Book Title: UNIVERSE OF LOST MESSAGES Character Name: Shakespear (Shake) Cardinale   How would you describe your family or your childhood? Mind-blowing, on both counts. My life began in the greater Boston area a couple of decades after the time you’re living in, during the 2040s. My family was really poor, and very close knit. We became friends with a certain rebel named Jarat, who had some powerful enemies. Our house was attacked by the people who were trying to destroy him. The only person who survived was a terrified four-year-old kid—me. Thanks to Jarat, I was adopted by a lonely woman named Petra. She happened to be the CEO of one of the most powerful media companies on planet Earth. It was a kind of pauper-turned-prince situation for me, and really weird at first—not only because of the wealth, but I was deeply traumatized. Around the time when I started to feel relatively stable, life got a lot stranger. My little sister, Izzie, arrived. Izzie isn’t normal. She is what’s known as a Charismite. In other words, she has extremely powerful gifts of charisma and can get people to do almost anything with very little effort. As a kid,…

Welcome to Fresh Fiction, Janet! Congrats on your new novel, THE JUICE. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your book?  Thank you so much for featuring me! I’m thrill-honored. I kind of live a double life. On the one hand, I’m a longtime journalist who fell into writing about media companies a long time ago. They are constantly changing, and utterly fascinating to me. On the other hand, I have been a teller of fictional tales ever since I was a little girl in a tiny upstate New York village called Franklin. (Now I live in the Bronx, and I can pull out the attitude to prove it!) I like to write fantasy and sci-fi stories that take conditions present in the world today and play them forward, into another space and time. That’s what I did with THE JUICE, which is a cyberpunk sci-fi tale about a secret substance that makes people incredibly charismatic, with god-like abilities. They are “used” by a media company to bend public thought to its will. Three unlikely allies try to stop this: a dirt-poor, homely teen who becomes a sort of Cinderella when she takes the Juice; a…