LITERARY QUEEN. Cayla Kluver’s newest novel, The Queen’s Choice, is published
by Harlequin Teen.

Two worlds clash as faeries and humans meet, both hunting for something they want. Lives will be threatened, decisions will be made, and nothing will ever be the same.

Mondovi author Cayla Kluver’s fourth novel, The Queen’s Choice is book one in the Heirs of Chrior trilogy. In The Queen’s Choice, the main character – Anya, the niece of the Faerie Queen – embarks on a journey through the human world to find her cousin who has run away – Prince Zabriel – and bring him home before the death of his mother. However, leaving behind the faerie world has its risks. Anya has to fight for her life when hunters cut off her wings, making it impossible to return to her own world. She realizes she may now have more than one thing to fight for: her cousin and her own people.

“I came up with it several years ago, and it came to me in terms of, I wanted to have this perfect world, and sort of strip away the layers,” Kluver said.

“It was a weird situation: My career got in the way of college, which is backwards. As far as problems go it’s a pretty good one to have.” – author Cayla Kluver on becoming a successful novelist at a young age

Just 21, Kluver may already be an experienced author, but she has had her ups and downs with publishing. Before signing with Harlequin Teen, Kluver had help from her mother. “She was a business professor for 20 years at UW-Stout and she actually set up her own publishing company and put it out to get industry reviews and reader response,” Kluver said. All that hard work paid off when Kluver was picked up by Harlequin Teen. The publisher bought her Legacy trilogy (the first volume of which was originally published when Kluver was 14) as well as the first and second books in her new trilogy. Kluver said Harlequin Teen gives her a lot of creative freedom and isn’t as restricting as in the past when she worked with Amazon.

The hardest part about creating her most recent book, The Queen’s Choice, was the change in the publishing process. Kluver said this time it was beginning the writing process with a deadline, instead of having more freedom with time. “I struggle a bit with that, I’ll be honest,” she said. “I’m such a perfectionist and I panic when I stop and think about the fact that I have deadlines and people are relying on certain things at certain times, but that pushes me in a good way.”

The Queen’s Choice was a way for Kluver to explore world-building in a whole new way. “It’s a higher fantasy than my original series was and it explores the politics of the world the characters live in,” Kluver said. “I wanted to explore a lot of issues that I think are relevant today.”

Kluver said she could see parts of herself in her main character Anya. “One of my faults is I can be a little moralistic and I think that comes though in the main character,” Kluver said. “I think it was good for me to write that main character and recognize that in her it was a flaw in some way. Obviously morals are a good thing, but in terms of approaching the rest of the world that can be alienating in ways you approach things.”

Kluver said it was something she went though when she went to Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., majoring in sociology and anthropology with a concentration in criminal justice, but later left due to the need to focus on The Queen’s Choice. “It was a weird situation: My career got in the way of college, which is backwards,” she said. “As far as problems go it’s a pretty good one to have.”

Many people expected her to be a creative writing major, she said, but since she is already learning so much by writing her own books she wanted to explore other areas she was interested in. In the future, Kluver said she sees herself continuing to write novels. “The question is what kind will I be writing for the rest of my life,” Kluver said. “I love writing for the young adult genre, because I am a young adult at this time and I love my publisher Harlequin Teen, but as I get older I keep finding I want to write about older characters, so I am not sure where I will end up.”

The Queen’s Choice will be available at all places books are sold on Jan. 28.