Angel
Thieves, Part One
Guest
Post by Kathi Appelt
This book took me a full three
years to get it to its final incarnation, and honestly, if I had another week,
I’d probably tweak it again. My editor, the wondrous Caitlyn Dlouhy, basically
had to rip it out of my grubby little hands. “Kathi, seriously, we have to send
it to the printer NOW!” Alas!
Some history: The first draft
came fast. I got it all down in about six weeks, which is something of a record
for me. I’m normally a fairly slow writer. You could say that it was the
proverbial shitty first draft. There was nothing lovely or magical or
enchanting about it whatsoever. What it had going for it was “possibility.” And
you’re probably thinking, really? Six weeks? Okay, true confessions: there were
a couple of intertwined ideas that I had been mulling over for years, and in
that initial burst of writing, those two ideas just kept eating at me.
The first came to me as a
question—what does it look like to have the kind of faith that you would risk
everything, including your life, and the life of others, for the cause of
faith? Here in my part of the world, I’ve met people whose faith is so deep,
their belief is so solid, that they are convinced that any harm that comes
their way is part of a bigger plan, and also that Jesus or God or Allah or
however you want to describe a Higher Power, will take care of you. I call
these folks “sweet believers,” because that’s how I see them: sweet in their
beliefs. And I mean it in a very complimentary way.
I will be the first to say
that I’m not a religious person. However, I do believe that one can be a person
of faith, without being tied to any particular religion. But that wasn’t what I
was pondering here. Instead, I wanted to write about a girl who lived her life
based upon her sweet belief in all-things-good. Moreover, what if it was her
experience of her church that guided her?
The second idea came from a
moment I had several years earlier. One cold, rainy day, I accompanied my
90-year old grandmother to the graveside service of her younger brother. It was
a tiny gathering at the old Washington Cemetery in Houston, TX. I come from a
very long line—seven generations in fact—of Houstonians, the earliest of whom
arrived back when Texas a republic.
The service ended, hugs were
delivered, and we got back in the car to head to her house. But as we drove
through the cemetery, I noticed that something was “off.” It was so unsettling
that I felt compelled to make another loop through the graveyard. What I
noticed was that, without any exceptions, every angel had been decapitated. All
their heads were missing.
I was haunted by it, so much
in fact that I asked my husband, Ken, to drive to Houston with me to take a
photo.
I even wrote a poem about
it.
Now, the Washington Cemetery is
old. It’s been there for a very long time. It’s likely that some of those heads
were lost to lightning, or a tree fall, or a high wind. But it’s more likely
that someone, maybe someone like the boy in my poem, stole them. And that led
me to investigate the very lucrative black
market in stolen cemetery statuary. Yes, it really is a thing.
All of this led me to ask this
question: what would it be like for a boy who has a dark secret to fall for a
girl who is fundamentally good? How could that possibly play out? Would there
ultimately be any hope for a relationship like that? What would it look like?
From those initial questions,
I created Soleil Broussard (Sweet Believer) and Cade Curtis (Angel Thief).
They form the contemporary
timeline of the novel. There is another timeline that is set in pre-Civil War
Houston. I want to tell you about that too, but right now, I have to feed the
cats. Stay tuned.
