Exclusive Interview
Inside Author Julie Soto’s Journey to Writing ‘The Thrashers,’ Her First Young Adult Book
Julie Soto made a big splash in the contemporary romance world with her first two novels, Forget Me Not and Not Another Love Song. Fans are also chomping at the bit for Soto’s romantasy debut, Rose in Chains, which is due in July and adapted from her popular Harry Potter fanfic, The Auction. First, Soto will release The Thrashers on May 6, which adds a third genre to her professional resume.
The Thrashers is significantly Final Destination and Pretty Little Liars coded. It centers on Jodi Dillon, an introverted high school senior who is in love with her best friend, Zack Thrasher. The problem is that everyone is in love with Zack and wants to be part of his social circle, known to Jodi’s New Helvetia classmates as the Thrashers.
Jodi constantly battles imposter syndrome being part of the most popular group of kids in town, but when fellow student and Thrasher wannabe Emily Mills ends up dead on prom night, rumors start to spiral that put a national spotlight on Zack and the Thrashers.
When bizarre and dangerous events start threatening the Thrashers while police narrow in on their potential involvement in Emily’s death, Jodi is put in a race against the clock to find out what really happened the night Emily died and whether her so-called friends were involved.
“Thrashers is my first YA thriller, but I feel like I have been writing this book for 10 or 15 years. I just never sat down and actually put it on paper until five years ago,” Soto explained to Swooon in a recent interview. “It’s a story that I’ve always wanted to play with and tell — the idea of these complex inner relationships and a clique that is exacerbated by legal problems.”
Outside of the supernatural events and the media trial the Thrashers face in the novel, Jodi’s story feels like a universal high school experience. We’ve all struggled with fitting in and feeling insecure during those turbulent teenage years. That’s in large part because a lot of Jodi’s story is based on Soto’s real-life experiences and separating herself from those feelings became the biggest challenge in writing this new novel.
“I was walking through plot beats and issues with someone, and they suggested that a certain character had actually done a bad thing, but I was like, ‘Oh no. This is someone I know very well, and they wouldn’t do anything like that’,” the author explained. “It was so complex for me to give up the attachment I had to each of these characters and let them be their own villains, be their own protagonists, and let them shine without feeling like they were based in my love for them.”
Jodi is not a perfect protagonist by any means, but that also makes her relatable. She’s still figuring out who she is and who she wants to be, which is what Soto thinks separates her from her previous heroines.
“I think Ama [from Forget Me Not] and Gwen [from Not Another Love Song] are young women who are career-driven. They have to do things alone, and they’re not always accepting help or looking for help,” she said. “Jodi has not had to do a lot alone. She is learning for the first time what it means to become an individual and to not follow the flow, to not follow the things that her friends do and just accept them as fact. There’s not much talk of a career because it’s a YA book, but the individualism is way different with Ama and Gwen.”
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The Thrashers is still a couple of weeks from debut, but Soto is already thinking about adaptation possibilities. The author teased one name in particular to play the central heartthrob if any studio chose to bring The Thrashers to the small or silver screen — Milo Manheim. Soto first met the School Spirits actor when she cast him in her musical Generation Me over a decade ago. Many Bookstagram fans have noted their friendship and clamored for Manheim to play the romantic lead in a Forget Me Not adaptation, but Soto has always pictured him as her Zack.
“I still see him in The Thrashers world. Physically he does not look like how I described Zack Thrasher. He actually looks how I described Julian [Zack’s best guy friend], but I think he would absolutely nail what is necessary about Zach Thrasher, which is that everyone is in love with him. He’s friendly, and there’s something so vibrant about the frequency that he vibrates on,” Soto revealed. “[When you meet] Milo, you get this feeling that he’s very dedicated in his attention to one person. That attention does go away as soon as he’s, I hesitate to say distracted, but he gets pulled in so many different directions. That idea of making you feel like you had a conversation with him, that you were heard, and that you meant something to him, is exactly what Zach Thrasher does to people…If we could get him as Zach Thrasher before the clock runs down on him taking teenage roles, that would be my dream.”
Before any casting can happen, Soto’s fans have to show up for The Thrashers in print. Her debut YA thriller will be released on May 6. Make sure you come back to Swooon for Soto’s breakdown of the novel and what she has in mind for book two.
