I am so grateful to Ellen Holgate and Lucy Mackay-Sim at Bloomsbury Children’s Books for supporting me and my work and pushing me to aim higher and higher every time with your thoughtful edits and incisive questions. My books are so much better because of both of you! And thank you so much to my agent, Molly Ker Hawn, for being the best partner in publishing that I could ever imagine. I’m so lucky to be able to call my agent a friend.
Thank you to Jenn Reese, Patrick Samphire, Aliette de Bodard, Dave Burgis, Rene Sears, and Jamie Samphire for beta-reading chapters as I wrote them at various stages of this process. Thank you to Rene Sears, Aliette de Bodard, Ben Burgis, and David Burgis for giving me fantastic feedback on the first chapters and proposal for this book, and to Claire Fayers and Patrick Samphire for their wonderful critiques of the full first draft.
Thank you to my wonderful American editor, Sarah Shumway; to my copy editors, Susan Hom and Kaitlin Severini; and to the whole Bloomsbury team, including Erica Barmash, Faye Bi, Lily Yengle, Beth Eller, Jasmine Miranda, designer John Candell, and brilliant cover artist Petur Antonsson.
Thank you to Jamie and Ollie Samphire for illustrating my hard-copy manuscript with perfect, thoughtful drawings that gave me inspiration as I wrote, and for sharing so many wonderful conversations with me about what animals we would all turn into if we had Cordelia’s powers.
Thank you to Tricia Sullivan for putting me up and feeding me homemade chocolate chip cookies while I wrestled my way through a difficult part of the first draft. Thank you to Patrick Samphire, Y. S. Lee, and Tiffany Trent for a wonderful, nourishing writing retreat that helped me make so much progress on my manuscript, and thank you to my parents for the generous childcare that made that retreat possible.
Thank you so much to everyone on Facebook who answered my bat-signal (bird-signal?) and gave me fantastic suggestions on the birds that Cordelia would see and/or hear in her woods: Sorrel Jones, Lindsay Glasspool, Kathy Burgis, Freda Warrington, Sarah Pitt, Katya Coupland, Cecilia Busby, Ashley and Alexandra Roumbas Goldstein, Nicky Hopkins, Dave Chetwynd, Elizabeth Williamson, Teryn Raptor Dear, Helen Hall, Matt Daubney, and Stephanie Maurer Whelan and her Terry Pratchett group.
(PS: Any mistakes that I’ve made, anyway, are entirely my own!)
Thank you to all of my Slack and private Facebook group colleagues for moral support, cheering-on, pen and ink recommendations, and company along the way. It made a huge difference!
Thank you so much to my brothers, Ben and David Burgis, for moral support along the way. There’s a reason why I write so many siblings into my books! We may live in different parts of the world nowadays—and there may be times when we’ve squabbled every bit as much as the triplets in this novel!—but when it’s the middle of the night and I’m scared, you are always the first ones I think to reach out to, because I know that the three of us are a lifelong team—and that means the world to me.
And thank you so much to my parents, Richard and Kathy Burgis, for teaching me what family means and providing me with so much love and support even when we’re separated by an ocean. I have been so lucky with my family.