books

Pre-order it on: Amazon | Barnes and Noble | iBooks | The Book Depository | Kobo | National Book Store / Fully Booked (PH)

The last thing sixteen-year-old Jamie Watson–writer and great-great-grandson of the John Watson–wants is a rugby scholarship to Sherringford, a Connecticut prep school just an hour away from his estranged father. But that’s not the only complication: Sherringford is also home to Charlotte Holmes, the famous detective’s enigmatic, fiercely independent great-great-granddaughter, who’s inherited not just his genius but also his vices, volatile temperament, and expertly hidden vulnerability. Charlotte has been the object of his fascination for as long as he can remember–but from the moment they meet, there’s a tense energy between them, and they seem more destined to be rivals than anything else.

Then a Sherringford student dies under suspicious circumstances ripped straight from the most terrifying of the Holmes stories, and Jamie and Charlotte become the prime suspects. Convinced they’re being framed, they must race against the police to conduct their own investigation. As danger mounts, it becomes clear that nowhere is safe and the only people they can trust are each other.

Equal parts tender, thrilling, and hilarious, A Study in Charlotte is the first in a trilogy brimming with wit and edge-of-the-seat suspense.

Thank you so much to the lovely Brittany and her adorable answers to the interview!!! I am sooooo in love with Sherlock novels, the movies and TV shows and to see a novel spin-off of sorts, I'm just so excited! Do leave comments below about what you thought of the interview and what you're looking forward to the book. Thanks! Tomorrow, we'll have Ami Allen-Vath, author of Liars and Losers Like Us! Do look forward to it :)