The Iron Ring by Lloyd Alexander and Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black – an interview with Roshani Chokshi

Podcast #054

For my fifty-fourth Dream Gardens kid lit podcast, I interviewed author Roshani Chokshi about the children’s novel The Iron Ring by Lloyd Alexander and the YA novel Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black.

Published in  1997, The Iron Ring is a middle grade fantasy novel that draws from Indian mythology to tell the story of Tamar, a king who loses a game of dice with a mysterious stranger. Because of his adherence to the precepts of dharma and duty,  he makes a journey to give his life over to the stranger. Along the way he meets a variety of colorful characters and becomes embroiled in adventure and danger, all on the way to figuring out his real obligations to those who matter most to him.

Published in  2013, Tithe: A Modern Farie Tale is a young adult novel  that takes the familiar tropes of fairy stories and sets them in a contemporary urban setting. It tells the story of sixteen year old Kaye, who falls unwittingly into a center of a conflict within the fairy world where she is being offered up as a “tithe” to bind the services of the Solitary Fey to the Fairy Court Queen. But these fairies, capable of betrayal and terrible cruelties, are no storybook fairies. Even worse, Kaye is about to find out that her connection to them goes deeper than she ever suspected, and that her life will never be the same.

Roshani Chokshi is the author of the YA series The Star Touched Queen, the YA novel The Gilded Wolves, the middle grade novel Aru Shah and the End of Time, and its sequel Aru Shah and the Song of Death, which was just released this year. You can find Roshani’s
website at roshanichokshi.com.

All podcasts are available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Please link, share, comment, or subscribe. And if you are interested in participating in the Dream Gardens podcast, send me a request through my contact page.

My next podcast will be with author Darby Karchut, talking about the middle grade novel  Ranger’s Apprentice: The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan. It will be published on June 17th.

One thought on “The Iron Ring by Lloyd Alexander and Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black – an interview with Roshani Chokshi

  1. I love Alexander’s work, but had wondered if The Iron Ring was still relevant. I appreciate your insight into it now. And Flowers in the Attic… Yeah. A woman for whom I was babysitting let me borrow her copy when I was 12… And I then bought the series!

Leave a Reply