BOOKS

East Texas native

to release YA dark fantasy romance

BY STELLA WIESER | swieser@panolawatchman.com

East Texas native Kate Pentecost is releasing her second book Oct. 19, and it's a book she's dreamed of writing since she was a child.

Pentecost wrote the first version of the story, titled "That Dark Infinity," when she was 12. "I spent a long time trying to perfect this story," she said. "This one is the one that taught me how to write a book. So I worked on this one all through college and through grad school, trying to get it to be sort of perfect. Well, trying to get it to be what I wanted it to be. So it's really an important book to me because it grew up with me. So for that reason, I'm really glad that it was published, because a lot of authors' first books are not published. They’re seen as like practice or that kind of thing."

The book, targeted at young adult audiences, is about an immortal mercenary called the Ankou who is cursed to die and resurrect every day. "As the years go by and he doesn't age and can't die, he gets pretty depressed; he is looking for a way to die permanently," Pentecost said. "So he and Flora, a handmaiden of a princess of a nation that has been sacked, are on their way to the Temple of Fates, where one of them can achieve their deepest wish. So Flora, it would be to have her country, her people back, and for the Ankou, it would be to finally have his curse broken."

Pentecost grew up in Deadwood and graduated from Carthage High School in 2006 before attending Panola College and moving away in 2008. Her mother taught at Carthage ISD for many years, and her grandmother used to work at Panola College when it was founded. Pentecost currently lives in Houston.

She was inspired to start writing by her mother and her English teachers at Carthage ISD growing up. "She (Pentecost's mother) was a first grade teacher who did a lot with reading and literacy, so whenever I would come to her classroom, whenever I would walk to her classroom after school, I would just sit down in her little reading section and I would just read," she said. "I would read all the picture books that she had, and so I'd go to the library with all the paintings on the walls, like 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' and 'Jack and the Beanstalk' and stuff, and it was just the world that I grew up in. I decided from a very, very young age that I specifically wanted to write children's books."

Pentecost released her first book, "Elysium Girls," last year in April. It's a young adult historical fantasy novel set in Dust Bowl Oklahoma. "I released the first book during the pandemic, so sales were kind of affected by the fact that I wasn't able to do in person events and stuff like that, so this one I really don't know what to expect because I haven't ever released a book under normal conditions, and I don't know that I will debut this book under normal conditions," she said. "In Houston I have an event scheduled for Oct. 30 at the Blue Willow Bookshop, and then I have another one scheduled; I'm going to be in Washington, D.C. and I'm doing to go to the Imaginarium Book Festival, and I have a lot of Zoom events.

The book, published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, will be available to purchase anywhere you can buy books.

COURTESY PHOTO

East Texas native Kate Pentecost will release her second novel in

October. The story,

“That Dark Infinity,” follows an immortal mercenary who is cursed to die and resurrect every day.