Kill Creatures<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(Delacorte) is a tour de force of teenage friendship, crushes, and revenge through the riveting perspective of Nan, who is hiding the fact that she killed her three best friends. This sounds like a massive plot point, but Power\u2019s book is no less suspenseful for this early reveal as she thrillingly teases out what happened that summer night when Nan entered Saltcedar Canyon with Luce, Jane, and Edie, and walked out alone. The other three were never seen again\u2014until now, a full year later, when Luce reappears miraculously with no memory of the past 12 months.<\/p>\nIn discussing the choice to reveal Nan\u2019s misdeeds early on, Power says that it provided her an interesting way to challenge herself. \u201cI think the who-done-it question is also a why-done-it question of like, we\u2019re never just satisfied with knowing who did it. We want to know the whole story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nan\u2019s voice is by turns funny and fierce: \u201cIf I ever kill her again, it\u2019ll be with my bare hands,\u201d she seethes, aggrieved at her friend\u2019s mysterious reappearance, which complicates her identity as a best friend in mourning but more, causes the sheriff to start poking around. Power considers the teen unique among her work.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt like someone in her position\u2014and especially that age where everything is the biggest thing that\u2019s ever happened, so everything is also like the smallest thing that\u2019s ever happened\u2014I felt like she would respond in this wry way…that was really fun for me to lean into. Of the characters that I\u2019ve written before, she\u2019s unique in that fact,\u201d Power says. \u201cFor most of the other protagonists I\u2019ve written, they take things very seriously. And so it was fun to just kind of, like, poke a little bit at the absurdity of the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s Utah setting of the fictional Saltcedar Canyon, revealing its vast secrets as its lake dries up, is based on Glen Canyon, where the Colorado River was dammed along Utah and Arizona to create popular vacation destination Lake Powell, also now decreasing in size as remnants of the past reemerge.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat kind of resurfacing was really cool to me,\u201d Power says, adding that while she\u2019s wanted to set a book in a canyon for a while,\u00a0Kill Creatures\u00a0was the perfect opportunity. \u201cThis thing that [drives their] livelihood is kind of drying up and there\u2019s this sense of dead-endedness to everything that I think kind of contributes to the way that Nan is like, \u2018This might as well happen, like, okay. I\u2019m going with it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a fun, layered novel, and Power hopes that readers take away a \u201cthoughtfulness for memory and perspective,\u201d saying \u201cthere\u2019s so much to learn from other people and there\u2019s so much to be curious about.\u201d<\/p>\n
And of that\u2014no spoilers\u2014ending of\u00a0Kill Creatures, when asked if she would ever return to this world, Power says that while she is currently working on an adult project, \u201cnever say never.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bestselling author\u00a0Rory Power\u2019s new YA novel\u00a0Kill Creatures\u00a0is a tour de force of teenage friendship, crushes, and revenge. Here,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[95541,3444,95547,77,4072,95545,95544,95546,26113,19862,95548,95549,101914,95543,5636,16,15,4078],"class_list":{"0":"post-267692","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-2025-stars-so-far","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-collection-development","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-fiction","13":"tag-jlg","14":"tag-junior-library-guild","15":"tag-librarian","16":"tag-library","17":"tag-qa","18":"tag-reading-categories","19":"tag-reading-levels","20":"tag-rory-power","21":"tag-school-library-journal","22":"tag-stars","23":"tag-uk","24":"tag-united-kingdom","25":"tag-ya"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114865236100072529","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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