Karen Odden's "A Dangerous Duet"

Karen Odden's interest in the Victorian era goes back to her New York University doctoral dissertation, which explored how the medical, parliamentary, and literary representations of nineteenth-century railway disasters helped to create a discourse out of which Freud and others fashioned their ideas of “trauma.”

Odden has served as an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and taught classes in English language and literature at New York University and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She has contributed essays and chapters to books and journals, including Studies in the Novel, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation; for ten years, she served as an Assistant Editor for the academic journal, Victorian Literature and Culture; and she has written introductions for Barnes and Noble’s Classics Series editions of books by Dickens and Trollope. Prior to receiving her Ph.D. in English, she worked as an Editorial Assistant at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and McGraw-Hill, as a Media Buyer for Christie’s Auction House in New York, and as a bartender at the airport in Rochester, where she learned how to stop being shy. Her first book, A Lady in the Smoke, was a USA Today Bestseller and won the 2017 New Mexico-Arizona award for eBook Fiction.

Here Odden dreamcasts an adaptation of her new book, A Dangerous Duet:

I’d tap Emma Watson for any one of my heroines. She has such a mobile, expressive face; she can light up with joy, but she also displays a quiet fierceness and a capacity for insight in many of her roles. My heroine Nell Hallam is passionate about her piano but reflective—and well aware of the danger of her mother’s legacy of mental illness.

Ben Barnes for Jack. I had him in mind as I wrote; his face is dark, pensive, watchful, expressive. In the film Prince Caspian, he suggests a searing pain stemming from a father-figure’s betrayal quite similar to the one Jack experiences.

Tom Felton, who plays Draco Malfoy, would make a brilliant Stephen Gagnon, my sociopathic violin player.

Visit Karen Odden's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Karen Odden and Rosy.

--Marshal Zeringue