Ashburn author Rebecca Danzenbaker’s debut novel “SOULMATCH,”a young-adult Romance and Sci-Fantasy exploration of how societal narratives can both shape and be defied by individuals, released Tuesday. 

The novel has won a spot on The American Bookseller Association’s July/ August 2025 Young Adult Indie Next Book List. It’s Danzenbaker’s first novel, but she said it’s been revised so many times that she can “count on one hand the number of scenes that have survived intact.”

“SOULMATCH” was conceived 15 years ago, inspired by YA dystopian works like the Hunger Games, Divergent, Ember In The Ashes and Shatter Me. Danzenbaker, keeping her YA audience in mind, drew up a protagonist with deep seated anxieties about where her life will take her. In doing this, Danzenbaker channeled lessons pulled from a life of career switches and experimenting with purpose.

“We all think that, like what am I supposed to do?” Danzenbaker said. “Why am I here? And who can tell me who I am?”

Her literary angle for those questions arrived one day in 2010.

“I passed a cemetery and randomly thought, ‘gosh, I wonder if my past self is buried there?’” Danzenbaker said. “And wouldn’t it be cool if someday we had the science to connect us to our former lives?”

With that creative spark, Danzenbaker “spiraled a whole bunch of ideas around” about the impacts such science would have on society, she said.

In “SOULMATCH,” the government uses camera technology so advanced that the photographer can capture the “markers” of a person’s soul in a picture. Over time, the similarities between the souls of those in the past and present became evident. Thus the “Kirling System” was invented, a “government mandated matching of a soul from a former life to a current life.”

“As this goes on, they’ve realized, like oh yeah, people are being reborn, then the infrastructure starts growing around that,” Danzenbaker said.

That new understanding redefines the meaning of life for the inhabitants of “SOULMATCH”– who begin the practice of passing their inheritance, and their sins, to future reincarnations.

“We need infrastructure for that. We need laws around that,” Danzenbaker said. “If you are a convicted serial killer, you will get 10 life sentences.  …Your soul has to serve 10 life sentences.” 

These ideas are encapsulated by the “kirling system,” the terminology used by “SOULMATCH’s” society for the process of the government-mandated matching of a current soul to its former life.

For Loudoun locals, “SOULMATCH” delivers a Sci-Fantasy rooted in the familiar.

The story begins in Ashburn in 236 A.K.. A.K., meaning “After Kirling,” the story’s unique yearly notation. A minor ingredient emblematic of a more complex web of worldbuilding. Danzenbaker said “SOULMATCH’s” worldbuilding and premise elevate it beyond the standard “Romantasy” tropes.

“It has a lot of familiar elements that you would expect in dystopia, but the reincarnation aspect takes that in a different direction, and so it creates its own little sub niche of the genre,” Danzenbaker said. “Behind the scenes on this, all these characters have four or five-ish documented past lives. They’ve all, even though you have different families in every life, you’ve interacted with all the same souls in every life. …It does create a more like dimensional sort of array of relationships, if that makes sense.”

Danzenbaker also funneled her background into the world’s politics. For ten years, she worked on the account management team at Congressional Quarterly in DC.

“That’s when I got a lot of like, my political training and learning how legislative process works, which has helped in my writing career,” she said. “There’s a lot of political intrigue, even though I write YA, there’s usually some sort of government or microcosm of the way, like reflections of the way government works.”

After that job, Danzenbaker grew a photography business. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she had to shut that business down. Once boredom struck, her fingers found the keyboard and “SOULMATCH” found its first draft– culminating a journey from teaching music to elementary schoolers, to account management for Congressional Quarterly, to photography for Ashburn locals and finding her passion for escaping into fiction.

“You can always change and grow, and if not, why are we even here?’ Danzenbaker said. “Like, what is our life about, if we’re supposed to say the same our entire lives and not learn and grow and change and like, learn from our mistakes?”

Learn more about Rebecca Danzenbaker and “SOULMATCH” at rebeccadanzenbakerbooks.com.