Emily Hourican: ‘Murder at the Ivy Hotel’

Welcome to episode 35, season 3, of the Teacher Book Club Podcast!

This is a recording of one of our most recent Instagram live special author chats, with author Emily Hourican!

This episode is in partnership with Scholastic AD | PR

Tara had the pleasure of speaking to renowned Irish author Emily Hourican about her new (and first) middle grade children’s book, ’Murder at the Ivy Hotel.’ Tara asked her our Teacher Book Club questions plus a few extras! It was great hearing all about the ideas behind the story and characters. We hope you love listening to it as much as we loved recording it!

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Disclaimer: This is recorded from an Instagram live, so we apologise if some of the sound is not the best quality.

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Music: Twinkle
Musician: EnjoyMusic
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello, and welcome back to the Teacher Book Club podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you for downloading. And thank you so much for being a part of Teacher Book Club and listening back to our amazing author chats that we are very lucky to have the opportunity to have. We'd love sharing them with you. So thank you if you are listening now to our podcast version. So I'm really excited to share with you one of our recent author lives. This was with author Emily Harricane. I really enjoyed speaking to her. It was lovely getting to chat to her all about her first children's novel. She is a renowned Irish author, having written lots of adult books, but this is her first middle grade, which is super exciting. I really enjoyed her writing and I devoured this book. I love a murder mystery personally, so reading murder at the Ivy Hotel was the perfect read for me. I'm gonna read you the blurb just to give you a little bit of an idea of what the book is all about. Twelve-year-old Meredith and 10-year-old Macy feel like the luckiest girls around. The Ivy Hotel in Dublin is old, beautiful, and beloved with a tight-knit fet staff that feel like family, and they get to call it home. Meredith and Macy's mum is the general manager, and their modest apartment is tucked away in a corner, but it has lots of perks. The girls make friends with longtime residents like Colin, the quiet little boy who plays piano, and Agatha, the eccentric older lady who stays in a plush suite with her dog Milo. The girls love spying on fancy events, sneaky treats from the restaurant, and knowing all the secret stairs and corridors that guests never see, where the staff move around invisibly, making sure everything runs like clockwork. This is going to come in handy because within the cosy walls of the Ivy Hotel there is also danger, intrigue, and threat. Just as the hotel's new owners arrive, ready to sniff out any excuse to make cuts and fire staff, the girls are faced with the biggest task yet: a murder to solve. And you'll have to read it to find out what happens. But I hope you enjoy listening back to my chat with the lovely Emily. We did have some technical difficulties with good old Instagram live initially at the start, um, but I have managed to skip past them for you on the podcast here, so you will hear us when we eventually manage to get on together and manage to get to talk to one another. So enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Oh my god, I'm so sorry. But I know it was my fault. I just it was. But I don't know, I don't know how that was your fault. It wouldn't be. It's instable. I thought either, but I am 100% certain that in some capacity it was my fault. I am so sorry. It is so nice to talk to you. I'm so glad that we managed to actually get this far.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

I know, I'm so excited. Please don't worry, we're here now. That's the main thing. That's all we're worried about.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

All right.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

It's so lovely to see you, Evelyn. So we are going to be talking all about your wonderful new book, Murder at the Ivy Hotel. I absolutely loved it. I love a murder mystery. So I always get very excited when a children's book is a murder mystery because I love an adult murder mystery, but I think it's great when then I can share that with children as well, and they get that excitement and they get to be detectives themselves when they read. That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, would you like to tell us maybe how the idea came about and maybe a little summary of the story as well?

SPEAKER_01 4:11

So the idea came, so like you, I absolutely love thrillers, I love murder mysteries, I love who done it. Um, I've been reading them since I was a child. I mean, certainly when I hit the age to start reading Agatha Christie, I just devoured them. And in a way, I still agree with that, and that is kind of one of the things behind the writing of the book. So having read all of these Agatha Christie's, as I say, and then you know, all sorts of other murder mysteries, I then as a parent was watching my daughter hit that age, I think there's an age at around kind of nine or ten, which for readers. So if you have a kid who really loves reading, which is an amazing thing, they kind of reach the stage where they're ready and they want to read books that are more grown up, but then at the same time, they're still only nine or ten or eleven, and they may be capable of reading much more grown-up things, but that doesn't mean to say that the themes are suitable for them. And I watching my daughter kind of in that pocket of reading stuff that I thought was kind of unsuitable for her in terms of themes that were too adult, but I could see that she was drawn to wanting something that made her turn the pages, that was gripping, that had kind of followed the clues, work out who did it. And I kind of went, Well, you know, I'm gonna see if I can write one. And so just for the sheer hell of it, I started writing this story, um, which is the story of two sisters. Will I kind of segue? Will I go into the kind of what it's about?

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Yeah, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Okay. So it's the story of two sisters, Meredith and Macy, who are aged 12 and 10, and they believe themselves to be the luckiest girls in the world, and I think they might be right. Yeah, they live in it's called the Ivy Hotel, and it's this really old, so it's a 200-year-old hotel in the middle of Dublin, and it's a really beautiful, really luxurious old hotel. And they live there, so it's kind of magical, but it's also real. They live there because, in very prosaic terms, their mother is the general manager, so managing the hotel, and as part of the job, they live in the hotel, and they live in quite a small apartment on the fourth floor of the hotel, but that's not the point. The point is that they get to go around all the rest of the hotel, and they have all of these amazing friends, like Bob Doorman, who opens and closes the doors, who handles baggage, there's Sandra who works on reception, there's their friend Jake, who works in the kitchens, and they just absolutely love living there, and then the hotel comes under threat. So the threat is a very immediate one in that it's being sold. The people who have found the family who've owned it forever are selling it, and the people they're selling it to are much more hard-nosed, they're all about maximizing. They want to change loads of things in the hotel so that it makes more money, but all the things they want to change are the things that the girls love best about it, and then so they're destabilized by that and they're wondering what's gonna happen, is there any way that they can prevent the hotel being sold? And then, out of the blue, a guest winds up dead. He checks in, he pays by cash, he calls himself Mr. Smith, he has no belongings with him, he literally just has the overcoat that he's wearing, he's shown up to his room, and the next morning he's dead. So this is where and he's murdered dead. He's not dead from natural causes. So this is kind of where the book kicks off, and uh it's the story of how, with all the friends who live in the hotel and around the hotel, how they solve the mystery of who he is, what's he doing in the hotel, and most importantly, who killed him and why.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Yes, absolutely. Yep, it is fantastic. I absolutely devoured it. Um, and I'm sure children will as well, because it's just fast paced, and you just don't know what's coming round the corner, and you want to know what's coming round the corner. So, yeah, I think children are gonna absolutely love it.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

I hope so. I mean, it's very to be at this stage is really exciting. Yeah. I mean he was too old for it by the time I'd finished writing it. She and her friends read it, and they were like very critical. And I incorporated a lot of what they said into later draw. Um, and they were then really nice about it, but they weren't the right age by the time they got it. So I'm so excited now that kids who are the eight of the children that I wrote it for are gonna get to read it and see what they think about it.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

Yeah, oh it's amazing. Am I right thinking this is your first children's book as well?

SPEAKER_01 9:10

It is my first children's book, yes.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Yes, it's very exciting.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Yeah, and writing for children, I've written several novels for adults.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:19

Been amazing and I loved it. But I think it's different writing for kids. I mean, in a way, I think it's more important because I think they don't give kids books that really engage their imagination, then they are not going to come to reading. It's just much harder for them to find their way there these days because the screen distractions are so many.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Lots of ways, but books are also amazing.

SPEAKER_02 9:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

And I really I think it's a real um, it's a real privilege to put something in front of children that you hope will be the thing that sparks their imagination and makes them go, Wow, books are great too.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Yeah, that is exactly what we want, absolutely. Right, so we are teach a book club, so we are a group of educators and we like to speak to authors and find out kind of all about their inner thoughts behind the stories that they write. So I've got some questions for you to delve a little bit deeper with your with your story, so then we can kind of pass these messages on to the children we teach when we share your book in our classrooms.

unknown 10:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

So, my first question is um who is your favourite character and why?

SPEAKER_01 10:34

So, I my the two sisters, Meredith and Macy, I both really I love both of them. But in the end, I think I slightly pick Meredith, who is the older of the two, has this incredibly quick mind. She's kind of super bright, she's very brave. Possibly in that dynamic, it would be easier for Meredith, who is a quieter person, to be slightly overlooked. Um she never would feel that. She's incredibly protective of her younger sister, and as you know, she doesn't have the kind of dazzle of that quick mind that Macy does, but she is an incredibly kind person, and I think kindness is one of my favorite parts. She's and often kindness gets slightly overlooked, you know. It's not as kind of maybe noisy and headline grabbing as other things, but kindness genuinely I find to be one of the most enduring and the most beguiling qualities that anyone can have. She's also really conscientious. Um, I mean, if I'm like either of them and I'm not really, I'm definitely much more like her than like Macy. Uh I think I I think I probably identify with her slightly more, and that makes me closer to her.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

Yeah, no, she's a wonderful character. Like you say, she's so protective over her younger sister as well, which is a really lovely quality. And I think for children reading it, that's something great for them to see. Um yeah, I think yeah, caring for your sibling and yeah, looking out for one another, working together as a team. I mean, they've they had to do that an awful lot. Um sorry, I missed that.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Trusting each other.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

Yeah, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

So it gets these kind of instinctive feelings that something is wrong or not right or off. Macy is not like that at all. Macy's mind is much more logical, she likes facts. It would be easy to dismiss each other, and they don't. Yeah, they kind uh they trust that whatever the other is saying, that there is some reason for it. Um, and that idea of working together, I mean, I think that that's great, and I think sibling dynamics can be tricky, you know. They can be. I mean, I have I have five siblings, that's a lot.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Well then, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

So I mean I know they can be, but also then when it works, there is no relationship that is your whole life, you know, that they that you press in and that they have your back, and I think that that's really amazing.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

Yeah, no, definitely, yeah, it's a lovely thing to have highlighted in the story. Um, I put that I actually loved Macy the most, um, so it's nice we've got both characters there. Um I've written down that I just think she's got such brilliant bold ideas, um, and I think she's quite she's just it's just that curiosity that she has. And I think because she's uh a little bit younger, um, she's a she's a bit more naive and curious and wanting, you know, wanting answers and wondering a little bit more, and I yeah, I just really like that quality to her. It was lovely.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Yeah, and I think she drives a lot of the action in the book.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

She does.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

She is assertive and inquisitive, in doesn't really accept things that people tell her, just be said it. She really wants to kind of check things out for herself and be assured that she believes the thing that she's been told. And that kind of dub action, you know, she needs to know, she needs to know, needing to know is also a really good quality.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah, I thought she was wonderful. Uh so my next question is what was your favourite part and why maybe your favourite part to have written?

SPEAKER_01 14:33

I liked, I mean, I love writing every single word of it. I really have never written a book that I loved writing so much.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

No, no, no.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

It's a bit of towards the end in which Macy confronts the person who they have identified as the murderer. Yes. And that was kind of tricky to write because again, you know, you're kind of wanting to keep in mind the age of the people who will be reading this, and you don't want this character who is ten to be entirely exposed in a really dangerous, threatening situation with somebody who we all know, believe has killed once. So trying to kind of create the balance of that, but then also the setup of it is that Macy knows she is 100% convinced that this person is a murderer. He has no idea that that in front of him is anything other than, you know, a silly little girl is what calls her. And um I love the idea. I mean, often I think that people can underestimate children. I think children are super small. They see things and notice things, they don't always say it, but they see and notice an awful lot. And I think that she has the information and he doesn't, and she's kind of playing him, and he has absolutely no idea. And uh so that balance between, you know, kind of danger and excitement and not making it too threatening, yeah, but genuinely kind of fraught and like a slightly dangerous situation, and then this idea that Macy's there with like all the information, um the cards in a sense, and I kind of I did, I really enjoyed writing that.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Yeah, that's brilliant. She had all the power, which is great. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think my favourite part was um when they kind of realised what was realised more about the tattoo. Um I think that was quite pivotal in the storyline in their own investigations, um, yeah, and led to lots more afterwards. I won't give too much away.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

I know! But no one I like that bit as well. That was yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Yeah, I just I think it was a great twist to have at that point in the story as well.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Uh so my next question is do you have a favourite quote from the book?

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Um, I kind of thought about that. And I came, I mean, there is there is one, I think by and large, Agatha, who is the kind of she's an American lady in her 70s, who's very grand and very rich, and she lives permanently in the penthouse at the hotel with her Milo, who is a miniature Schneiser. And Agatha, I love, she is the kind of adult who lets she believes in children. She believes just as smart and capable as adults are, and she is never telling them, Oh, don't do this, oh be careful, oh do you know you should tell an adult or you should put in the She really encourages them to follow their heart, follow their instinct, follow their nose, and do the things that they want to do, but she's still there as a kind of reassurance they can always go to her with So Agatha has a lot of the best lines, um, and one of them, I mean, look, there's loads of them, one of them speculating about some piece of information that they've discovered. She's wondering, does this mean that someone they have previously thought of is an enemy? Perhaps not. Uh maybe he's working with them. And Agatha's response to this is, you know, an enemy my enemy's enemy is many things, not necessarily a friend. Uminder. Um, and then she has another line when they're saying, you know, what will it mean for the hotel if um if you know this this mystery, this murder, if we don't solve it, nothing good, she said grimly. In fact, this is the worst sort of thing of all to happen. No one wants to stay at a hotel where strange deaths occur. And it's very it's kind of obvious, and yet at the same time, she puts it in a nutshell. This is exactly the problem. If they don't solve this strange death, people won't stay at the hotel. If people don't stay at the hotel, the new owners will fire their mother, they might close the hotel and change it all around terrible things will happen to them. Um, and of course, Agatha is the one to kind of really she is the voice of the adult world, but without the kind of judgment or you know, without the kind of um resist or restrictions that the adult world will normally place on children. So I like that about her.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Yeah, absolutely. I I adored Agatha, like you say, there's just the fact that she's rooting for the children, um, and she's she's like a grandparent figure, but that really fun grandparent that you know gives you sweets all the time, and yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Tells your parents when you've done anything bold, you know, who, as you say, has your back, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Definitely. Which makes me want to move on to the next question because it is who would you like to hear the story from if you could hear it from one of the characters? Because it's written in the third person, so if you could hear it from a first person perspective, I would like to hear it from Agatha's perspective personally. I just think she's got so many stories to tell, which I would love to hear.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

That's so true. I mean, she really does, and she doesn't really get to you know she does, but obviously she doesn't get to tell them because the action is all centered around the girls. That's really interesting. That in mind. Um I picked Macy because again, this like she's just so curious. Yeah. And that's that sharp mind and that slightly confrontational demeanor on the would be a good guide through the narrative, but I think you'd need to watch her because I think he jumps ahead. I think mine works quicker than mine does. So I think that she would be one of those narrators that you kind of needed to question sometimes. I think her assumptions are very rapid, and I think that she is pursuing so many lines of investigation, and anyone I think she'd be brilliant to narrate it, but I do think that you would need to sometimes kind of you know just take a step back and try re focus everything that you've heard from her your own way in order to where exactly you think you might be.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Yeah. Rein her in a little bit every now and again. No, I think that would be brilliant. Yeah, I totally agree. I hadn't even thought that she would she would just be chaos, really, wouldn't she? Her mind and how fast it works.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

And we just come at you. And it some of it would be relevant and some wouldn't, and she'd be filtering. The entire time, and you'd be left going, but I've got these pieces of information I don't know what to do with.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, would be great, absolutely. Um, so I've got a few extra questions to ask you. Do you have three uh children's book recommendations that you could share with us?

SPEAKER_01 22:17

Yes, so this um I really so two of them are kind of fantasy genre, right? So the first writer, so I have been obsessed with this writer from I don't know, the age of certainly about 10 onwards, and I'm still obsessed with it. Sorry, Diana Wynne Jones.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

Oh, I don't know her.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

So good. Of fantasy writers, yeah, she as far as I'm concerned, is by far the best I have ever read. Oh wow. She her books are just brilliant, her characterization is brilliant, her kind of grasp of really, really complicated physics theories, like you know, the multi-universe theory and space-time stuff, is so sharp, and her ability to translate that into just the most gripping stories that you have ever read is astonishing. So I books, I would take two in particular. She wrote a lot. So Charmed Life is one of them, and the magicians of Caprona. And I give these books, I mean, really, I am like worn out giving these books to kids. Every single child who I come across who likes reading, these are the books that I hand over to them. They're absolutely brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Yeah, and she does a she's she has she has a lot of books. Like once you get into that, is a rich theme, and they're very so they kind of there are books for slightly younger, slightly older readers. There are definitely books that are too complicated for 910, 11 year olds, but that were brilliant, 14, 15 year olds.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

So that's like that's a hard recommendation.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Oh, amazing. I like a new one. I don't have never heard of.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Oh good. So she died a couple of years ago. She wrote right through the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. Um English writer. But so, you know, if you if you get around to it, I really recommend her.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

And I was gonna recommend there's an Irish writer called Derek Landy. So again, it's fantasy. Yeah. So he is writing now. He had a new book. Um the series is called Skulljuggery Pleasant.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Yes, I know it, yes.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

Skulljuggery Pleasant is a skeleton detective. Yeah. Um, the main kind of human character in the book is a girl called Stephanie, and it's the stories. I think there's about 13 now, and they get darker in theme as Stephanie gets older. So she ages through the but in the first series, she is, as far as I remember, she's 12. Um, and certainly my daughter was reading that when she was uh maybe about the same age, so maybe kind of 11, and absolutely loves them. They're incredibly funny, like really funny.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Really?

SPEAKER_01 25:07

And they're just a mad dash through a kind of crazy alternate universe, who done it kind of, you know, sort of world-threatening conspiracy featuring other world creatures, but they're just brilliant. So I love them. Those are really like another hard recommendation. And then, I mean, God, I was trying to think, I just love so many books, and I I know it's so hard. What should I put as my last one? I may have put, I mean, the magic faraway tree are still like and the film's coming out. I am wildly excited, but also because I know terrible.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

Yeah, I know, and you have your own thought, yeah, how you've imagined it, and it's not gonna be that, is it?

SPEAKER_01 25:57

It's it's just gonna be awful. Oh boy. I know. I'm you know, I can't wait to see it.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

I mean, got to.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

And also I think the film will bring those books back.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Yeah, I hope so.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

It's who might never otherwise come across them. Yeah. And you know, I mean, if the film does nothing but that, then it's amazing that like gets those books read by these are younger readers, but these are amazing. Like these books are fabulous.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

They are, yeah. No, fantastic recommendations, thank you. And yeah, like I say, I love getting new ones, so that's brilliant. Thank you. Um, so my next question is do you have any writing tips for us teachers? Obviously, we teach children writing every day, um, but it's great to have tips from a an actual author.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Well, I mean, so I teach some creative writing to adults. Brilliant. Um some amount of it with my kids and their school classes, and I always think so. What I like myself and what seems to work well with them is you want the imagination to run wild, but I weirdly always feel that my imagination runs most wild when I have some kind of a frame for it. Yeah. So write a story. I'm like, well, that's your thought.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

There are like a hundred million things. So I like something that is kind of specific, but also really open-ended. So I like, for example, right, your story is going to either begin or include a moment when the doorbell rings. This I'm just at the top of my head. The doorbell, you go to the door and you open it, and standing on the doorstep is a person who you have never seen before in your life who says, Slightly out of breath, I came as quickly as I could. And then you're like, okay, who is that person? Why are they here? No, no, no, no. So that kind of prompt, I think, doesn't box them in. I think they can go anywhere with that.

SPEAKER_02 27:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

You know, you go to the shop and you put your hand in your pocket to take out the money that you put there to pay for the thing, thing that you bought, and there's no money in your pocket. Instead, there's a tiny silver figure of a horse. What, why, who, you know?

SPEAKER_00 28:13

Yeah, all these questions.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

I mean, and there's a gazillion of them. I mean, everybody, you know, you can think of like a thousand an hour. Um, but it just it kind of it's a spark that makes you think anything that makes you think, oh my god, I wonder what that is. Because I think you're really like, isn't that where imagination flourishes best when you're really curious about something and you're like, I need to know. And obviously, the only way to know is to make it up, because it's not but you've got to tell yourself that story. Um so I think that that is the thing, and then I mean, you know, the obvious stuff that you know so much better than I do, that you know, like everyone's story is amazing. Yeah, like this the contents of somebody's mind, particularly I think children's minds, put out into the world, they're they are amazing, you know. They're the insight into the way they see the world through what they tell you about it, is just so completely fascinating. Yeah. So I mean when I hear that you do lots of that with them, I think they're like it's just like they're so lucky and it's just amazing. It's such a great thing to do.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Yeah, it is. No, I totally agree. I mean, children's imaginations are wild in the most incredible way. So yeah, they always have so many ideas when it comes to writing their own stories. But you're right, if actually having a stimulus, something, whether it like you say, we start them off with something for their story, or sometimes it's giving them a picture. Um that's always great as well. And they have to, you know, what what does that mean to them? What's going to happen? Where is this place? Yeah, it's them thinking about the questions and how they're going to answer them.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Certainly. I mean, anything, any events I've ever done in schools, and I've done very few, but I've done a couple, they are just so funny, you know, any questions and the hand guns up, and the question, it's not a question, it's like, I've got an idea, I've got a brilliant idea for a book. And you're going, you do. Like, I totally 100% believe that you do. I think boys in their own minds, like constantly, you know, they don't have time to write down on a page because they're just kind of, you know, I mean they're living it, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, it's brilliant, it really is. Um, so my last question is have you got anything coming up in the pipeline? Are you writing at the moment? Is there anything we can expect soon?

SPEAKER_01 30:48

So I am. I have just finished the first draft of the second in the Ivy Hotel series. Amazing. Calling it mystery at the Ivy Hotel. Because no this one yet, but there are very mysterious happenings, and the hotel is still under threat. So the kind of looming threat of the new owners who might destroy this wonderful world, if the you know, the murder might be like the specific events in the first book might be laid to rest.

unknown 31:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

The threat is still there. So the second one, which again I had so much fun, and I was able to put into it. So if my favourite character wasn't Meredith, it would be Flicker, the horse.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

I love horses in a very, you know, I like super salty way. I really like I like Sean the Jarvey and Flicker, and I love their kind of vantage point of the hotel. So they go round the square outside the hotel, they go around the Ivy Park, and then they stable, flicker is stabled at the back of the hotel. So they don't go to the hotel, but they kind of see everything that happens around the hotel.

SPEAKER_02 32:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

And they kind of stuff on the kind of you know, the pace of a horse is really interesting. It's faster than a walk, or slower than faster than a walk, but way slower than a car. Um so there's much more of Sean and Flicker. Okay. Which made me very happy. Uh but yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, I was so excited. It picks up the the the story picks up about two weeks after the first one finishes. So there's still I was still totally in the zone of like these people and these characters in the world. So I just went straight back into it, and I was like, well, what else might happen? And it's so like a hotel, like a big old hotel. There's so much scope within it. There's all the public rooms which are very grand, but then there's all the stuff behind the scenes. There are all of these ways of getting around the hotel that guests will never see. You know, this kind of network of smaller corridors that are like unknown or slightly secret. Um, so I think that this just for me, there's so much scope in there to tell lots of different kinds of stories.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Yeah, that's very exciting. So when will the second book be out, do you know?

SPEAKER_01 33:19

I think this time next year. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it's just it's really great if kids like the first one.

SPEAKER_02 33:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

Have a second one. And I always loved, I mean, if I liked a book, I wanted many more of them. Oh, you know. Absolutely. I wanted to find those characters in different situations. I never liked them growing up.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Yeah, yeah, I don't want to change too much.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

Yeah, and then they got really boring.

SPEAKER_00 33:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

I mean, they would be so exciting when they were young, and then suddenly they'd be teenagers with, you know, romance or something.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

Yeah, don't want that.

SPEAKER_01 34:04

And senses of responsibility and things, yeah. No.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

No. Well, that's really exciting, yeah. So lots for us to look forward to then. So thank you so much, Emily. It's been lovely chatting to you. I'm glad we got it all working in the end as well. I know.

SPEAKER_01 34:24

Yeah, until it completely lets you down.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

Yeah, oh absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

I I love chatting to you so much. Thank you very, very much. And I'm so excited that you read the book.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Oh, no, thank you. I'm so excited to take it into school now and to share it with my class. They're gonna love it, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

That's really I will let you know.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Yes, please do.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

I will. Thank you, and I will obviously share this so that everyone can watch back if they haven't watched live as well.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Fabulous. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

Happy lovely, and you hope you speak again. Bye!

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Bye.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

So that was my lovely chat with author Emily Harricane. I really loved getting to chat to her. I think she had amazing ideas for her story, and I really can't wait for more now. And I really hope you enjoy it if you get to read it as well. Thank you for listening, and please do subscribe to our Teacher Book Club book boxes if you haven't yet. We are very lucky to have our podcast sponsored by VIP Reading, who also create our teacher book club book boxes. So if you subscribe, you will get our next book arriving at your doorstep every other month, and then you can read along with us and also get incredible reading resources from Gramosaurus and lots of other little extra treats as well. You have voted for all the next book, which will be in the next box coming in May. So if you subscribe now, you will get that next box, which is going to be a really exciting one. So, thanks again for listening. And please do follow us on Instagram and please also like our podcast as well. Any star rating reviews would be amazing. Thank you for your support, and I will get back very soon with another podcast season.