Blog Tour: These Fleeting Shadows by Kate Alice Marshall (Interview!)

Happy Saturday and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for THESE FLEETING SHADOWS! I’m so excited because today I have an interview with Kate Alice Marshall to share with you! This book is truly amazing and I’m so excited to for you to find out more about it!

These Fleeting Shadows by Kate Alice Marshall
Published on August 9, 2022 by Viking Books for Young Readers
Genres: Contemporary, Horror, Queer, YA
Pages: 336
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Author Links: Website, Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram

The Haunting of Hill House meets Knives Out in a bid for an inheritance that will leave Helen Vaughan either rich...or dead.
Helen Vaughan doesn't know why she and her mother left their ancestral home at Harrowstone Hall, called Harrow, or why they haven't spoken to their extended family since. So when her grandfather dies, she's shocked to learn that he has left everything—the house, the grounds, and the money—to her. The inheritance comes with one condition: she must stay on the grounds of Harrow for one full year, or she'll be left with nothing.
There is more at stake than money. For as long as she can remember, Harrow has haunted Helen's dreams—and now those dreams have become a waking nightmare. Helen knows that if she is going to survive the year, she needs to uncover the secrets of Harrow. Why is the house built like a labyrinth? What is digging the holes that appear in the woods each night?And why does the house itself seem to be making her sick?
With each twisted revelation, Helen questions what she knows about Harrow, her family, and even herself. She no longer wonders if she wants to leave…but if she can.

What would you do if you spent the day with Helen? Where would you go to eat, hang out, relax, etc.?

Helen isn’t allowed to leave the grounds of Harrow for a year, so we’d be pretty stuck. A nice picnic by the folly would be nice, assuming it didn’t get interrupted by predatory shadows, and then we could go peruse the occult books in the Vaughan family library before locking ourselves in for the night. It isn’t safe to wander the halls after dark, after all.

If Helen were to hang out with other fictional characters, who would they be and why?

Helen has a very hard time making friends, but I suspect she and Sophia from Our Last Echoes would find they have a great deal in common, if they sat down to chat. Both of them are rather misunderstood, and have had a paranormal influence on their lives from a very early age…

What was your favorite bit of research you ended up not using?

There’s a whole ton of completely bonkers 19^th-century occultism that I read about but couldn’t possibly work into the book. There was this fad during the period where women claimed to be able to project their consciousness anywhere in the world; it was employed repeatedly to search for the lost Franklin expedition in the arctic. Annalise Vaughan does something similar in These Fleeting Shadows, though she’s traveling to other worlds, and it actually works. 

What is your favorite quote, scene, or moment from These Fleeting Shadows?

I have a lot of favorites, so it’s hard to pick! But I think that my absolute favorite chapter is one in which Helen, having discovered that she is sleepwalking, manages to wake herself up in the middle of the night, and finds herself in the halls of Harrow at night. She comes across a creature called the Folded, and learns that it isn’t the only dangerous thing at Harrow…

What do you think about These Fleeting Shadows? Have you added it to your tbr yet? Let me know in the comments and have a splendiferous day!