About the Book:
Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer
Kara has started a new school year without her best friend by her side. Eden has a new boyfriend and doesn’t have time for her.
Instead, Kara finds herself drawn to a friendship with Romilly, a girl from her year with no friends. The trouble is, the more Kara hangs around with Romilly, the more unsettling things start to happen. There’s the break in to her locker… the silent cold calls… and more. But can Kara be sure it’s Romilly who is derailing her life?
One thing is for sure. Someone is targeting Kara, and if she doesn’t work out why, who knows what they will do next …
Blurb taken from Goodreads. Add to your shelves here. Find on Bookshop.org (affiliate link).
About the Author:
Sue Wallman is the the daughter of a psychiatrist and a nurse, and grew up with an interest in human behaviour. She spent her awkward teenage years in Highcliffe on the south coast of England. She loved reading and did a lot of hanging about in a small town where nothing much happened.
After gaining a degree in English Literature & Publishing at Oxford Brooks University, she worked for a newspaper in Paris, and magazines in London, then became a secondary school librarian for six years. Now she is fulfilling herdream of writing and doing writing-related events full-time.
Interview:
Which author(s) inspired your love of thrillers?
I remember discovering Agatha Christie books when I was about twelve and whipping through them with absolute fascination. I loved the surprise of GONE GIRL by Gillian Flynn. Around the time I realised I wanted to try writing in a teenage voice, I was very taken with Meg Rosoff’s HOW I LIVE NOW which isn’t a thriller but has sparse, effective writing and great tension.
When you are planning your books, what elements do you need before you start writing? What typically comes first?
I always know the twist because if I didn’t, it would waste so much time. I also know key scenes and motivations for the main characters. I’ve never been able to plot too tightly – I think it’s because it sucks the joy out of it for me. I love the way you can find unexpected connections and layers as you write.
Female friendships – and their complexities – are at the heart of WATCH YOUR BACK. What drew you to focus on them for this book?
This is the first of my YA thrillers not to have a murder in it. I’m relying on building up suspense and playing into the worry of not being sure if you can trust someone. Female friendships can be extremely hard to navigate – I say that as a woman, and a mother of three daughters. When I was working as a school librarian, I witnessed a lot of distress and confusion around friendships. It can be devastating at any age but particularly brutal when you’re a teenager.
Many of your books are set in and around schools. How do you approach using the pressure cooker of social and academic expectations to add to the stakes and tension without letting it take over the narrative?
I guess it’s all in the balance. Readers want just enough detail around social and academic expectations to make it authentic. In a thriller, you want to stress your main character (it took me a while to understand just how mean you have to be to them) and one of the ways to do that is to have various forms of pressure on them in addition to the horrible thing they’re currently living through.
WATCH YOUR BACK builds tension initially through strange events occuring around Kara, things that could be shrugged off on their own but together create this deep sense of unease. How did you come up with these happenings and did these change over the course of editing the book?
After I’d written chapter 1, I sat in a café with a latte and a cinnamon swirl and wrote a list of creepy, unsettling things and how they could be explained away. With subsequent edits I refined them. I made some events unnecessarily complicated and caused logistical problems for myself – for example, when Kara’s dad trips over the wire that’s been strung across their gate, I initially had him slip on some spilt oil. One of my editors came up with something I’d never have come up with on my own (the drawings in Romilly’s flat) which got swapped with something that didn’t quite land.
Thrillers require a certain amount of misdirection so that readers can’t guess the entire solution from page one (though we all have friends who are somehow to be able to do this even though we’re stumped!) How do you balance keeping the reader guessing while not making the reveal of whodunnit feel like it comes out of nowhere?
When I do school visits, I ask students to put up their hands if they like to guess the end of a book about three-quarters of the way through. About half will put their hands up. The other half like to have the “oh my god, I didn’t see that coming” moment at the end. I have to satisfy both groups by making it possible to work it out as you’re coming into the final quarter of the book but not easily. A good way to misdirect is to hide an important detail in a load of other details so the reader doesn’t know what’s relevant and what isn’t. Some readers will pick up on them and others might be reading in more of a gulpy way and won’t.
I don’t think it’s very satisfying to guess the whole thing by chapter one. I also don’t think it’s satisfying if the villain only pops up at the end of the book. It feels like cheating to me.
There is a community award in WATCH YOUR BACK. What inspired you to include one and why did you choose to create your own version rather than use an existing award for young people?
I loosely based it on the Duke of Edinburgh Award but I didn’t need certain aspects of it (the camping for example) and I wanted to add “doing something outside your comfort zone”. There’s the risk of getting things wrong if you use something that is real and that annoys readers. I also didn’t want many students taking part which is why I had it as a new award and gave it a trying-too-hard reputation!
Please recommend a UKYA book for readers you think they’ll love
HAPPYHEAD by Josh Silver
Thank you so much, Sue, for chatting to us!
#UKYASpotlight 
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