Best known for her romantasy novels, author Tracy Wolff returns to the world of her bestselling YA fantasy series Crave in the spinoff Sweet Nightmare, the first in the Calder Academy series which centers new characters and features fan favorites from Crave. Seventeen-year-old Clementine Calder has lived her entire life on the small Gulf Coast island that houses paranormal Calder Academy. When her manticore powers begin manifesting and she starts receiving mysterious flickers of the past and future, as well as an unprecedented ability to see ghosts, she turns to dark and brooding dream daimon Jude Abernathy-Lee, and together, they uncover dark secrets about their world. Wolff spoke with PW about what inspired this new series, the differences and similarities between Calder Academy and Crave, and how her experiences during the Covid pandemic informed her writing.
Why did you decide to write a spinoff series to your Crave novels?
There are a lot of different reasons, actually. While the journey of the main characters in the Crave series is complete, there was a lot about the world that I still had questions about that I wanted to answer that I also think my fans were really curious about. So, doing a spinoff gave me the chance to play in a whole different area of this world that I had fallen in love with—and I’m so grateful that my fans have as well.
How did writing Sweet Nightmare compare to writing Crave? What did you do differently?
After writing so many books, my process is pretty much my process, but at the same time, Sweet Nightmare really kind of stretched me. I mean, Crave [Crave #1] stretched me when I wrote it five years ago, but Sweet Nightmare pulled me in a whole new direction because it’s a little scarier—I would call it horror lite. It was definitely a new area for me to write in, but I had a lot of fun diving in and exploring.
While I think that the process was similar, the tone and mood of the book are very different. Most of the Crave series was written during the pandemic, and I think it’s so interesting how the books kind of reflected where we were. In Crush [Crave #2], Hudson was trapped inside Grace’s head and just wanted out. At the time that I was writing Crush, we were all trapped in our own houses, and we wanted out. And now, we’re still dealing with the repercussions of all the things that were happening during the pandemic, and people are just trying to move on.
I think Sweet Nightmare is a book that is very indicative of the things we’re dealing with today, what with the mystical storm that triggers Clementine’s power manifestation and how that relates to our current environment. The world in which we live in 2024 is where I’m drawing inspiration from, because we’re always wondering what’s going on with the country that we live in, and so much of Sweet Nightmare is about not knowing and the introspection that comes with it. You start thinking, “What are your nightmares? What is it that you’re most afraid of? How does that play out in the world? And what happens when your power is taken away from you? How do you reclaim that power?”
Another thing is that Crave was set in Alaska while Calder Academy is set off the coast of Texas. I’m from Austin and at the end of August, we’re always saying, “We Texans aren’t afraid of hell, because we have August.” So, I went from extreme cold to extreme heat, and I think the mood and tone reflects that.
What can you tell us about the next book in the Calder Academy series?
We’re switching out heroes and heroines. The plan is that each book in the series will involve the same core set of characters but will be told from a different point of view.
I’m an only child and I moved around a lot, so family is incredibly important to me, and found family is a huge theme in all my books. And as the mother of teenagers, it’s become more apparent to me just how much peoples’ experiences of the world is within their own head. If you look at your own family, your own communities, everybody else is the hero of their own story. So, it’s very exciting to be able to mimic that, and to see how the story unfolds from the point of view of a manticore and a siren and a dragon and a witch and a vampire. Eventually, all their special powers and their experiences come together.
It’s important to me to convey this idea that you don’t have to do everything on your own. You have people who will be there with you.
So, the next book will be from a whole new couple’s point of view. We’ve already met them in Sweet Nightmare. The series just gets darker and wilder from here.
Do people need to read the Crave series before starting Sweet Nightmare?
Absolutely not. I think if you read Crave, you’ll get more insight into some of the things that are mentioned in Sweet Nightmare, but my publisher and I deliberately made sure that the series could stand on its own.
Sweet Nightmare (The Calder Academy #1) by Tracy Wolff. Entangled, $21.99 May 7 ISBN 978-1-64937-706-7
