“I just felt compelled,” says Geri Halliwell-Horner of what led her to begin down the road of her new novel. “I felt like the world needs a new hero, someone ordinary, to find the courage they never knew they had.”
That was in 2015, when what is now “Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen” began on a vacation in Mexico. Halliwell-Horner — aka Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls — kept at it all these years and, in the week plus since her book debuted, she now has a New York Times and USA Today bestseller on her hands.
The book is targeted to young adults, but so far on her U.S. book tour, Halliwell-Horner has been greeted by fans of all ages. At the center of the story is Rosie Frost, a new kind of heroine that Halliwell-Horner was craving.
“I always try and feel what the world is feeling and what the world is needing, and I just feel like, aren’t we sick of perfect and airbrushed? Can we have someone, she happens to be a girl, but who is vulnerable and is scared and maybe a bit angry, and then tells me I have to work through that?” the author asks. “I thought, is that more interesting and more real? And so it’s this big adventure story, but you feel a heartbeat across the pages.”
The onetime Spice Girl is no stranger to writing, having published a memoir, “Just for the Record,” in 2002. But “Rosie Frost” is an entirely different beast. Writing, Halliwell-Horner says, gives her creative fulfillment in a way different from music.
“I really like the music because it’s like a perfume drop of emotion. It’s just a little bottle. But when you write a story, you go on this adventure and you have to really keep your reader, that one person, in mind. Who’s it for?” she says. “And as you’re speaking to them, you keep the answers just out of reach.”
She’s already at work on the second “Rosie Frost” book, and while she does get other ideas for new books, she’s keeping herself focused on the Rosie follow up.
“She deserves that completion,” Halliwell-Horner says. “My husband [Formula 1 principal Christian Horner] is very good about discipline and goals and timings.”
When she’s writing, Halliwell-Horner sticks to the recommendation to avoid reading other books, but she lists “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” and “The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou” as recent favorites. On the music front, she’s all over: Billy Joel, LL Cool J and Ice Spice.
“I think she’s quite sassy,” she says of the latter, a fellow spice-named performer. “I like her.”