Please welcome character Catharine Gredarato our blog today!She is the star of the book The Universal MirrorCreated by Gwen Perkins
Welcome Catharine! So glad you could come visit with us today.
So, Catharine, please introduce yourself and tell us about the story you star in.
My name is Catharine Gredara and I survived the Plagues.
Wow.... Seriously?
I say this first because it is the first—and last—thing that anyone notices about me. The illness left me scarred outside and in. I am proud of those marks in public—I pull my hair back so that everyone can see the damage to my face and I walk as tall as I can so that the world knows I am not afraid of my own ugliness.
That takes a lot of strength, and good for YOU!In private, however, there are times in which I doubt myself. I see what is left of the child that I was beneath the marks and I wonder whether it is possible for anyone, even my husband Quentin, to love what they cannot bear to see. I can't let my own doubt control my life, however, and so I try as well as I can to fight it.
This sounds like a very painful journey for you.
The Universal Mirror is the story of how Quentin tries to find a way to heal me, not knowing that his battle will take him into the depths of the city. He and his friend Asahel turn grave robber as they search for ways to experiment with healing without doing harm.
Wow... grave robbing?
In the process, they discover that the Plagues themselves are part of a much larger cycle and that, in order to save people like me, they must risk their own lives in doing what is right. Quentin's adventures take him through the criminal underworld of Cercia, into palace ballrooms, and towards death itself.
This seems like a very intense and powerful story Catharine.
We all want to be different, so what is the one thing you wish your creator had done differently with you?
I wish that I would have found it in myself to be more tender to those around me. A lifetime of mistrust doesn't breed a gentle nature, however. To change that part of myself would be to erase my history and I've never believed in that kind of erasure.
Erasing your history would have had a serious impact on your story.
If you could have added something to the story, and your creator would have let you, what would that have been?
To tell my story from its beginning and explain what it was like to grow up as a young woman in a place that doesn't appreciate women as equal to the men around them.There is much yet to uncover about Cercia, particularly in how magic interacts with people like me and I hope that she shows this in future tales.
What do you love best about yourself? What do you like least?I love most of all my independence and the fact that, in spite of the world that I live in, I haven't yet broken and become the woman that I'm expected to be. When I think of what I like the least, it isn't what others would expect of me. The plagues destroyed my beauty but I have little regret for that now as it made me the person that I am. What I regret, however, is my inability to believe others when they tell me that it matters as little to them as it does to me.
I wonder if you will ever learn that this can be possible...
What part of the book was the hardest for you and your creator to work through?
Watching my husband commit progressively more destructive acts in an attempt to save something that I never wanted him to save—my physical appearance. It hurt terribly to realize that he believed that was something that mattered to me so intensely when it did not.
That sounds like it would hard to deal with.
Is there a sequel for this book? If so, what do you want to accomplish in the next book. If not, do you wish you could continue your story?
My creator is writing the second book and intends for The Universal Mirror to be the first of a series, Artifacts of Empire. I'm not featured in the second book but I will be the main character of the third in which two characters return home to find that my husband, Quentin, is now the ruler of our nation. My life with him becomes difficult as his quest for power begins to transform him into a man that we both hated. All that I can hope for is that I'm able to pull him away from this quest in time to save not only our marriage but our country.
Sounds like some very big plans in the future. Thank you so much for visiting today and for sharing this with us!
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