I want to thank Brian Luster, the copy editor of so many Unwanteds books. If anyone knows my books better than me, it’s you. You save me from embarrassment by suggesting I should change gristly to grisly (good call). You fix my comma issues time after time after time. (Or is that time, after time, after time?) We have a strange relationship—we’ve never met, and we don’t communicate directly. But I’ve come to rely on you. And I’m really grateful that you’ve stuck with this series all these years. Just one more book to go! I don’t know if you’ll miss these characters, but they’ll definitely miss you. An extra-large thank you to all the others who make my manuscripts shine. In the publishing world, authors don’t often meet the people who make our books better, and we hardly know just how many hands touch these words to help tell the best story we can. I’m so grateful for all of you.
Thanks to Liesa Abrams at Aladdin, who guides the ever-growing big picture of these books. This penultimate book felt especially daring to me, and your support gave me the confidence to go for it. And thanks to the entire team at Aladdin, from editorial and education to sales, art and design to publicity and marketing. Special thanks to my publicist, Lauren Carr, for making everything easier, especially around tour time.
I’m unendingly grateful to Owen Richardson, who has stunned me with his cover illustrations a grand total of fourteen times over the past decade. Your iconic art has brought warm feelings to readers for years, and will continue to do so for years to come. When readers think back to the world of Artimé and the joy it brought them, they will picture your covers in their minds.
To Kilian McMann, who has provided various forms of art for The Unwanteds and Unwanteds Quests—posters, illustrations, pins, postcards, and art for my presentations—I’m so glad to have worked with you from the moment the idea for The Unwanteds began to form. Your dedication to your craft since then has made this journey in Artimé feel so much more special, and it has made my belief in the value of the arts that much stronger. I’m also extremely proud of you.
As always, I’m enormously thankful for my agent, Michael Bourret. Twenty-five books and counting, thanks to you. You’re simply the best.
And huge thanks to my readers. Some of you are just finding this series, others shuffled through the gate into Artimé with the debut of The Unwanteds, and still others picked it up somewhere in between. I hope you see yourself in these books, and I can’t wait for everyone to discover how it all ends in book seven.