Bowman, Erin
Entry updated 3 October 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1985- ) US author, most of whose work has been fantasy written for the Young Adult market, her first publications of significance being the Gray Wethersby sequence beginning with Taken (2013), set in a colouristically delineated Near Future Dystopian world, in a Keep-like enclave where all male children are ritually kidnapped on their eighteenth birthday. As may be expected, the world outside the walls is radically at odds with the militaristic hierarchy ostensibly in command. Her second series of sf interest, the Contagion sequence beginning with Contagion (2018), is a Space Opera whose cast, finding an abandoned planet showing signs of some savage desolation, must combat a Pandemic which, though currently dormant, afflicts Homo sapiens. In Immunity (2019), the now-immune young protagonists must use the contagion as a Weapon to stave off an inimical Alien civilization.
Of Bowman's two singletons, The Girl and the Witch's Garden (2020) is fantasy; Dustborn (2021), which is an sf Western, carries its young protagonist across a desolate seemingly unmapped terrain, though she is in fact, in a sense, herself a map, as the route through this Ruined Earth to the rumoured haven of Verdant has been tattooed onto her back. There may be some echo here of the tattooed scalp carried by the Stranger in Black in Westworld (2016-2022) in his search for the labyrinth which may lead to a verdant oasis at the heart of the world. Verdant, when finally discovered, is loaded with secrets which explain Dustborn's nature. Bowman should not be confused with the American singer-songwriter Erin Bowman (1990- ). [JC]
Erin Bowman
born Connecticut: 1985
works (selected)
series
Gray Wethersby
- Taken (New York: HarperTeen, 2013) [Gray Wethersby: hb/Alisdair Miller]
- Frozen (New York: HarperTeen, 2014) [Gray Wethersby: hb/Alisdair Miller]
- Stolen (New York: HarperTeen Impulse, 2014) [novella: ebook: Gray Wethersby: na/]
- Forged (New York: HarperTeen, 2015) [Gray Wethersby: hb/Alisdair Miller]
Contagion
- Contagion (New York: HarperTeen, 2018) [Contagion: hb/Bose Collins]
- Immunity (New York: HarperTeen, 2019) [Contagion: hb/Bose Collins]
individual titles
- The Girl and the Witch's Garden (New York: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2020) [hb/]
- Dustborn (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) [hb/]
links
previous versions of this entry