Author Event: Bend authors Kristina Bak and Kerry Chaput discuss their new books

This is a ticketed event requiring a $5 fee or purchase of the book. Fees and books can be purchased through Eventbrite. 

Cold Mirage is the second book in my YA Stevie series, with a third due in 2023. Stevie has come a long way since I introduced her as a sixteen-year-old with a secret gift searching for her disappeared father in Nowever. The most dangerous thing Stevie can imagine at seventeen is other people learning she can heal pain with a touch of her hand. But secrets are slippery things, and the worst people already know hers, or think they do. In Cold Mirage Stevie battles her worst nightmares, and bizarre enemies from her past, with two new allies (whose gifts are even stranger than her own), and their cats.

The novels in my Stevie series are for readers age 12 to 112, or beyond. Some readers describe them as “cinematic,” which makes sense because what I create comes to me first as a movie in my mind. My fiction deals with the world we live in and its often unseen, but not unreal qualities. The strange and unexpected–metaphysical gifts, hauntings, natural phenomena–blend with the ordinary in the adventures of Stevie, her friends, and animal companions. We all contain mysteries, maybe some even stranger than Stevie’s, and like her, we have to find strength to trust and believe in ourselves. It’s been a lifetime search for me; I hope my books inspire others.

Kristina Bak grew up in the Pacific Northwest, dropped out of Reed College in 1969, and spent enough years hiking in the North Cascades to graduate from Western Washington University in Bellingham. She explored utopias via Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti and the University of New Mexico. A graduate degree in architecture at the University of Washington earned her a Fulbright year in Rome before she moved to Australia with her husband and six-month-old daughter for three years. Back in the US, the family lived on Bainbridge Island until Kristina graduated from Antioch, Seattle, with an MA in psychology. They moved to Bend, Oregon, in 1993. Since that time, Kristina has worked as a mental health therapist, taught qigong, and sojourned in Sydney again as a ghostwriter, among other things. She took her first Argentine Social Tango class in 2010, and like countless others, is addicted to the dance.

Chasing Eleanor – Newly orphaned Magnolia Parker must protect her sick little brothers, but when the authorities send the boys to an unknown orphan asylum, Magnolia calls on her unwavering grit to bring them home. She’s lost everything but still has a secret weapon—a promise from Eleanor Roosevelt, the most famous woman in America. Setting out on a cross-country quest, she befriends two unlikely travelers: Hop, a migrant worker with a big heart, and Red, a young girl traumatized into silence. Hunger and dust storms aren’t the only dangers this found family faces on the rails. After an assault, they’re forced to outrun the police, all while trying to track down the First Lady. But time is running out and Magnolia’s chance to reunite her siblings depends on one thing—finding Eleanor.

Kerry Chaput is an award-winning historical fiction author who believes in the power of stories that highlight young women and found families. Her debut, Daughter of the King, continues to place as a best-seller in Historical French Fiction, with the sequel set to release in March, 2023. Born and raised in California, she now lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, where she can be found on hiking trails and in coffee shops.