Would you please talk about The Two Princesses of Bamarre? How did you come up with the idea of princess sisters? Do you have a sister?

I came up with the idea of princess sisters because when I started writing, I thought the book was going to be a novelized version of the fairy tale The Twelve Dancing Princesses. There are princess sisters in that story, twelve of them. I cut the number down to three, but I ran into other problems. There are mysteries in the fairy tale that I couldn’t figure out, so the book gradually transformed itself into another story entirely, an original fairy tale, and the number of sisters dwindled further to just two.

I do have a sister. Her name is Rani, and she’s five and a half years older than I am. We shared a room when we were kids, which did not promote friendship between us. What we each wanted was privacy, and instead we got each other. Our relationship was more like Wilma’s relationship with her sister in The Wish. Rani and I are good friends now, though. So the inspiration for the sisters didn’t come from us as children, but I think our adult selves do have something to do with it.