Erin Bow: Hi. I'm Erin Bow, and I'm the author of Sorrow's Knot. For me, this story started when I spotted something from the window of a city bus: a girl with a cat's cradle pattern strung between her hands. The book took a long time to write. I spent three years just doing the research, and it changed a lot. But the glimpse of the girl with her hands lifted with skill and power and yet her hands literally tied together -- that never left me.

And now I'll read you an excerpt. This is from very early in the story, and three friends -- Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket -- are throwing mud at each other in an abandoned corn field.

Cricket was a pole's length away, crouched in a low spot that gave him shelter. He stretched a hand behind him, seeking a clump of dirt. And in the place he was reaching towards, Otter saw something. Something was resting in the nest of shadows under the cornstalk. Something stirring as Cricket's hand came near. Something gawk-stretched and ugly as a new-hatched bird with no feathers and skin over its eyes. Something that moved suddenly like the earth moving above something buried. Something struggling and starving.

Cricket reached backwards, fumbling, and the dark thing opened its dark mouth, like a baby bird, like a snake. It opened so wide that if it had had a jaw, its jaw would have broken. Suddenly, it was all mouth, and it was reaching. There was one heartbeat in which Otter couldn't move.

Kestrel shouted, "Cricket!" Cricket grinned up at Kestrel, groping unknowing towards the shadow, and Otter dove to save him. Anyone in that place would have counted her as a child, but it never occurred to her that most people would have dived the other way.