The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game, #1)(100)
Many of the settings in The Crown’s Game were inspired by my trip to Russia in 2003, when I took a cruise along the Volga River from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. I remember seeing the shimmering wooden church on Kizhi Island and thinking it must have been constructed by magic—now it is indeed magical, as one of the locations in Nikolai’s Dream Benches.
And, of course, there is Saint Petersburg . . . perhaps I love it because one of my dearest friends lives there, or perhaps it’s because one can’t help but fall for the beautiful capital. Most of Vika, Nikolai, and Pasha’s Saint Petersburg is based on the actual city, from Ekaterinsky Canal to Nevsky Prospect, from the bronze statue of Peter the Great to the Winter Palace. The waterways and rivers are real as well, as is the Neva Bay and the many small islands linked by bridges and ferries that form the capital city.
However, both Vika’s home, Ovchinin Island, and the new island she creates are figments of my imagination. I like to think, though, that they’d fit right in with the actual islands that dot the Neva Bay.
I do have to confess we took artistic license with the cover of The Crown’s Game. The buildings in the crown would not have existed in 1825, but after many iterations, the team at Harper and I decided that this version best captured the essence of Vika and Nikolai’s story. I hope the historians among my readers will forgive me this transgression.
As for whether the magic in The Crown’s Game is real, well . . . that depends. Do you believe in what you cannot see?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I first came up with the idea for The Crown’s Game, I emailed a few of my friends and said sheepishly, “So, hey, I started writing this crazy fantasy about two enchanters in a deadly duel who fall into impossible, bittersweet love, and it’s all set in magical, Imperial Russia. . . .” I wasn’t sure how they’d respond, but I was pretty sure it would involve good-natured laughing along the lines of, There goes Evelyn on another nutty whim. But instead, all three responded immediately and emphatically with, YES. Yes, yes, yes, write it. So thank you, Stacey Lee, Sean Byrne, and Jeanne Schriel, not only for your friendship over the years but also for telling me to chase this idea and make it real. The Crown’s Game would not exist without you.
Thank you to my agent, Brianne Johnson, for loving Vika and Nikolai from page one, and for your gushiness and your sharp editorial insights and your mirrored Instagram pictures of your cat. Many thanks, too, to Cecilia de la Campa and Soumeya Roberts of Writers House, for bringing The Crown’s Game overseas, and to Dana Spector at Paradigm Talent Agency for giving Vika and Nikolai a tour of Hollywood.
I cannot express enough gratitude to my brilliant and tireless editor, Kristin Rens, for helping me make this story bigger and brighter (and also darker) than I ever imagined possible. Kristin, you are the enchantress of publishing. Thank you to Alessandra Balzer and Donna Bray for championing The Crown’s Game from the very start. To Joel Tippie and Alison Donalty for the breathtaking, perfect cover. To Kelsey Murphy, Jon Howard, Nellie Kurtzman, Caroline Sun, Megan Barlog, EpicReads, and the Harper sales team—I am so lucky to have you on my team.
Special thanks to Professor Richard Schupbach of Stanford University and his colleague Anna Bogomyakova for their expertise (and amusing emails) on nineteenth-century Russian swearwords. And to all my other professors and teachers at Stanford, for being there as I fell in love with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Russia’s history.
This journey would not have been possible without the love, laughter, and wisdom from my writing family: Stacey Lee, Sara Raasch, Emily Martin, Sabaa Tahir, Monica Bustamante-Wagner, Tracy Edward Wymer, Anna Shinoda, Lara Perkins, Sean Byrne, Morgan Shamy, Hafsah Faizal, Dana Elmendorf, Elizabeth Briggs, Betsy Franco, Karen Akins, Karen Grunberg, and Puja Batra. I owe you an infinity of cookies. And ice cream.
Thank you to Denis Ovchinin, my Russian pen pal since we were teens. For you, Den, I created an entire island. I hope you like it.
Thank you to Kevin Hsu and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for your faith that one day, my words would become a real book.
To Paul, Dawn, and Karl Ehrlich, thank you for always cheering me on.
Enormous thanks to the Tsar’s Guard! Your enthusiasm and devotion have made this one heck of a year. The tsar could not have a better army in his service.
Eternal love to Andrew and Margaret Hsu, the very best parents a girl could ask for. Thank you for never setting a curfew, for letting me major in something as “impractical” as Russian literature and history, and for always encouraging my writing. I cannot wait to place this book—this real book!—in your hands. I love you more than you can ever know.
And last, but most important of all, thank you to Reese, for humoring me when my mind wandered to imperial Russia in the middle of breakfast, for spending weeks drawing a book cover for me, and for being proud of me and showering me with hugs and kisses. You are magic. You are the light of my life. And guess what? I love you!