Some Frequently Asked Questions…

(SPOILERS—don’t read this unless you’ve already read The Cabinet of Wonders!)

Tomik puts water, a wasp, and a lightning bolt in his Marvels. Will he ever make more Marvels with different things inside?

Yes! But you’ll have to wait for future books in the series to see what those things are. What would YOU put inside a Marvel?

Why does Astrophil fall asleep when he and Petra are in Prague?

Do you remember the first time you ever left home alone? It was probably thrilling and a bit scary, and I bet that the experience changed who you are, even if only in little ways. It’s the same for Petra and Astrophil. When they arrive in Prague, they encounter a strange new world. Being there opens their minds to new possibilities, so they become capable of seeing themselves in different ways. This is why Petra and Astrophil each discover something new about themselves during their first day in Prague.

Why is Petra’s last name “Kronos”? Isn’t that the Greek word for “time”?

Yes, it is. This is what Kronos looks like in Greek: χρόνος. I chose this as a last name for Petra and her father for a few reasons. It made sense to me that Petra’s father, as a clockmaker, would have a last name that meant “time.” And “kronos” is also the origin of the word “chronicle,” which means a story or history. In the Renaissance, a chronicle was a history book (Shakespeare based many of his plays on a history book called Holinshed’s Chronicles). When you read The Cabinet of Wonders, I think you can see why time and history are important in the book, because of the clock and because Petra and her friends are living in an exciting, dangerous moment in history.

“But what about stories?” you ask. “Didn’t you say that a chronicle is also a story?” When I was writing The Cabinet of Wonders, I was inspired by a certain kind of story: the fairy tale. There are lots of references to fairy tales in the book, and not just because there’s magic in such stories. What’s more interesting to me is that fairy tales are magic. The power of storytelling is a magic all of us can practice. When Petra first meets Neel, she has no reason to trust or like him. But he can tell a good story. If he wasn’t able to do this, Petra might not have listened to him long enough to learn that he has other qualities that make him a close friend.

For Neel, a story is history. Storytelling is vital to him because it’s the way his people share information about their past. The Roma (at least, in my book) practice “oral history.” Instead of writing history books, they tell stories that explain who they are and what they value as a culture (please keep in mind, though, that this is how I have presented the fictional Roma in my novel. There are real Roma in this world, and they have different beliefs).