Book Title: THE WEB OF TIME by Flavia Brunetti
Category: YA Fiction (Ages 13-17), 298 pages
Genre: Grounded Fantasy
Publisher: Blue House Literary
Release date: May 2025
Content Rating: G + M: While this is fully G, it does touch on matters including physical abuse and trauma. This is done in a very gentle way, but perhaps worth noting.
Far beneath the ground, a web quietly spins. The threads are keeping time, marking history. What’s done is done. Until now.
Protected by the gods and powering the three Great Portals of Art, Language, and Kindness, The Web of Time rearranges itself as humans change their minds, fall in love, or cause empires to rise and fall. When the Great Portals close from the world, time begins erasing itself, histories start to disappear, Earth falls into chaos, and the gods don’t know how to stop it—until Jack meets Anna.
Anna is a passionate and solitary writer who is protected by her companion, Nafusa of Libya, the cat god. When Jack, a young painter harboring a traumatic past, falls through the Great Portal of Art in Tunis, he stumbles into Anna, and his fate.
Helped and hindered by a rotating cast of deities, the two embark on a journey that connects three ancient cities in different times: Rome, Tunis, and Tripoli. They realize that it is Anna’s gift for healing words and Jack’s natural talent for drawing places as they were that can reinstate the Great Portals and restore the world’s balance, but some of the darker gods who thrive on chaos will stop at nothing to derail their quest. As time tears faster than they can heal it, Anna and Jack must come together in time to save history, and the possibility of a future.
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Born just outside of Rome, Flavia grew up bouncing back and forth between Italy and California and has lived between a myriad other countries, so her writing often revolves around place and identity and is usually written on a plane where she inevitably apologizes to the person sitting next to her for bumping their elbow. She is the author of the novel All the Way to Italy. Her second novel, The Web of Time, a YA grounded fantasy adventure set in Rome, Tunis, and Tripoli, will be published by Blue House Literary in May 2025.
Today, Flavia continues learning about the world while working for a humanitarian organization and getting lost in her Eternal City, writing flash fiction and non-fiction stories, and connecting with other readers, writers, and adventurers (also the armchair travel variety).
1. What literary pilgrimages have you gone on? I
think every book you delve into very deeply ends up being an adventure, a
journey of sorts. A few books that felt like pilgrimages in the best way are
Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange &
Mr. Norrell. Those books felt like falling into another world, barely coming up
for air, and barely wanting to. They’re reading experiences where I literally
felt like shaking the (metaphorical) water out of my ears when I took a break,
in order to settle back into the real world, everyday life.
2. What is the first book that
made you cry? I can’t remember the very first book that made me cry but
I can tell you a recent one that made me cry thoroughly: A.D. Rhine’s Daughters
of Bronze, the sequel of their book Horses of Fire. The two books together tell
the legend of Troy from the point of view of some of the strong women that make
up the legend, and it was an exquisite literary journey, one of those reads
where you know what’s going to happen, but firstly it happens in different ways
than the traditional point of view which is amazing, and secondly, you know it’s going to break your heart but
you find yourself just hoping fervently it will go differently this time
because you love the characters so much. I bawled.
3. Does writing energize or
exhaust you? Both, depending on the day, but ultimately, I think it’s also
how I survive (and on good days, thrive).
4. What is your writing
Kryptonite? I am! I’ll procrastinate, get distracted, spend more time
worrying about writing or wishing I was writing or wishing I had more time to
write than I do actually writing. My mind wanders and I have excellent imposter
syndrome so I have to psych myself back into the project I’m working on by
taking it one little chunk at a time.
5. Did you ever consider
writing under a pseudonym? Yes, and I still don’t use my full name.
6. What other authors are you
friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? I’m lucky to have
several people in my life that are both close friends and incredible authors
(and not only authors but creatives, with different mediums), and they’re an
incredible boon in my life in a myriad ways, from inspiration, throwing ideas
around, pushing each other up, and learning from each other’s writing styles
and ways of looking at things. Community is an incredible gift in every sense,
not least of which because everybody brings different things to the collective
table, and you end up with a table laden with glorious gems and baubles and
colors.
7. Do you want each book to
stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections
between each book?The Web of Time can stand alone, because as a reader, I tend
to love series that intertwine but also wrap up their individual storylines,
but the world we’re meeting in this first book isn’t done with me yet, and I
hope the readers will feel the same!
8. What
authors did you dislike at first but grew into? It’s not that I
disliked Bonnie Gamus before reading Lessons in Chemistry, but I hadn’t read
anything by her before and I didn’t expect to get completely smacked in the
face by how much I loved it.
9. What’s your favorite
under-appreciated novel? To Kill a Mockingbird. Stay with me here: not because the
novel is little-known, but because most people seem surprised to learn Harper
Lee, the author, is a woman. What’s surprising about a woman writing a melodic
and poignant story that sticks an arrow in the heart of the times she’s writing
in, so much so that it’s completely still relevant (sadly) in its discussions
sixty-five years later?
10. As a writer, what would you choose as your
mascot/avatar/spirit animal? Is it trite to say a phoenix? Firstly, I find
the ability to rise from the ashes a distinct skill and secondly, who doesn’t
want to fly and have fiery red and gold wings?
11. How many unpublished and half-finished books
do you have? I have a lot of half-finished stories and flash pieces and idea
notes that I go back to. For books, I don’t have a half-finished manuscript but
I have just started to work on The Web of Time’s sequel!
12. What did you edit out of this book? Plenty, because I have a
tendency to ramble with my world-building, but also, scenes out of one of the
Portal stories that became so much something of their own story that I decided
the first part has its home in Web, and the continuation will be built
out upon in the second book.
13. If you didn’t write, what would you do for
work? I
actually have a full-time job other than writing; I’m also a humanitarian aid
worker.
14. Do you hide any secrets in your books that
only a few people will find? I wouldn’t call them secrets but the
characters in The Web of Timeoften have a story around their name: for
example, Tevere, one of my favorite gods in the book, is named after the
Italian word for Tiber, the River of Rome. Vulturnus is an easterly Roman wind,
named after the Roman personification of one of the winds, and you’ll also find
his brothers in the story. Quies is the Latin word for “silence” and so the god
of silence has this name, and he’s covered in gold, because silence is golden
(at least until time begins to unravel in the story). More than secrets I’d say
readers will find linguistical easter eggs scattered throughout the characters!
15. What is your favorite childhood book? There are so many, but
the first three that immediately spring to mind are Pat O’Shea’s The Hounds
of the Morrigan, Madeline L’Engle’sA Wrinkle in Time, and of course,
Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
connect with the author: website ~ X ~ facebook ~ instagram ~ goodreads
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