Wrede's careful world building in her alternate-universe mid-nineteenth-century America envisioned a continent in which the first inhabitants of the continent were not our American natives, but settlers from both Europe and Africa.

Such was the unfortunate fate of Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child, the first novel in the author's trilogy of books best described as Laura Ingalls Wilder meets YA fantasy. If the controversy can make a lazy average person feel like an indignant activist between Facebook status updates-without any actual activism beyond foaming at the mouth and pounding on the laptop-everybody wants to dogpile on, say the most unkind things imaginable, and congratulate themselves for 'raising awareness' until the next meaningless auto-da-fé. It doesn't matter if the popular flavor of the month is whether a Disney princess appears in a too-feminine dress on the company's website that none of the shrieking masses visit, or whether a satire site said something unkind about a public figure whose movie almost no one saw. She has no children.Įvery few months, an Internet controversy arises that requires no more of its participants than to leap upon some minor perceived slight, fan the flames of controversy, and then bask in the blazing hot fires of self-righteous fervor. She is a vegetarian, and currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her cat Karma. Her interests include sewing, embroidery, desultory attempts at gardening, chocolate, not mowing the lawn, High Tea, and, of course, reading. In 1985, shortly before the publication of her fifth book, she left the world of the gainfully employed to try winging it on her own. It came out at last in 1982, which is the year she met Lillian Stewart Carl (who introduced her to Lois McMaster Bujold by mail). In April of 1980, Patricia's first novel sold to Ace Books. In January, 1980, Pamela Dean, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Steven Brust, Nate Bucklin, and Patricia Wrede - all, at that point, hopeful but unpublished - formed the writer's group that later became known as 'The Scribblies.' Several years later, they were joined by Kara Dalkey.

Patricia finished her first novel in late 1978. Dalton Booksellers, and finally at the Dayton Hudson Corporation headquarters. She worked for several years as a financial analyst and accountant, first with the Minnesota Hospital Association, then with B. from the University of Minnesota in 1977.

She finished it five years later and started her second book at once, having become permanently hooked on writing by this time. She began work on her first novel, Shadow Magic, just after graduating from college in 1974. She attended Carleton College in Minnesota, where she majored in Biology and managed to avoid taking any English courses at all. Patricia Collins Wrede was born in Chicago, Illinois and is the eldest of five children.

A Matter of Magic by Patricia C. Wrede