Honestly, I really didn't want to take on World War II France, but when I came across the story of a nineteen-year-old Belgian woman who created an escape route out of Nazi-Occupied France, I was hooked.

I love women being the heroes of the piece. There is just something so dramatic and important about this story [The Nightingale ].

[ The Nightingale ]ended up being a huge undertaking - a daunting amount of research on a subject that many people know intimately, a country I had not yet been to when I first started planning the book, an entire war.

You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.

I know I'm not normal in this, but [ Severus ] Snape is absolutely my favorite character in the Harry Potter books. He is completely mortal - good, bad, strong, weak, motivated by hatred, motivated by love. A gorgeous, compelling, complex character who definitely earns a spot at my table.

In the end, the best part of the whole book [The Nightingale ] to me was the research, reading about the courageous, ordinary French women who put their lives on the line to save others. It was really inspirational.

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.