ABOUT ALAINA JAMES
Some stories ask to be retold.
Others ask to be questioned.
ABOUT ALAINA JAMES
Some stories ask to be retold.
Others ask to be questioned.
Alaina James writes intimate, sensual fantasy about desire, memory, identity, and the stories we inherit.
A lifelong lover of fairy tales and happily-ever-afters, she is drawn to the places where familiar stories begin to fracture: where the girl questions what she has been taught to want, where love asks for something more complicated than surrender, and where the ending we recognize may not be the whole story.
As an unapologetic romantic, the love stories that interest her most are about two people who remain fully themselves. They are allowed to change without fear of loss. They disagree, desire, forgive, protect, and allow themselves to be protected. They trust without having to surrender themselves.
For Alaina, love is not something a woman receives for becoming who she was expected to be. True love makes room for her to become who she truly is.
Love does not save a woman from having to find herself; it gives her the space to do so, and to discover that love is still what she wants.
THE STORIES WE INHERIT
Fairy tales have always offered a particular kind of escape: worlds where impossible things happen and enormous truths can hide inside very small objects. A slipper. A spindle. A mirror. A strand of hair. A path through the woods.
Growing older did not make Alaina love those stories less; it made her more curious about them.
She became interested in the spaces they leave empty; in the questions they never quite answer. In the ways the same story changes depending upon who tells it, and what those changes might reveal about the people who needed the story to survive.
Most of all, she became fascinated by the desires buried inside them.
Who taught the girl what happiness would look like?
What was she allowed to want?
What happens if the life she was promised is beautiful, but it isn't hers?
And what happens when she is finally free to choose?
Those questions became the beginning of A Thousand Broken Roads.
A THOUSAND BROKEN ROADS
A Thousand Broken Roads is an interconnected series of twelve adult fantasy novels that begin somewhere familiar and gradually uncover something much older beneath the stories we know.
Across the series, women encounter impossible remnants, forgotten magic, altered histories, and connections that should not exist. As one story begins to disturb another, the familiar tales become less like answers and more like evidence.
At the heart of the series is a question:
The answer is different for every woman.
So is the road she chooses.
And sometimes, after everything she discovers, she still chooses love.
If someone else has shaped what you are capable of wanting, how do you know which choices are truly yours?
FROM THE BROKEN ROADS
Some things do not belong in the official story.
Letters from Alaina James, with glimpses behind A Thousand Broken Roads, early looks at new work, buried pieces of the world, and occasional things meant only for readers who know where to look.