Sarah Henning’s latest YA novel The Lies We Conjure is Knives Out with magic

Photo Courtesy of Sarah Henning

Lawrence YA author Sarah Henning‘s new book, The Lies We Conjure, combines the fantasy of her Kingdoms of Sand & Sky trilogy  with the modern setting of her sports books such as Throw Like A Girl, with a swirl of magic and mystery. And by mystery, we mean that literally. Pitched as “Knives Out meets The Inheritance Games with magic,” the novel—out this week from Tor Teen—has it all: “thirteen witches, a locked-room murder, and two non-magical sisters trapped in a deadly game of Clue.”

The Lies We Conjure is the sort of book you pick up, start reading, and when you have to put it down to go to bed or get ready for work, get intensely furious regarding the fact that you can’t just immerse yourself in the world Henning has created without pause until you’ve finished. The tale is about Ruby and her sister Wren, recruited to pretend to be a woman’s granddaughters for a weekend turns into a bloody series of riddles, as they race against time to discover how to escape from Hegemony Manor, a magical estate in the Colorado mountains.

With its alternating perspectives, switching between non-magical Ruby and Auden, a member of one of the four families gathered at Hegemony for their annual gathering. The Lies We Conjure is just as much fun to read for grownups as it is for young adults. Full of twists, turns, and displays of powers the sisters never knew existed, Henning has crafted a novel which plays out like a movie in your head.

Sarah Henning’s tour for The Lies We Conjure kicks off Monday, Sept. 16, at Best of Books in Edmond, Oklahoma, with the author in conversation with The Inheritance Games‘ own Jennifer Lynn Barnes and wraps up in conversation with Megan Bannen at Rainy Day Books on Friday, Sept. 20. Ahead of her tour and the book’s release, we sat down with Sarah Henning to discuss her writing process and how The Lies We Conjure came to be.

The Pitch: You’re an ultra-marathoner. I know some runners use the time to just blank slate everything, and they just focus on themselves with one foot in front of the other, but other folks use it as a way to just like, “Oh, I get this time to myself, no distractions. I can just work through everything in my head.” What’s it like for you?

Sarah Henning: I mean, I’ve always been a runner, but when I really started taking this seriously and got an agent, my run time in the morning was the time I had alone and a lot of my work time was in the morning when my kids were small. I’d get up at 4:15, I’d run six miles, think about what I was going to do for the day. I’d even stop and do notes on the side of the road, in the dark. I’m sure anyone driving by was like, “What’s wrong with you?”

Then, I would go home, I would turn on the coffee pot, and I’d write from basically 5:30 until 7 or whenever my kids distracted me. Then, I’d go on with my work day because I still worked 40, 50, 60 hours for workweeks at a normal job—whatever I can get done in those small increments during the workweek.

On the weekends, in the afternoons, that was my time to cram everything I’ve been thinking about for the whole week. So I definitely use the running time as writing time or at least subconsciously think through things. Sometimes, now, I listen to audiobooks and I’ll accidentally stop listening because I’m thinking about my own plot. And that’s my cue to like, “Oh I should just listen to my playlist for this book.”

I’ve been a full time writer for four years, but I still get up that early because I’m still used to having that time to myself and I guard it like a dragon.

When you work in any sort of creative field at all, it’s very important to just have that ‘you time,’ even if you’re not using it for that particular thing.

Thinking is the big part of writing, and we always talk about writing because we want to ask about your process, but really, we never talk about revision as much, and that’s where a lot of that problem solving happens, not necessarily the writing and thinking what’s coming next. It’s like, “How do I solve this problem?”

That’s why I have this giant running notes app for each story I’m working on. I have it pinned to the top so that I can just get in there and thumb tap it out, whatever. I think it may be just how my brain works. I just have to get it. I really like to handwrite notes. I have the whiteboard in my office and I’d rather handwrite the whole thing than type it, but my handwriting is terrible, so sometimes I handwrite it and then I type it.

Playlists for the book? What was the playlist for The Lies We Conjure like?

It has like, 70 songs. I actually had to go through this because I’m doing a conference in Nov. where the moderator wanted songs from our playlist and I had to find the ones without expletives, which is surprising to me because there’s a lot of Olivia Rodrigo. She cusses a lot for somebody that young.

Honestly, Taylor Swift’s “Delicate” was a big part of this because it’s about finding somebody at your lowest point. A lot of the characters in The Lies We Conjure are at their lowest point, so I thought about that song quite a bit. There’s also a lot of Beatles. Freedy Johnson, “Bad Reputation.” It’s all about reputation, apparently.

I have ’em for all of my books, and there are some songs that get used for each of ’em, but I definitely have playlists where I kind of give the vibe. I don’t listen to music while I write. But around writing, in the car, when I’m running.

This book has the fantasy, world-building elements of your Kingdoms of Sand & Sky series, but, at its heart, it is about kids dealing with stuff, which is how your big sports books have gone.

Yeah, it was my first time getting to write fantasy in today’s world and exploring that inside the secondary world, which was really fun.

Where do you start? With the plot, or do you have ideas for this world, or are they just so intertwined?

I think my world building is more piecemeal. My friend Tessa Gratton, who’s a Lawrence writer, will build out an entire world. Her brain is expansive, and then she’ll figure out what story goes in the world. My brain will never work that way. I’m always so impressed when she talks about world building, ’cause I feel like I find a lot of my world and my characters on the page, so I do think about plot first.

Like, this book from the beginning was “Knives Out with magic.” I actually have a background in writing murder mysteries. That’s where I got my first agent. Never sold one. I always kind of wanted to return to mystery. Karen McManus and Holly Jackson have really done a great job of bringing contemporary mystery to like the forefront of YA right now and sold so many books and made mystery lovers out of so many people, so, when Knives Out came out, as somebody who’s read all the Agatha Christie and everything, I love seeing the reaction to that movie. I’ve read plenty of closed room murder mysteries, but seeing moviegoers react to it, and it being so well done and modern, I was like, “Yes, I love that people are loving this, and get it, and I want to do that, but with magic,” and that’s what happened.

There’s a real sense of place in this book. Did you make a map? It feels like you have one somewhere, on a whiteboard or something.

Yeah, a terrible map. Yeah, that would be me. There’s not a map in the book. There’s not going to be a map in the finished copy, but you do have this idea of these grounds that are 10,000 acres in Colorado. And then this old-timey mansion that has a courtyard in the middle and some other weird elements to it.

The Renn Fest where the sisters are recruited into this whole thing feels like that is very much taken from here.

Yes, because when I was in high school, they would recruit from my drama department. I went to Shawnee Mission North. It’s so much fun. One of the more recent times we went, we ran into one of the daycare providers from Hilltop, where my daughter was in preschool, and she had to keep a straight face and the British accent the whole time. The kids were just on her. She’s trying not to break, and it’s like we are just making her life hell every time we run into her.

That idea of having to maintain a mask in wild circumstances, that’s the very plot of this book.

Yeah, one sister is game to do this and the other one is like, “I don’t know how I got into this at all.”

How difficult was it to switch perspectives between the two narrators?

The book is told from Ruby’s point of view—Ruby is one of the sisters who’s not magical, who gets talked into pretending to be someone she’s not at a dinner party—and Auden, who’s one of the witches. I really enjoyed both perspectives because with Ruby, you almost get the audience perspective, like what it would be like for a normal person to be stuck inside and then Auden gives you the real stakes of what’s happening, which helps avoid an info dump and keeps you entertained.

It was really fun trying to figure out who should be the point of view and how it should work and then also figuring out ways that they could get to know each other without giving you the same information all the time. You don’t want the same scene from two points of view.

What led you to go with the different types of magic?

There’s four different types of magics—celestial magic, blood magic, elemental magic, and death magic. I just thought it’d be kind of an interesting way to set up things that felt siloed but aren’t because, as you go along in the story, you realize that their lines of magic are not that different. There’s a reason that they joined together to protect themselves. I just thought it’d be cool to do it that way.

I mean, there’s plenty of authors who’ve done it all different types of ways. But I thought it made sense that these things would go together, and that they’d want to each be their own little captain. Then, they’d have somebody in charge of the whole thing and they’d have problems with that, like anybody in a power structure would.

I have a feeling that when folks get to read this, everybody is going to have their favorite part of, whether it’s “I like the scavenger hunt part,” or “I like the murder mystery part,” or “I like the absolute craziness of everything together.”

See, I want it to be fun. I just wanted people to have fun. It’s not supposed to be any deep anything. Just have a good time.

Sarah Henning’s The Lies We Conjure is out this week from Tor Teen. She appears in conversation with Megan Bannen at Rainy Day Books on Friday, September 20. Details on that event here.