Into YA with Kristina Forest


I'm super excited to bring you another edition of Into YA, this time with one of my new favorite YA authors, Kristina Forest. While I'm sure you've already heard about Now That I've Found You, you can get caught up by reading my review here. Thank you to Kristina for taking the time to chat with me, and I hope you enjoy our conversation. If you want to help support the blog, please consider grabbing a copy through my Bookshop affiliate link here

 1. In Now That I Found You, all of your main characters are famous. Evie and her family are huge in the film industry, and love interest, Milo, is on the rise with his band. Did that require extra research to write about for either the music or film industries?


It didn’t require much research. I’ve always been interested in old Hollywood and I’m a big fan of movies and music, and I’ve watched dozens of documentaries and/or biopics so I felt pretty prepared to write the story without having to do additional research.

2. Once Evie gets to NYC, she’s set off on a scavenger hunt of sorts to figure out where her grandmother took off to. Did you plot out the story in advance and determine the locations ahead of time? Did you intentionally pair certain locations with certain emotional moments in the story arch?

Yes, I intentionally picked all of those spots. I'm a huge outliner. Some spots are real and some I made up.

3. Like I mentioned above, the book takes place mostly in New York City, even though Evie lives in LA most of the time. What inspired you to set the book in NYC? What was the most fun or difficult part of capturing the city in your story?

I live in New York City, and I think it is one of the best places and provides the perfect backdrop for a mystery and a romance. The most fun part was writing all the subway scenes. The most difficult part was making sure I placed the real landmarks in the correct locations.
4. I’m going to make this vague because it relates to the ending, but I love how your book has such an openness to being young and having the chance to reevaluate choices you made in the past. Both in the romance and in Evie's career, she learns to give herself a lot of space to change her mind. Teens are pressured to make life defining choices at sixteen or seventeen, and there's a lot of weight and anxiety that goes into that, even if you do have a plan. Was it important to you to show that teens are allowed to change their minds and not know exactly what they want from the moment they graduate high school?

Yes, that was super important. Success is subjective, and I think we all owe it to ourselves to try and follow our dreams and see where they take us.

5. I’m sure everyone who picks up Now That I’ve Found You will be excited to read your next book. Besides going back to your debut, I Wanna Be Where You Are, do you have any new projects you can tell us about?

Nothing I can talk about yet, but hopefully soon!

More From Kristina Forest...



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