Q&A with Rosanne Parry

From my Q&A with Rosanne Parry, author of A Whale of the Wild, illustrated by Lindsay Moore:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Titles are hard, and A Whale of the Wild, had extra work to do. It is a companion novel to last year’s A Wolf Called Wander which has spent 40+ weeks on the NYT best seller list, so the title needed to be similar. And the wolf book sold a dozen translations, so we needed to pick a title easy to translate.

I had hoped to work the word “orca” into the title because my story is told from the point of view of a sister and brother orca in the Salish Sea, but we went with “whale” in the end because it’s more familiar in Europe and Asia.

I had also hoped to work in the word “journey” because the orcas travel from the San Juan Islands near the US Canadian border out to the open Pacific and back again to the Puget Sound south of Seattle all in search of their family and the salmon they need to eat.

In the end...[read on]

Visit Rosanne Parry's website.

Q&A with Rosanne Parry.

--Marshal Zeringue