A Minnapolis author’s debut novel has been selected as Good Morning America’s book club pick for June.
“Ink Blood Sister Scribe,” a fantastical page-turner by Emma Törzs, was also the subject of a bidding war by publishers. It was released by William Morrow on Tuesday.
“It’s been a great week,” Törzs said during a chat with the Pioneer Press on Wednesday, “but let me find some wood to knock on!”
No matter what, it’s been a great start to the week for Törzs, who teaches creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul.
The buzz for Törzs’ magical tale is warranted, our book critic says.
“It doesn’t matter how many TBR books are lying on every surface of your house,” our book editor, Mary Ann Grossmann, wrote in her Readers and Writers column on Sunday. “You have to make room for this debut novel from Minneapolis author Emma Törzs. It has everything we want in summer reads — old houses, hidden staircases, messages (and corpses) sent through mirrors, likable characters, secrets that go back centuries, scribes who literally gave their lives to write magic into their books, and questions of how far family loyalty should go.”
Book club pick
ABC’s “Good Morning America” introduced the book on Tuesday during its June book club reveal.
“We’ve never done a GMA book club pick quite like this one,” said Becky Worley, a contributing correspondent for GMA.
Törzs, who describes herself as a writer, teacher and translator, described the magical read during the segment:
“Good morning, America, I’m Emma Törzs and this is ‘Ink Blood Sister Scribe,’ a novel about two estranged half sisters who were brought up to protect their family’s library of magical books,” Törzs said as she held up the hardcover. “After a decade of separation — one in Antarctica, one in Vermont — the two are brought back together after their father is mysteriously killed while reading one of his own magical volumes.
“Meanwhile, in London, a wealthy young man wonders if his life of privilege is perhaps more of a gilded cage. This is a story about family, secrets, the legacy of power, a good little dog and, of course, magic.”
You can read and listen to an excerpt at Goodmorningamerica.com.
Magical reviews
The incoming reviews for this Minnesotan’s book are magical, too:
“Emma Törzs’s ‘Ink Blood Sister Scribe’ (William Morrow, 407 pp., $30) is astonishing and pristine, the kind of debut I love to be devastated by, already so assured and sophisticated that it’s difficult to imagine where the author can go from here,” Amal El-Mohtar wrote in a review for the New York Times.
“Törzs’s lyrical, idiosyncratic prose (at one point, the sky is described as ‘so pale it seemed infected’) elevates proceedings,” writes Publishers Weekly in a starred review. “This is a must-read.”
“A fantastic magical adventure, not to be missed,” proclaimed Kirkus in its starred review.
Masschusetts, Macalester, Montana, Minneapolis
Törzs’ literary influences began at home in Massachusetts, where she grew up.
“My mom is a poet,” she says. “She taught creative writing at a community college all throughout my childhood, and she’s a huge reader. She is not published — she mostly stopped writing to focus on teaching and family — but she’s a beautiful writer.”
When she started college, Törzs didn’t plan to follow in her mother’s path.
“Macalester brought me here,” she says, “but I majored in cultural studies, not English.”
Later, she changed her mind. After graduating from Macalester in 2009, Törzs headed west to Missoula in 2010 to earn a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Montana in Missoula. Now 36, Törzs returned to Minnesota to settle in a home in South Minneapolis that she shares with roommates.
“I came back to my community here,” she says. “I really love Minneapolis a lot.”
She is also trying to get to know St. Paul better, she says, beyond the campus of Macalester, the private liberal-arts college where she is a professor, teaching the art of creative writing to undergraduates.
Pandemic novel
Although this is her first published novel, Törzs has other published works. In fact, that’s how her agent, Claudia Ballard with WME, discovered her.
“She first reached out to me about a short story I wrote,” Törzs says.
(That short story, “Come the Revolution,” was published in Ploughshares, a literary journal, in Winter 2012-13.)
Years later, Törzs took a break from her usual literary genre to get away from reality.
“During the pandemic, I was alone a lot more,” she says. “I was not alone the way others were — I have roommates — but I was not getting up and going to work. I’m normally a very busy, busy person; I was not busy for a year and a half. It really is a pandemic novel — although I didn’t realize that until afterward — in that all three of the main characters are very isolated; there’s a sense of isolation and phobia and fear, feelings we experienced during the pandemic.”
It wasn’t a gloomy writing process, though: She recalls feeling excited to work on it every day, to escape into this world she was creating.
“I had so much fun writing it,” she says. “I was really excited about it.”
It was a playful experience.
“I wanted the book to feel like a mix of the genres I like to read,” she says. “I really like all genres of fiction and I read very, very widey — literary, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction …”
For a time, though, the real world pulled her back: She lives near where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020.
“I couldn’t write a single word for four months,” she says.
The power of Pilates
In the summer of 2021, after Torzs finished her book, she nervously submitted it to her agent.
“I had never written a fantasy novel before,” she says. “She was my agent for literary realism — I was scared she was going to fire me.”
Spoiler: She didn’t!
“She loved it!” Törzs says.
Ballard shepherded the book through a bidding war; there’s also interest in the movie rights.
At what point did she realize that her book was going to be big?
“I don’t know if I’ve realized it even today,” she says. “But I knew it was a priority for my editors and publisher because they paid a lot of money for it, frankly.”
She’s not sure if she can say how much, but here’s how she generally characterizes the effects of her literary paycheck:
“I started going to Pilates, that was the big change,” she says. “It’s really expensive!”
‘Ink Blood Sister Scribe’ book launch
- What: Emma Törzs will launch her debut novel locally during an in-person event (masks required).
- When: 6 p.m. Thursday, June 1
- Where: Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis.
- Information: Moonpalacebooks.com/events.