Hello, I invite you to Maria Dracula’s blog, which is based on the character Maria Dracula from my fantasy novel for children with the same name (www.mariadracula.com).

I grew up in Eastern Europe (Bucharest, Romania). Because now I live, read, and write in North America, I invite readers and writers who grew up in various places in the world to post their thoughts about the books they read as kids and how a childhood spent in different countries and cultures influenced their writing and reading as adults.

What are the stories you love most? I will start with my own experience. Growing up in Eastern Europe, I'd read Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Brothers Grimm, Carlo Collodi, Edmondo de Amicis, Jules Verne, Hector Malot, Mark Twain, L. Frank Baum, Robert Louis Stevenson, Petre Ispirescu, and Shahrazad. They left an enduring mark on me to this day: I see the world beautiful, innocent, promising.

Maria Dracula is a coming-of-age fairy tale about a ten-year-old apprentice witch and orphan from Salem, Massachusetts, who discovers that she is the great-granddaughter of Dracula -- Maria Dracula. But this is also a fantasy book written the way stories are told in Southeastern Europe. In that part of the world surrealism supplants the gothic and Orient meets Occident in literature and art. Hence, natural elements – such as the Sun, the Moon, or the Milky Way Galaxy – are part of the adventure, and can intervene in the life of the characters at any time.

Maria Dracula is a fantastic story parents and grandparents would tell their offspring, hoping that children will learn about poetical language, and that through adventurous voyages any kid can become a hero. I guess, as writers possessing a hybrid diasporic sensibility, we instinctively bridge novelty and old style, the newly-found home and the lost one, the stories we learn as adults and the ones we've heard as kids.

Alice Rose