The Black Lotus Blog Tour: My Life That Books Built by Kieran Fanning

Last month I posted my review of Kiean Fanning's brilliant new ninja time travel adventure story, The Black Lotus. Today I am overjoyed to be welcoming Kieran to The Book Zone to tell us about the books he enjoyed reading when he was younger:

One of the first books I remember being genuinely moved by was The Children at Green Meadows by Enid Blyton. I was a huge Enid Blyton fan and read all The Secret Seven series. The Famous Five series was also a firm favourite, especially as the show was on TV.

We also had some abridged illustrated classics at home, like Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Last of the Mohicans. I think I enjoyed the illustrations more than the stories but they did prompt me to revisit these titles when I got older and Treasure Island is still one of my all-time favourites.

We loved comics in our house too, though we weren’t allowed to buy them often. Our neighbour however, got comics every week so when he was finished with them we received bundles of the Beano, the Dandy, Roy of the Rovers and Thundercats.

Our mother also encouraged us to read Irish books and I loved Tom McCaughren’s fox series beginning with Run with the Wind. I also vividly remember Carolyn Swift’s Robbers series and Island of the Great Yellow Ox by Walter Macken.

Roald Dahl has to be on this list too, my favourites from him being Danny the Champion of the World and James and the Giant Peach.

I also have great memories of books in school. Every day we used to look forward to the teacher reading us Charlotte’s Web or The Iron Man. In the older classes I discovered abridged classics like Dracula, Frankenstein or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The first books that totally transported me to another world were Mary Norton’s Borrowers books. I guess it was my first taste of fantasy. Watership Down was my second, and I was truly blown away by it. It remains in my top ten books of all time.

As kids, we loved getting gifts that came free with a box of cereal, but when the Weetabix came home from the shop with a book attached we were overjoyed. Not just because it was a free book, but because it was a book we’d never seen the likes of before. It was a Choose Your Own Adventure book, in which the reader makes decisions at the end of each page to choose the direction of the story. This interactive fiction coincided with the arrival of an Atari 800xl computer in our house and for the first time I realised that the reader no longer had to play a passive role, and that a story can have many endings. I remember reading War With the Evil Power Master, The Case of the Silk King, The Horror of High Ridge, Survival at Sea, and Mountain Survival over and over again until I reached a satisfying ending.

From there, my brother and I evolved to reading gamebooks. These were like Choose Your Own Adventures, but with the added complexities of fighting monsters, rolling dice, collecting objects and earning/losing health and skill points etc. I loved The Way of the Tiger series by Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson, and the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever.

These types of books led me to write my own books, which I still have. They’re my most precious possessions! At around the age of ten I wrote The Magic Sword, and The Samurai was written some years later.

Fast forward twenty years and it was no big surprise that my first publications would be interactive puzzle adventures – Trapdoor to Treachery, Voyage to Victory, Tempest of Trouble and Curse of the Cockroach.

Fast forward another 10 years and it is no surprise that my first novel, The Black Lotus includes swords, ninjas, samurai, time travel and talking animals. It may have taken forty years, but the books I read as a kid were the making of my novel, and also, the making of me.

The Black Lotus by Kieran Fanning is the first book in the Samurai Wars series and is out now in paperback (£6.99, Chicken House). Find out more at http://www.kieranfanning.com and http://www.chickenhousebooks.com 

Review: The Black Lotus by Kieran Fanning

Ghost, Cormac and Kate are not like other kids.

Ghost can turn invisible, Cormac can run up walls and Kate can talk to animals - all abilities which make them perfect recruits for the Black Lotus, a training school for ninjas. But when the Moon Sword - a source of unimaginable power - is stolen by samurai, the three are forced to put their new skills to the test in sixteenth-century Japan ...

Add too many ingredients to a bread or cake on the Great British Bake Off and you'll have to suffer the wrath of Paul Hollywood. Do the same when writing a book and you may not face wrath, but it will make your story appear disjointed and confused. Kieran Fanning's debut middle grade novel, The Black Lotus, has young people with super powers, martial arts, fantasy swords with magical powers, ninjas and samurai - that's a hell of a lot of ingredients for a literary cake yet somehow Fanning pulls it off to produce a mouthwatering adventure story that will satisfy the appetites of action-hungry young readers.

The Black Lotus is set in an alternate 21st Century planet Earth, where much of the world is part of President Goda's samurai empire. London, Paris, Rio... all are part of Goda's empire and it seems that the USA is one of the few nations that lies outside of his influence. For the time being at least.

We are initially introduced to this world through the lives of three teenagers from very diverse backgrounds, although all three have at least two things in common - they all believe themselves to be orphans and all three of them have a special power. Ghost lives in a Rio de Janeiro favela, and can turn himself invisible if he concentrates hard enough; Cormac lives in a Hinin House, or orphanage, in Ballyhook, Ireland and can run so fast that he is able to run up vertical walls; and Kate lives on the streets of NYC having run away from a children's home. Kate's special gift is that of communicating with animals, literally speaking with them. All three think they have managed to keep their special abilities, however all three have come to the attention of the Black Lotus, a group of ninja freedom fighters who have spent centuries fighting against the totalitarian rule of Goda (yes, you read me correctly - NINJA FREEDOM FIGHTERS). Soon the three find themselves teaming up to join this fight, and on an adventure that sees them travelling back to 16th Century Japan to retrieve a magical sword that goad could use to subjugate the rest of the world.

To describe The Black Lotus as cinematic would be a disservice to Kieran, as to me it can imply that a story relies far too much on action set-pieces, and yet this book would make a damn fine action/adventure film. The Black Lotus certainly isn't just a chain of action scenes with little in between them. In fact, although the action scenes are fast-paced and exciting to read (and are full of NINJA martial arts wonderfulness), it is the relationship between the three young heroes that makes this story work so well. Each one has different back histories and thus different motivations, and although, for plot reasons, we find out more about one of the three than the others, it is still very easy for the reader to empathise with all three.

The Black Lotus is yet another fab addition to the plethora of great middle grade books that have been published in the UK in 2015. It is certainly a book that will have young readers clamouring for a sequel, although I would guess that we have quite a wait for that ahead of us as The Black Lotus was only released two weeks ago. 

And did I say that it has lots of ninjas?

My thanks go to the fab people at Chicken House for sending me a copy to read.