Carolyn Tara O’Neil Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Carolyn Tara O’Neill is a young adult fiction novelist who is best known for her debut novel “Daughters of a Dead Empire.”

She grew up in New York City in a very tiny apartment that was always full of books. Carolyn remembers how she used to head to the public library every Friday to get all manner of books.
O’Neill now makes her home in a smaller apartment in New York City, where she has slightly fewer books on her shelves, even though she continues to visit the library whenever she can.
Over the years, Carolyn Tara O’Neill has lived all over the globe in Japan, Spain, and France. She has also dedicated herself to the rights and education of young people.

She also loves to study languages, and travel and spends endless hours discussing great hiking trails, books, TV, and how we need to cooperate in the building of a more equal society.

As for how she got into young adult writing, Carolyn Tara O’Neill has said that she has always loved reading.

She believes that since teen years are the time when people begin figuring out who they are in relation to the world around them and why and how things work. This makes it the ideal time and setting for stories about revolution and justice.
According to Carolyn, it is such themes and the way teen characters discover and grow that keep her coming back again and again to young adult fiction.

Outside of her writing endeavors, she works with Generation Citizen, a fantastic nonprofit. The organization is all about bringing to public schools Action Civics programming across the United States.
It also teaches young people how to carry out advocacy campaigns so that they can learn more about government and become more knowledgeable about the issues they are passionate about.
Working with the nonprofit had an impact on how she wrote the lead characters in her novel Anna and Evgenia, who engage in passionate debates about what government needs to function.

As for the inspiration for his novel, Carolyn Tara O’Neil got much of it from the Anastasia legend.

She had always loved the Anastasia legend for years and when she was in middle school, she used to spend a lot of time memorizing songs from the Disney movie.

Nonetheless, the biggest motivation has to be her love for Russian history and her need to do an exploration of the turbulent time period during the Second World War when the age of empires was finally coming to a close.
She found all manner of parallels to the modern world such as deep political divides, increasing repression, and income inequality.

Carolyn found the history fascinating and just knew that she had to write a reimagining of it in an accessible and exciting way.

As a big believer in routines, she penned the first draft over about one and a half years. She used to head to a cafe near her apartment where she would write for between 4 to 8 hours every Sunday.
By 2015 she was done writing her first full manuscript but she kept going back, revising, and writing.

“Daughters of a Dead Empire” is a work set during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918 in Russia.

Anna is a member of the Tsar’s family which was massacred leaving her fleeing from her life pursued by Commander Yurovsky who is determined to kill her. The only way she can be safe is if she manages to reach the Tsar’s loyal army, the Whites.
But she needs to figure out how she will be getting there given that the towns along the way are full of communists.

The first town she arrives at attempts to kill her for being a white loyalist and she is lucky that a stranger named Evgenia saves her. She makes a deal with the stranger who agrees to smuggle her across the communist-filled territory for a fee.
Evgenia is more than just the money that Anna is offering as she has another ulterior motive. While she is poor and needs the cash to help her brother who lost a leg while fighting the communists, she does not trust Anna.

It is not long before Evgenia also finds herself in the crosshairs of Yurovsky. As they traverse the countryside trying to keep ahead of the killer, they develop tight bonds of friendship and find they have a lot in common despite being on different sides.
It is a beautifully written story of survival and friendship following tragic loss following the Russian Revolution.