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Roz Maclaren

Teen Fiction with a Dark Twist

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Archives for April 2026

Character art reveal: Hunter and Vesper

8 April, 2026 by Roz MacLaren Leave a Comment

If you’re in the Street Team, you’ll have seen this already (and if you’re not, why aren’t you?!)

I’m thrilled to unveil Kat’s beautiful piece, created to go along with my upcoming YA dark romantasy series, The Ruined Skye Trilogy.

Here you go:

In my head, the art is meant to evoke how my main characters wanted their first meeting to be. In reality, they argue, threaten each other and one of them nearly dies. But both know that, if they didn’t live in a world where talking to the wrong person could kill them, perhaps they might be friends…

So while this scene isn’t actually from the book, think of it as as a kind of bonus scene. I love how Vesper holds her knife, not quite trusting Hunter (or herself) and never fully relaxing.

Blurb

Here’s a reminder of the blurb:

She wants to destroy his world. He’s sent to destroy her.

Centuries after a radiation leak on the Isle of Skye wiped out thousands, the mutated survivors developed god-like powers. Led by power-hungry Queen Creyta, they’re determined to drive the few remaining humans to extinction.

Seventeen-year-old Vesper, one of the unmutated, is determined to go down fighting. Prince Hunter, the queen’s ridiculously handsome son, might just be the key to his mother’s undoing. But the closer Vesper gets to Hunter, the more she realises he’s just as trapped as she is. Now she’s torn between taking down Creyta and protecting the boy she’s grown dangerously close to.

One wrong move and she won’t just lose Hunter. She’ll lose everything.

Forgotten Skye is out this summer with Evernight Teen. I can’t wait to share my fiesty, damaged, dangerous, flawed, fearless characters with you.

Filed Under: Character Art, Forgotten Skye

Book review: The Swarm by Anna February

5 April, 2026 by Roz MacLaren Leave a Comment

I was thrilled to get a message from the Chicken House teams giving me a free ARC of The Swarm by Anna February.

I was fortunate enough to get an uncorrected proof of The Hive, Anna’s previous book, and review it. So I was keen to get straight in to the sequel.

I tore through The Swarm in just a few days. The book sees Niko and Feldspar head off in a mission to a nearby colony – but that mission soon goes very wrong…

This book switched to Niko’s point of view, which took me a little while to get used to. I liked him as a mysterious figure and to access his inner monologue stripped him of some of the intrigue but it also gave us a chance to see the first book’s protagonist, Feldspar, from a new angle.

I found the twists easier to predict than the first book. This probably isn’t a reflection of the book, but I am serial predicter of twists – which was in no small part why I loved the first book so much. It really kept me guessing until the end.

Both both books are very intelligently written and thoughtful without ever feeling preachy. In their own way, they wryly comment on today’s political and social landscape.

I only hope there will be a third!

Filed Under: Book Reviews

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