Laura Gallego and Her Fantastic New Worlds *-*

Hi, invisible beings!

Today I’m going to talk —Is it ok to say “talk” when I’m writing or typing?— about my favorite writer, Laura Gallego. You can find her biography and all that stuff in Wikipedia and in her website, but I’ll make a summary anyway.

Laura Gallego García was born the 11^th October of 1977 in Quart de Poblet, Valencia. She started writing when she was just 11 years old, with a friend called Miriam. The story they wrote was Zodiaccía, un mundo diferente (Zodiaccía, a Different World, could be its name in English). It’s not published but you can find it in her website. I discovered that recently, so I haven't read it yet. But I promise I'll have a look at it (in fact, I can't wait to read it) and then maybe I'll tell you about it. It's important because that's when Laura decided she wanted to be a writer.

She started publishing when she was 21, while studying "Filología Hispánica" at university in Valencia. She had been participating for some years without succeeding to the “Premio Barco de Vapor”. But when she sent her 14^th book, Finis Mundi (1999), she won!

Laura Gallego is now 35 years old and she has published around 30 books. But she’s working in many more projects and she’s finishing her doctoral thesis. Besides that, she still finds time to answer letters from fans and go around high schools to talk about her books. Isn’t that admirable?

I’ve found other interesting things about her, like the fact that her favorite film is mine too: Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away (El viaje de Chihiro in Spanish). Her favorite book is The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende, and she’s keen on manga (Japanese comic). I already knew that, but I nearly couldn’t believe it when I saw that her favorite series are mine too: InuYasha, Detective Conan, Bakuman… She’s so much like me that I’m starting to wonder if I may be like her soul sister, her clone or her early reincarnation (I’m joking, of course).
So it's obvious that I love the things she writes about, but in fact I also love how she writes about it. 
Her stories are almost always fantastic; we could classify her work between historical fantasy (Finis Mundi), science fiction (Las hijas de Tara/ Tara's daughters), and epic fantasy (Memorias de Idhún/ Memoirs of Idhun). But what remains in every story she writes is the relevancy she gives to feelings. That's how characters become almost real; you can almost touch them, because their minds are so splendidly described that you understand them and you can feel what they are feeling. And I'd like to thank her for writing like this, focusing on characters, because when you read a book is to know more about them, not about which country the ribbons of the curtains of their rooms came from, or how many steps and in which direction someone took to arrive at some place. What I mean is that there are writers who want to describe everything so meticulously that you get lost while reading and finally you get bored because, really, who cares about these things? I’m not saying descriptions aren’t important; it's a fact that you must know lots of vocabulary and how to use it to be a writer. But also, the purpose of writing is to send a message, somehow, and describing things in order just to use more vocabulary and to seem more cultured makes the message become vague. At least for me, the best way to make the message arrive is focusing on characters: their feelings, their thoughts, their pasts, their worlds… And everything which surrounds them and which is relevant to push the story forward and make the storyline clear.

And now, I’ll talk about Memorias de Idhún, because it’s my favorite book and it will always be. Memorias de Idhún is a trilogy (La Resistencia, Tríada and Panteón are the three titles) about another world called Idhun. A world where magic still exists, where three suns illuminate the sky during the day, and three moons shine during the night, where humans aren’t the only rational beings. It’s a world where seeing a unicorn and acquiring magic is not a dream but a hope, where dragons soar in the sky and protect people. But a dark wizard called Ashran the Necromancer uses the power of the astral conjunction to let a superior species called “shek” (winged snakes which are ancestral enemies of dragons) come to the world and take the control. At the same time, he uses his power to kill all unicorns and dragons, as there is a prophecy which says that a unicorn and a dragon together could defeat him. But a baby unicorn and a baby dragon are saved from the slaughter, and sent to the Earth so that they can grow up save and return in the future to set Idhun free. The most powerful wizards and the human kings and queens of Idhun, while preparing to fight against shek invasion, send to the Earth a knight called Alsan and a wizard called Shail to find the unicorn and the dragon and make them come back. But Ashran is aware that they have escaped, so he’ll send a mysterious and young assassin called Kirtash to eliminate them and everyone who has gone into exile to the Earth. And he’s the kind of cold and extremely intelligent assassin that never commits mistakes. 

In that context, Jack and Victoria, two young humans born in the Earth, see how their lives turn upside down when Alsan and Shail save them from death, as Kirtash has tried to kill them. Although they don’t know which their relation with Idhun could be, they’ll become members of the Resistance and they’ll fight for it with their new friends.

That's more or less the plot summary. I don't have more time but another day this week I'll post a ranking list with the books I've read from Laura Gallego. I wanted to write it here, but anyway, this post is long enough.

So, bye and see you soon! ;p