SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Filipino-Australian author Kristyn Maslog-Levis is taking Filipino mythological creatures, like the manananggal and engkanto, to a wider audience in her debut novel, The Girl Between Two Worlds.
The day after Karina’s sixteenth birthday, supernatural things start to happen around her and she has no idea why. Her mother, who disappeared soon after they migrated from the Philippines to America, speaks to her in prophetic dreams. Stranger still is the old man who turns up at her house one day who claims to be her grandfather, even though Karina’s mother told her he died a long time ago. It turns out , Karina’s mother is the princess of a parallel world who caused a major trouble when she fled to earth trying to lead a normal life as a human. The old man says that Karina is now of age to take the throne and must do so, otherwise, a bloody war will ensue between the two worlds. She must learn to control her powers and fight a range of weird creatures trying to kill her and her family. Worst of all, it happens just as she meets the boy she likes.
“I wanted to bring the Philippines’ very colorful mythological characters to a worldwide audience. The vampires and werewolves are puppies compared to the manananggals and tiyanaks. Also, I wanted to introduce these characters to the next generation of Filipinos overseas who were not exposed to these stories as children because they were raised abroad,” Kristyn said.
Kristyn is a freelance journalist based here in Sydney, with over 13 years of local and international experience. Several of her works have been published in The New York Times and Al Jazeera. She worked as a TV reporter for ABS-CBN before finishing her master’s degree in communication under the ASEAN scholarship at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Kristyn has self-published two children’s picture books in Amazon titled The Dragon and The Lizard and We Have it All.
The Girl Between Two Worlds is her first novel in a trilogy.
Hard copies will be available at all National Bookstores by end of July. E-book version will be available in Kobo and Amazon by mid-August.
