Julia Makin’s ‘Stormheart’, which was released earlier this month, is a dark, feminist romantasy that combines an ancient prophecy, pirates, and a high-stakes survival game with a steamy forbidden romance. Pirates, you say? Yes, Pirates. Not exactly standard romantasy fare, but we can’t say we weren’t intrigued by the concept.
What made Makin choose pirates over the standard romantasy book witches, sorcerers, faes, and dragons? Makin is here to answer just that question. And if the answer makes you even more excited to read her book, all the better.
People tend to be intrigued about my decision to introduce pirates to romantasy, a genre usually dominated by fae and dragons. At the risk of being too honest, it wasn’t a conscious decision. When I first started writing Stormheart, not only had I never read any romantasy – I was completely unaware that the genre even existed.
In the beginning, Stormheart was inspired by everything I loved to read about – piracy in the Caribbean in the early 1700s, Celtic, Norse and Japanese mythology, among other things. When the pandemic hit in 2019, I suddenly had endless hours to daydream, and the world of Maelstrom emerged. But it would be years of...