Sarah Raughley: Hi, my name is Sarah Raughley and I'm the author of The Bones of Ruin and The Song of Wrath.

The inspiration for The Song of Wrath and the whole Bones of Ruin trilogy came from some of the research that I did into the 19th century. Did you know that Europe at some point had zoos where they put people in it? People from different parts of the world, like Asia, India, Africa... And I really wanted to write a story about a girl who had had that experience but was now breaking free and trying to figure out who she was, not who they wanted her to be.

Iris Marlow is the main character of the Bones of Ruin series, and I really came up with her through research into a person named Sarah Baartman. Sarah Baartman is actually... In the 1800s, she was a princess of a region in South Africa and she was taken to Europe under false pretenses, and she was put on display in this exhibit in Piccadilly, London.

And I really wanted to think about somebody like that who had a voice. Who was Sarah? What personality did she have? What if she was a little bit sassy and fun? What if she was courageous and strong? So history doesn't really talk a lot about the personalities of these people, but I wanted to think about: who were these people really?

And Iris is a young African girl; spoilers. But I also wanted to make sure that as a young Black girl, she didn't really fit any of the stereotypes that also went along with Black characters in media. So Iris is very soft and she's very sweet and very inquisitive, and I wanted to make sure that Iris was not the kind of character that would fit into the stereotypes that unfortunately have been placed upon Black women for so many decades and decades.

The aspect of writing the Bones of Ruin trilogy that I enjoyed the most was just writing, first of all, the character interactions, because there's a lot of different characters. It's like one of those epic manga series, like Naruto or One Piece, where there's a lot of different characters and it's a lot of fun to see the characters interacting with each other to see how their relationship grows over the course of the first book and then the second book, and even the third book that's coming out soon. It's really fun to see these character interactions and the powers that they have. All these characters, or most of them, have superpowers. So seeing them fight with their superpowers, seeing the ways that they use their superpowers in every day is just a lot of fun to write.

I just want to say to my readers, to the readers of the Bones of Ruin trilogy and to my previous Effigies series, thank you so much for all of your love and support. I love hearing from fans. I love hearing from people that contact me through my website, sarahraughley.com, and who hit me up on Instagram or Twitter. You guys are the reasons why I keep going and I keep writing. So thank you so much for all of your support. I really appreciate it.