2025 is coming to a close, which means it's time for another issue of CHOPINIC ATTACK!

Book updates

Can you believe that Beyond Seven Forests comes out in less than two months?

First things first! If you haven't yet pre-ordered a copy, you can still snag an exclusive character art postcard by pre-ordering through my local indie, Bound Booksellers in Franklin, Tennessee. They'll ship anywhere in the US!

Why are pre-orders important, you ask? For one thing, your pre-orders count toward release day sales numbers. Related, they show booksellers and my publisher that there is buzzy interest in books like this, which means they're more likely to acquire other books from me in the future.

Next up—we've finalized details for a launch event! I'm excited to announce that the official launch event for Beyond Seven Forests will be at Barnes & Noble Cool Springs (Franklin) at 2 PM on Saturday, February 7, 2026. I'll be in conversation with #1 New York Times-bestselling author Sharon Cameron, who wrote the Reese's Book Club pick The Light in Hidden Places. Sharon's newest YA historical novel, Up From the Ashes, is out next October.

For more info and (free) event tickets, click this link. I hope to see you there!

With Christmas next week, have some snippets of the Polish Christmas traditions that show up in Beyond Seven Forests!

Beyond Seven Forests is a story told mainly through flashback. Most of the narrative unfolds as part of testimony at a court martial. Renia is on trial before a military tribunal for disrupting the Austro-Hungarian war effort, and she's spinning a story for her interrogators, attempting to explain her reasoning for why she helped two enemy soldiers. It's a fairly restrictive mode for telling a story, since we're limited to what Renia has reason to tell her interrogators. But now and then we do get glimpses of her life before the war, and I wanted to weave in as many references as I could to the Polish cultural traditions she would have grown up with.

The Christmas Eves of my childhood—the candlelit hours between our Wigilia and the Pasterka Mass at midnight, the supper dishes all cleared away and the gifts handed out. We would bundle into quilts before the tree and listen in rapt silence as my father told the stories of old Poland, of King Lech and the white eagle, of the dragon of Wawel Hill, of the knights asleep under Mount Giewont who will awaken in Poland’s hour of greatest need.

And elsewhere:

That jar _{[of pickled herring!]} was given to me as a Christmas gift out of one of his Red Cross parcels by an officer of the Polish Legions whom I treated in hospital—a precious reminder of our Christmas Eve Wigilia feasts in years past, when we would’ve eaten it with mushroom soup and pierogi and cabbage rolls and gingerbread once the first star had been sighted in the night sky.

(By the way, that tradition of sighting a star—signifying the Star of Bethlehem—to begin the Christmas Eve feast makes for a memorable scene in Andrzej Wajda's film Katyń, as the imprisoned Polish officers continue the tradition even in their Soviet prison camp. It's not an easy movie to watch, but I highly recommend it.)

Reading/watching/listening

Read: I've been catching up on Brigid Kemmerer's YA fantasy series(es). I read A Curse So Dark and Lonely back when it first came out in 2019, but I hadn't ever gotten around to books two and three. I've remedied that and am now also flying through the spin-off series (starting with Forging Silver into Stars) and her unrelated series, Defy the Night.

I also recently devoured Veronica Roth's To Clutch a Razor, book two of her Polish-folklore-inspired urban fantasy series (the sequel to last year's When Among Crows).

Alice Hoffman's The Invisible Hour was regrettably a miss for me.

Watched: I watched through the entirety of New Girl over the past few months, bittersweet now given the news this week about Rob Reiner, who played Jess's dad.

Also watched and enjoyed Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Knives Out caper—with probably one of my favorite portrayals of a Christian character I've ever seen on screen.

I’m eagerly awaiting the next batch of Stranger Things Season 5.

And, to round out my viewing, I re-watched Black Hawk Down after being somewhat surprised to see that Quentin Tarantino named it as his top film of the 21st century. It holds up; it's undeniably one of the greatest war movies; but I do recommend reading the book as it does a much better job of amplifying Somali voices too.

Mo

Have a safe and happy holiday season! Until next time,

Amanda