History takes a backseat in hotrod heist potboiler

St. Albert author Dawn Ius thrilled the Young Adult (YA) readership last year with her teenaged spin on the real story of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

While she averred at the time that she wasn’t a history nerd to have used such source material, she certainly doesn’t balk at her lifelong inspiration for her second YA outing. Overdrive is about hot cars that become even hotter cars when they get stolen by an unlikely expert.

“Overdrive is definitely a book of my heart. I grew up with muscle cars,” she confessed. “I love them. I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie. I love heist books and movies. Those things excite me, so when this story came to me, I couldn’t not follow it.”

“Some day I’m going to get a muscle car,” she added as an aside.

The story jumps into high gear right off the start. Jules Parish is only 17 but has become considered one of the greatest car thieves in Las Vegas over her three-year career. It’s too bad that her boyfriend talks her into stealing one car, a job that she has many bad feelings about. And that’s when she gets caught.

What’s even worse is that she was stealing cars to save herself and her sister Emma from the endless leapfrogging from one bad foster home to another. Getting caught only worsened their situation. And that’s when eccentric millionaire Robert Montgomery steps in. He agrees to be their next foster parent but Jules has to agree to his terms, which includes the greatest series of car heists: seven of the rarest muscle cars in the world in only seven weeks.

It sounds a bit like Gone in 60 Seconds but there’s more to it than what you see on the surface. Sure, things get fast and furious in this YA tale and Ius makes no bones about the seemingly glamorizing plotline. That’s just to strap the reader into a story about family.

“I definitely don’t want to glamorize crime. For each of them, they have their own desperate need to get out of what they’re doing and this is kind of their only way.”

For that, she notes that while Overdrive is definitely driven by its action sequences, there’s a strong character-driven component too.

This book marks the author’s second foray into young adult book territory in a year, but she’s not resting all of her laurels there. She’s also the author of short stories and educational graphic novels, and screenplays. She’s the co-founder and senior editor of Vine Leaves Literary Journal and the assistant manager of the International Thriller Writers Association e-zine called The Big Thrill.

That plus she also has some more mature material that she’s developing.

“I made a decision pretty early on when I started writing that I didn’t want to conform to one genre or style. I really love that I’ve been able to be as eclectic with my writing as I am with my reading. If a story grabs me, I don’t want to be concerned about whether or not it fits into a hole.”

“I really like writing for young adults but I have a couple of other adult projects on the go. I think Overdrive probably will target a slightly younger crowd. I’m lucky that I have such great support from my publisher. I think that as long as they keep wanting YA from me then I will write YA because I enjoy it but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a bunch of other projects on the go.”