Ann Fraistat Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Standalone Novels
What We Harvest | (2022) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
A Place for Vanishing | (2024) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Ann Fraistat is a narrative designer, playwright, and author who is a lover of all things magic and monsters. While being an author is something that she has been dreaming about ever since she was just 10, it was not so easy to get published.
She published “What We Harvest” her debut novel in 2022. Fraistat has also coauthored other works that include the play “Romeo & Juliet” and National Science Foundation-sponsored alternate reality games.
When she is not working on her fiction works, she can usually be found working as a director and actor and has been active on many stages across the Washington DC area.
Other things that she loves to engage in include drinking tea, baking, and anything spooky.
Like Charlotte Bronte, she loves to say that she writes since she just cannot help the insatiable desire to create stories ever since she was a child.
One of the earliest stories she remembers writing was a parody of “Lord of the Rings” when she was about nine or ten years old, which she aptly named “Lord of the Baloney.” The work featured a female version of Gollum who she named Golla.
She also penned a scary story about an evil gerbil that she gave one giant red eye.
Outside school, she continued writing as she used to complete her school assignments and then go right into fiction writing.
Like many of her contemporaries, she just can’t not write and has been doing so ever since she read R.L. Stine’s “Stay Out of the Basement.” This alongside “Goosebumps” were the novels that made her start to think of one day becoming an author.
At some point, she was reading so much of the “Goosebumps” series that her teachers had to hold an intervention to try to convince her to try a few works from other authors.
Other novelists she would grow to love include Philip Pullman and his novel “The Golden Compass” and Anna-Marie McLemore’s “When the Moon Was Ours.”
Ann Fraistat’s road to publication was long, as it stretched out from the time she was a kid. She used to have a huge collection of manuscripts on her hard drive and began searching for an agent in 2017 but hardly got any publisher interest.
In 2018 and 2019, she joined the PitchWars mentorship program where Ian Barnes and Laura Lashley mentored her over about four months.
Giving it everything she had, she used to stay up well past 3 AM writing and editing until she was burnt out. But it was an important process of growth, even if her novel never was one of the Pitch Wars novels that made a big splash.
While many of her fellow mentees who had no luck getting agents started thinking of reapplying, Fraistat decided to try out Julia Cameron’s freewriting technique since she had nothing to lose.
It was from this that was born the completed manuscript for “What We Harvest” and won her another mentorship to Pitch Wars in 2019 under Aty Behsam and Kylie Schachte. The novel would then get a showcase and an offer about a fortnight later.
“What We Harvest” is a work about a girl who needs to deal with a strange disease that is slowly taking everyone she loves while living in a small idyllic town with a dark past.
Wren the lead owes everything she has achieved and owns to the centuries-old picturesque town named “Hollow’s End.”
Tourists travel to the small town to check out the iridescent and shimmering wheat and other crops in the town. But then a quicksilver mercury blight arrives in the small town and begins slowly poisoning all the farms in town.
It begins by destroying the crops resulting in a thick silver sludge, before it moves to infect livestock and wild creatures from the forests, which are left with fogged white eyes.
Soon enough, it afflicts Wren’s neighbors and she remains one of the last locals not affected but not for long. However, the blight finally comes for her and the only person she can call is Derek her ex, even though that was the last thing she wanted to do.
It has been months since they last spoke but Derek and Wren both love “Hollow’s End” more than anything. However, they have very little information about the renowned miracle crops that made their town famous and will soon learn that miracles never are free.
Ann Fraistat’s novel “A Place for Vanishing” opens with a teen girl and her family coming back to the childhood home of her mother. There they discover that the strange beauty in the house may be hiding a dark past.
According to Libby’s mother, this was supposed to be a fresh start, and after her recent tragedy and diagnosis that said she is bipolar, she knows she needs to do something about her family.
However, the house is nothing remotely normal, as the winding halls are haunted by scores of bugs, the gardens are full of impossibly blue roses and the tall stained glass windows come with insectile and very strange designs.
Going by rumors in the locality, including one told by a mysterious next-door neighbor, there have been many disappearances that go back over a century. It does seem that the first owners were host to legendary masked seances that lived on the grounds.
Libby’s mother pretends that there is nothing out of the ordinary but Libby knows there is something very wrong about the house. The house is very strange and is keeping some dark secrets and she has come to believe that the bug-shaped masks she found hidden on the property are the key to unlocking these.
While we all wear masks to make us braver and stronger and to hide imperfections, Libby might lose herself if she keeps her on for too long.
Ann Fraistat’s novel “Romeo & Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending,” asked the question what if Romeo had never left Rosaline and become infatuated with her rather than Juliet? What if Tybalt and Mercutio did not die and got together instead?
In this classic retelling where you choose your own ending, the audience cast votes all through the play, trying to find new and exciting courses that love will take and also determining whether everybody dies or lives.
Coming with eight very interesting endings, it is a madcap and irreverent reimagining of the beautiful Shakespeare romance.