Check out our interview with Kate O’Shaughnessy, the author of "A Season for Falling."

What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?

I’ve had a longstanding fascination with celebrity culture, the disadvantages of fame, and those “where are they now?” pieces. Once, out of curiosity, I remember looking up a boy band member from the early 2000s. The only information I could find about him find were posts from a Facebook fan page that was run by his mother. It made me wonder: what was it like to be famous and then to disappear so completely? Did he feel irrelevant, or was his life better now? Was he happier no longer existing beneath the microscope of the public eye? By having its main character, Claire, be an ex-child star who is now living a quiet life in Connecticut as a “normal person,” I got to explore many of these questions in A Season for Falling.

What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?

Reading Rainbow for me means reading and supporting LGBTQ+ authors. It means reading widely and intersectionally. It means enthusiastically and joyfully sharing recommendations for these books with other readers, because word of mouth really is that powerful. It means including LGBTQ+ characters and representation in my own novels.

Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?

Books should represent what the world truly looks like, so in my opinion it’s simply bad writing to not be inclusive with representation. Readers, especially young readers, deserve to see themselves and their identities reflected back to them in stories. Books are also windows to understanding. Books help us understand people who are different than us in a myriad of ways, they expand our empathy, they allow us to see. I want my books to contribute to that. I try to be intentional about reading diversely for this same reason, but also because books that widen the field of who gets represented tend to be doing the most interesting work with voice, structure, and storytelling. (One that jumps immediately to mind as an example is the astonishing voice in Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley.) Reading widely is the best way to find the best books!

Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.

A Season for Falling is my YA debut, and it’s an autumnal second chance romance set in a small town in Connecticut. I would say it’s great for fans of Gilmore Girls, which I used to watch snuggled up in bed with my little sister as a teenager (while, appropriately, living in Connecticut). It’s about a former child star whose new, quiet life is totally upended when her ex-best friend and co-star shows up to film a movie on location nearby.

In the summer of 2022, my younger sister mentioned that she wanted to try writing a novel, and I didn’t have any writing obligations at that moment. I decided it was the perfect time to try writing this book. I had no aspirations for it—I wanted to try writing YA, and I’d had this idea forever, so it only made sense to try and write it. I ended up having a blast during the drafting process. When I was done, I thought, “that was fun!” and tucked it away. I didn’t re-read it, I didn’t even tell my agent that I’d written a draft of a YA. I just put it away and moved on. Then I had a baby, got swept up in edits for other contracted novels, etc. It wasn’t until one and a half years later that I decided to re-read it, revise it, and share it with my agent. The rest is history!

What can fans expect from your book?

Lots of love in the season of change! This means crunchy leaves, Halloween parties, football games, pumpkin spice coffees, a crisp breeze, and woodsmoke-in-the-air vibes. I hope readers feel swept away by the romance. And most of all, I hope it reminds readers that sometimes the best kind of love stories go hand in hand with self-discovery—because when someone sees and accepts us for who we really are, it helps us learn to see ourselves that way, too.

What's up next for you in the bookish world?

I have a middle grade novel, Brittle Magic, releasing in October, and then my next YA, another seasonal romance, is set to come out fall 2027, so stay tuned for that!