“ was such interesting and fascinating imagery to me and a very well-known story in Korea,” Cho said of the gumiho. Vicious Spirits is the follow-up to Cho’s debut Wicked Fox, about a gumiho-a nine-tailed fox who can become a beautiful girl in order to devour men’s energy. I am very food motivated.”Īdditional inspiration for her novels comes from creatures from Korean mythology. “I think that friends in YA novels are actually really important and I wanted to be able to focus on that with some of the integral scenes in both books,” she said. lovers being separated by circumstances beyond their control struggling with family expectations).”Ĭho said she loved exploring relationships in the book, delving into the intensity of human emotion as well as writing friendships in the story.

As well as the K-Pop webcomic, Free Hexel, and the YA romcom, Once Upon a K-Prom (Disney).Kat Cho’s sophomore novel, Vicious Spirits, was something of an exercise in writing melodramatically, inspired by the K-dramas and soap operas Cho herself grew up with.Ĭho said K-dramas embrace story types that tend to fit well into the coming-of-age style of stories so often told in young adult books, and that “there are just really fun melodramatic tropes to play with that I wanted to play around with to create tension in the story (e.g.

Kat is the New York Times and international bestselling author of the YA contemporary fantasy duology Wicked Fox and Vicious Spirits (Putnam/Penguin). She currently spends her free time trying to figure out what kind of puppy to adopt.

She likes anything that encourages nerding out, including reading, K-dramas, K-pop and anime. She loves to incorporate her Korean heritage in her writing, especially if it involves describing food. This helped when she decided to write a dinosaur time-travel novel at the tender age of nine. As well as the K-Pop webcomic, Free Hexel, Kat Cho (she/her) used to hide books under the bathroom sink and then sneak in there to read after bedtime. Kat Cho (she/her) used to hide books under the bathroom sink and then sneak in there to read after bedtime.

Kat cho books