Daughter of Light | Slayer of Gods | Father of Night |
Daughter of Light | Slayer of Gods | Father of Night |
The Story Behind It…
Garrett conceived Daughter of Light on a hot July day before his eighth grade school year. Almost fourteen, with a head full of fantasy stories.
That 2015 draft of Daughter of Light, his first completed novel, was a 70,000 word dumpster fire. What followed was the sequel, originally titled Scars of the Sea. Garrett worked on the sequel for two years in high school, until it was a 200,000 word beast. He looked at what he had created and thought, “This is a mess.”
So, his senior year of high school, he did what any sane person would do: he rewrote Daughter of Light from scratch. After an early high school graduation/COVID-19 lockdown, he buckled down and revised his brand new draft with the intention of querying it with literary agents.
He edited. No agents bit. Edited again. Still, nothing.
So he shelved it. A story he loved, that he had committed four years to honing. A complex tale of light and dark, of fire and water, of a lost daughter and a scared prince.
Summer 2021, after writing the first draft of what would become Whispers of Ink and Starlight, Garrett decided to take Daughter of Light the indie route.
Daughter of Light was officially published in March 2022, with the sequel Slayer of Gods in 2023, and the conclusion Father of Night in 2024.
The series was short-listed for the Publishers Weekly Selfies Award and is being translated into German, Spanish, and Italian.
(Pictured left is the original map, drawn by Garrett at 13, and below is the final map done in 2021 by his cousin JoJo Elliott.
Cover art by the incredible Eloïse Leibnitz-Armstrong.
Eileen is a Warlock with an affinity for water, using her power to protect her village in Mohana from an invading army. Despised by her companions, feared by her leaders, and hunted by her enemies, Eileen’s life only becomes more dangerous when Prince Finn Hadar, as punishment for a recent crime, is sent by his father to kidnap her. Desperate to make his father proud, he embarks on a quest through the arduous Red Desert and the misty mountains of Mohana.
Finn’s crime is Ciara, a servant and his forbidden love, who he must abandon on his journey into the mountainous north. But Ciara only showed him a sliver of her dark past: a life of secrets and monsters she’s had to suppress…until now.
As their lives intersect, separate, and braid like thread, Finn, Eileen, and Ciara are again and again pushed to their breaking points by the threat of war, blood-thirsty rulers, and their own pasts. The life they’ve always known is behind them and the new world they’re thrown into is wrapped in a turbulent network of intrigue, love, gods, and war.
Daughter of Light is for ages 14 and up due to graphic violence and some romance. This trilogy is perfect for fans of Victoria Aveyard’s Realm Breaker and Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (A.K.A. people who like chunky books) by weaving threads of friendship and romance into an expansive, character-driven story of adventure and war.
Beware of lies, for they can be deadly. And even enemies can become allies.
More art by Eloïse Leibnitz-Armstrong
Serilda and Eileen in Slayer of Gods
Eileen with the Father