All Interviews

Keeping a young girl company as she walks through grief

Interview by Alice Cary

Twelve-year-old Millie is thrilled to work her first babysitting job, but her world turns upside down the morning after, when she learns that her four-month-old charge, Lola, has died of SIDS. In her second middle grade novel, Liz Garton Scanlon beautifully depicts a middle schooler navigating an unspeakable tragedy.

Let’s start with this book’s striking cover. In the book’s acknowledgments, you write that one of your best friends created the embroidery that serves as the cover image. How did this come about?
I can’t get over that art, honestly. Jill Turney, Amelia Mack and Angie Kang (the book’s designers and design fellow) conceived of the image—a mashup of stitchery and sorcery. And then—it’s true!—they partnered with my friend Kathie Sever, founder of Fort Lonesome, a chain-stitch embroidery studio in Austin, Texas, where we both live. The art was made on a weighty piece of black linen, and I think it speaks to the heart and soul of this project, piercing darkness straight through with the abiding possibilities of love and light.

How did Lolo’s Light start for you?
The first scene I imagined was the one in Chapter 3, where Millie finds herself in the gorgeous airiness of the Acostas’ house, babysitting for the very first time and enraptured by the importance of her circumstances. It all seems almost too good to be true, which is a very good place to start a story, on the cusp between the before and after. I teetered there for a while with Millie, and then we fell headlong into the story.

Tell us more about Millie, who she is and where she’s at as the novel opens.
I think Millie is like many of us at 12 years old—happy and also restless. She has friends and smarts and good dogs and confidence, but what she really wants is to be grown up. That yearning to be on the other side of the invisible line between childhood and whatever-happens-next—it’s so palpable and so universal. But, of course, it’s also inevitably more complicated than we think it will be.

“Not every adult can walk alongside kids as they struggle and crack and grow, but I wanted Millie to have some of the good ones—the brave ones.”

After Lolo dies, Millie must confront all kinds of emotions. As you created her journey through grief, what was most important to you to get right about her experience?
I wanted to look at grief honestly—especially this first, great grief—and to allow all the nuances of it to play out for Millie. I wanted to show, for example, that while it’s unbelievably hard to feel responsible, it’s also heartbreaking when you realize you’re not, that nobody is, that there was nothing anyone could have done to change what happened.

It was also really important to me to depict grief as a journey, as something shifting over time, as something Millie navigated and grew within and maybe even eventually understood. I just aimed to see her through it, and there were so many layers and facets and stages to illuminate along the way.

Let’s talk about the adults in this novel, because there are a bunch of really great ones. Why was it important to you to surround Millie with so many adults, particularly when children’s literature often goes out of its way to eliminate adults from narratives?
I wanted to make sure Millie was not alone as she walked through grief. It’s as simple as that. Even when she felt alone, I wanted her surrounded by wisdom and experience and kindness and love. Not every adult in the real world is good at this. Not every adult can walk alongside kids as they struggle and crack and grow, but I wanted Millie to have some of the good ones—the brave ones. She needed them. Every kid does.

Millie’s class’s egg-hatching project works so beautifully within the story. Based on your acknowledgments, it sounds like you have experienced similar activities as both an elementary school student and as a parent. Did you by any chance attempt to re-create this project for research?
Ha—I did not re-create the project but just you asking makes me wish that I had! I did hatch eggs in science class as a kid and I did win the chance to take one of the resulting chicks home. It wasn’t until I was on the school bus with a big box on my lap that I realized the chick was already becoming a rooster who would not do well with my dogs or upon the top of my dresser. That poor bird was rapidly rehomed!

”When adults suggest that kids shouldn’t read or know or think about those things, kids feel shame and confusion and loneliness and fear. Let’s not do that to them.”

What are some things you think novelists could learn from reading or writing picture books?
Picture books center the child and the child’s perspective in a most remarkable way. There is something about having to consider the very youngest humans—the pre- and early readers— having to witness and reflect what they love and fear and want and need that can help us in the practice of writing through and of kids rather than to or for them.

Although this is not your first novel, you have written many picture books. What do you find challenging about novels?
I’m a short-form writer at heart, so writing a novel is a very real effort in opening up, in giving each moment and every character a little more breathing room. It’s a matter of trying to evoke meaning and emotions with the same potency I might in a picture book, but holding the reader’s gaze while I do.

You addressed a note that accompanied advance editions of this book to “adult readers.” In it, you wrote, “The grown-up world has not, historically, done a great job of acknowledging or attending to young people’s feelings.” What would you say to an adult who thinks that children’s books shouldn’t include the kinds of subjects and emotions depicted in Lolo’s Light?
I would say, “I understand your worry and your love, but kids are simply young human beings who wonder about and reckon with things like loss and grief and heartache just like we do! When adults suggest that kids shouldn’t read or know or think about those things, kids feel shame and confusion and loneliness and fear. Let’s not do that to them. Let’s not make things worse. Let’s, instead, keep them company.”

What do you hope a kid who finds themselves in a similar situation to Millie’s might take away from Lolo’s Light?
Honestly, I hope all kids everywhere grow to know that there’s a light they can count on, a light that can be seen through cracks and curtains, in friendships and in family and in themselves. Even on the darkest days with the sharpest edges there is still a living, humming, human light—a bioluminescent beacon—there to see them through.

Lolo’s Light contains some egg-cellent puns. I’m curious: If you had the opportunity to name a flock of chickens, what do you think would make some egg-ceptional chicken names?
Oh now THIS is a fun prompt. I’m going to go for a girl group—we’ll call them The Chicks— made up of Eggetha, Yolko and Henifer. They’ll be a power trio.

Read our starred review of ‘Lolo’s Light.’

Author photo of Liz Garton Scanlon courtesy of Elizabeth McGuire.

In Lolo’s Light, Liz Garton Scanlon captures the hard work of healing from an unspeakable tragedy.

Romance Contemporary Romance

Colleen Hoover secretly signs her books in bookstores

Interview by Savanna, Associate Editor

Colleen Hoover writes romances that are emotional roller coasters and thrillers that keep readers up into the wee hours of the night, and they’ve made her one of BookTok’s biggest success stories. Her novels (Verity, It Ends with Us and many more) are among the app’s most recommended reads, racing up the bestseller list years after their initial releases. It Starts With Us, the eagerly awaited sequel to It Ends With Us, arrives October 18, and to mark its release, we asked Hoover a few questions about her bookstore bucket list and most cherished library memories.

What are your bookstore rituals? For example, where do you go first in a store? Where do you go last before checking out?
I always check out the new releases first to see what I might not have. Then I check sections that might contain my own books so I can secretly sign them. I browse for a while and then love looking at all the nonbook-related stuff near checkout. I’m a sucker for journals and pens.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
My school library was my favorite. We were only allowed to go as a class once a week, but I’d have my books read hours after visiting. I’m pretty sure I read every book in that library multiple times.

While writing your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful?
When I first started writing, I’d write in the coffee shop of our local Hastings. The staff there were always so encouraging when I would come in to work. Unfortunately they closed a few years ago, but I did a lot of my early writing in that store and remember it so fondly.

Do you have a favorite library from literature?
The Midnight Library! 😉

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet?
I’ve been lucky enough to visit or sign at my dream stores on tour. The Strand in NYC was a big bucket list place to sign, so when it finally happened, it felt very surreal.

How is your own personal library organized?
It used to be organized alphabetically, but now it’s by color.

What’s the last thing you bought at your local bookstore?
I actually founded our local bookstore, The Bookworm Box, which is a charity bookstore where all the books are donated and signed by the author, and all the proceeds go to charity (usually a different one every month). The last thing I bought was a set of my books for a girl who came by after hours when I happened to be there.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
Cats!

What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack?
You don’t eat food while touching new books! That’s a no-no.

Picture of Colleen Hoover © Chad Griffith.

The reigning queen of BookTok reflects on her life among the stacks.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Science Fiction Horror

In Hiron Ennes’ ‘Leech,’ two parasites wage war for control of humanity

Interview by Laura Hubbard

The Interprovincial Medical Institute is the sole provider of medicine in a post-apocalyptic world. But unbeknownst to anyone, the Institute is a hive mind, a parasite living within, controlling and training the world’s doctors. When one of the Institute’s bodies dies, it sends a new doctor to investigate—and discovers it isn’t the only parasite interested in the human race. We talked to Ennes about fusing gothic literature with sci-fi and the terrifying scientific theory that keeps them up at night.

Parasites aren’t new to speculative fiction and horror, but your choice to tell this story from the perspective of the Institute, a hive mind that is both a medical professional and a parasite, is extremely original. What did writing from that point of view allow you to do as an author?
Building a narrator out of a many-minded parasite was not easy, but it let me take advantage of a sort of pseudo-omniscience, which was such a boon for world building. Writing from the Institute’s point of view was also an opportunity to delve into the threat a microscopic antagonist might pose. We all get it, parasites are spooky. That isn’t saying much at all. Where the true intrigue lies, I think, is in the mechanism of infection and the cellular changes that take place in a host. A protagonist needs to be proficient in microscopy to see the terrifying devil in those details.

“Is that DNA truly mine? Am I being parasitized by my own genome?”

The Institute harks back to classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Were there any particular stories that informed your creation of the doctor?
At the moment I can’t think of any fiction that influenced me as much as the stories science can tell us about our own cells. I was particularly taken by the theory of endosymbiosis: Deep in our mitochondria lives a strand of DNA separate from our nuclear chromosomes, an essential piece of our cellular network without which we would die. This strand is circular, like a bacterium’s, leading scientists to propose it is the genome of a foreign organism that hitched a ride inside us back when we were single-celled. It’s been sitting there ever since, perpetuating itself through the maternal line and providing the basis of a fun mind game I like to call “Am I even me?” Is that DNA truly mine? Am I being parasitized by my own genome? Does it care about me, or does it only care about my reproductive success? Is everything I do and think at the behest of a little self-interested string of nucleotides living inside me? You stay awake so many nights thinking about stuff like that, and eventually you write Leech.

Bodily autonomy is always going to be a ripe subject for horror, but it is something particularly terrifying for many people right now. What drew you to writing a book that delved so deeply into body horror and questions of bodily and mental autonomy?
I knew autonomy would end up being one of several themes, as a consequence of writing about parasitism, but the narrative quickly shoved autonomy to the forefront seemingly of its own volition. Leech was a demanding animal. It wouldn’t let me stop at the microscopic ecosystems parasites use to commandeer behavior but demanded I touch on the equally parasitic structures of hierarchy, power, abuse and some of the ways these structures rob us of our own bodies.

Despite the fact that Leech epitomizes a gothic novel, it’s also set in a post-apocalyptic world. What led you to marry these two genres?
To put it simply, I think they work well together. Gothic literature is usually predicated on the exploration of some sordid past, whether of an individual, a family, an old house or an isolated township—often all of the above. If a single dead child can make for a terrifying poltergeist, what hauntings might manifest from the cruel impulses of a dead society? In what ways will human cycles of exploitation, bigotry and imperialism haunt the future? What monstrous forms might their resurrections take?

There’s a definite shift in the language the doctor uses to talk about humans throughout the book, moving from a clinical analysis, to becoming more familiar, to a sort of horror. Can you talk about this shift in language? Was this a conscious decision, or did it develop organically?
The shift in language was a conscious development, and an excruciating one. I can’t count the hours I spent going back and forth, micromanaging colloquialisms, contractions, turns of phrase and intrusive thoughts. At the extreme ends of the story, the narration styles are pretty distinct, but it gets muddy enough in the middle that I’m fairly sure I underwent some sort of ego death while writing it.

There are hints as to what happened to society that caused everything to go wrong. Can you tell us what plunged your world into this dark age and how humanity survived?
I don’t think there is any one thing that plunged this world into ruin. The collapse of a society is a slow, mundane and brutal process (a process we are currently witnessing in real time). I don’t know how the world ended, or how many times it ended, but I do know humanity survived by virtue of resilience, ingenuity, mutual aid and cooperation. And trains. I suspect the resurgence of the locomotive was vital to the resurgence of human society. I don’t know why. I just feel it in my heart.

How did your background in medicine inform the writing of Leech? Is there anything that you’ve learned in your studies that you wish you could have included that didn’t quite fit?
To be honest, my background when I started Leech was in physics. My background when I finished it was in medicine, which definitely informed some of the details but not the core of the story. There are a few aspects of doctoring I might’ve incorporated if I’d had a more solid grasp of the realities of clinical practice—namely, a deeper exploration of the unique and sometimes mystifying relationships people have to their own bodies. I think I touched on this with Hélene’s (perceived) hypochondria, but I have seen some truly fascinating disconnects between internal and external experiences of disease: Munchausen’s syndrome, functional disorders and one case of a lovely, cheerful patient whose stated history painted a picture of health and who, almost as an afterthought, lifted her sweater to show me a massive open wound she had been nursing for nearly a year.

“I’m a utopian at heart . . . “

In gothic literature, deformity and physical differences are often cast as physical manifestations of sin, which is a theme now understood to be ableist at best. You manage to incorporate these bodily differences without that baggage. What drew you to including these elements of the gothic, and how did you navigate including them while avoiding the negative connotations that they usually hold?
I won’t claim that Leech is free of ableist baggage; after all, ableism is one of the many flavors in that soup of oppression in which we all grow up swimming. That said, I did consciously set out to subvert traditional, moralistic depictions of deformity. I wanted pretty much every “normal” patient to have some unconventional physical attribute. In a world where everyone has a mechanical limb or a migratory birthmark or a literal doppelganger, it’s hard to view these things as anything but variations of the norm. This allowed the narrative to focus more on the unique roles these attributes play in the characters’ lives and how they might be admired, celebrated, exploited or fetishized on an interpersonal, rather than societal, level.

A few characters speculate about where they think the monstrous, mysterious ventigeaux that stalk the woods near Verdira came from.Do you have an answer, or are they mysterious to you as well?
The ventigeaux are a mystery even to me. In the future, if there is an opportunity to dissect them, I might uncover their origins. For now, I share the Institute’s suspicions that they are orphans of biotechnology, but I can’t guess what sort of misguided endeavors led to their creation.

Read our starred review of ‘Leech’ by Hiron Ennes.

One of your characters tries to make sure that humans don’t regain the ability to make flying machines, believing that they are what caused the apocalypse in the first place. If the denizens of this world recovered lost technologies, do you think they would be doomed to the same self-destruction as their forebears?
I’m a utopian at heart, so I genuinely hope not. But I believe that without significantly, consciously dismantling institutions of power, people will end up re-creating the oppressive structures that haunt our past. Not as any function of “human nature” or some such evolutionary psychology nonsense, but by dint of centuries of vicious cultural selection. People tend to emulate their forebears, and the world of Leech is no exception. Fortunately, in that world, as in ours, there are those working to demolish monopolies of power, technology and capital. And in that world, as in ours, there will be monumental successes and devastating failures. Let us hope the former is more frequent than the latter.

Picture of Hiron Ennes courtesy of the author.

We talked to Ennes about fusing gothic literature with post-apocalyptic sci-fi and the terrifying scientific theory that keeps them up at night.

Children's & YA Middle Grade Children's

A haunted house story like no other

Interview by Stephanie Appell

When a house appears at the end of Juniper Drive, Jacqueline “Jac” Price-Dupree’s reaction isn’t what you’d expect from most 12-year-olds, but Jac isn’t like most 12-year-olds. Ever since she was diagnosed with cancer five years ago, Jac has been haunted by the fear that it might return, so when Jac sees the house, she wonders if it’s a hallucination. If it’s a symptom. The house fills Jac with terror even before she and her friends wind up trapped inside it—and before Jac discovers that the house knows her name.

Ally Malinenko’s This Appearing House is a surreal and horror-filled story about a girl who must confront her deepest fears and chart a path toward a new future.

Tell us about Jac and where she’s at when we meet her.
Jac is a pretty anxious kid. She’s been through a lot, and she is nearing her five-year anniversary from her cancer diagnosis. She’s still NED—no evidence of disease. Fun fact: We don’t use cured when talking about cancer, because there is no cure. There is only no evidence of disease.

She’s also pretty angry. She’s tired of her mother worrying and hovering. She’s tired of the elephant of a recurrence in the corner of the room all the time. She’s pretty lonely, and at the start of the book, she’s asking the universe a pretty big question. She wants to know if she’ll get what everyone else gets—a full, long life—or if she’ll die young. It’s a lot for a 12-year-old.

Jac’s story is a pretty clear response to some of the cultural narratives that exist around illnesses such as cancer. For readers who might not be familiar, could you briefly describe those narratives? Why was it important to give Jac a different story?
I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 37, and within the first couple of days I realized that warrior language (“you can fight this/you can beat this”) made me very tired very quickly. Because the truth was I wasn’t a warrior. I wasn’t brave. I was just doing what the doctors told me to do and I was hoping for the best.

Having a major disease like cancer changes you. It fundamentally splits your life into “the before” and “the after,” and while that gets smoother over time, the split is always there, like a scar. I wanted Jac to struggle with learning how to let go, because it was something that I struggled with. Letting go and moving on are not always the same thing. I also wanted to show that Jac was angry, and that anger in the face of an unjust world was a perfectly OK response to have.

Everyone looks to people who have been through trauma as some sort of inspiration. But we’re not. We’re just people that something happened to. We’re people who got unlucky and then very lucky.

“We teach kids how to fight monsters so that when a monster eventually turns up in their life, they’ll know what to do.”

This book isn’t your first foray into writing horror. What keeps you coming back to this genre?
I loved reading horror when I was younger. I started with Stephen King at much too young of an age, when I would sneak a page or two off my oldest sister’s bookshelf, so I’m definitely a horror fan.

I think I keep writing horror because I respect it. Horror trusts that kids can handle it. We adults do so much gatekeeping and shielding with kids and I always wonder why. Kids know the world is scary. Look at the last few years alone! We don’t do them any justice if we pretend otherwise.

Middle grade horror makes one promise: It will take you into the dark but it will always always always bring you back to the light. We teach kids how to fight monsters so that when a monster eventually turns up in their life, they’ll know what to do. Honestly, it’s an honor.

Where did this haunted house originate?
Haunted houses are typically metaphors for diseased minds, but I wanted this to be a metaphor for a diseased body. And I knew early on that the house was going to be there specifically for Jac, in this exact moment of her life.

What are some of your favorite haunted house narratives? Did they influence the house in this book?
Growing up, I was obsessed with The Amityville Horror, but rereading it as an adult just makes me sad to see how awful and abusive the father is. That’s an interesting example, because I feel like it’s the most well known of the economic horror subgenre—the “we bought this house and it’s haunted but we don’t have any money to leave” plot.

I am also a huge Shirley Jackson fan (who isn’t?), so I have always been a fan of The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, the opening paragraph of This Appearing House is an homage to the opening paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House.

Jac experiences a lot of truly terrifying—and incredibly imaginative—horrors when she’s trapped in the House. Which one are you most proud of? Which one was the scariest for you to write?
I’m probably most proud of the teeth scene. I had to fight to keep it in the book because my publisher thought it was too scary. In the original version, Hazel was really choking, so this version is a little softened, but yes, plates full of teeth, mouthfuls of teeth. I loved it.

The scariest one? At one point Jac is home and Hazel comes over to visit and Jac’s mother is acting very, very strange. It’s a scene that starts with a plate of eggs and ends with the kids running for their lives. That one was probably the most unnerving to write because you don’t want to have your mother, of all people, turn monstrous.

“Everyone looks to people who have been through trauma as some sort of inspiration. But we’re not. We’re just people that something happened to. We’re people who got unlucky and then very lucky.”

Tell us about the research that went into this book. Were you able to interview kids whose experiences are similar to Jac’s or talk to medical professionals who work with those kids?
Even though I am NED (no evidence of disease), I still go for monthly treatment. I spoke with some nurses about their experiences with kids. A lot of what they had to say I gave to Jac, like this idea that kids want to talk about it because they’re scared, but their parents, who are also deeply afraid, tend to brush away those conversations. But they need to happen.

Jac’s mom doesn’t get a ton of “screen time,” so to speak, but her interactions with Jac are so impactful. What do you hope kids and grown-ups will take away from her character and her relationship with Jac?
I think that Jac’s mom has a lot of unprocessed trauma, just like her daughter, and her way of dealing with it is to pretend it didn’t happen while simultaneously, consistently, fearing that it’s happening again. She goes through a checklist of symptoms when she sees Jac stumble, and that’s exhausting for her daughter.

I hope that it comes across that Jac’s mom does this out of love and fear, even though it’s probably not the best course of action. I want people to sympathize with her. Like her daughter, Jac’s mom also stood on the edge of that abyss.

I know what it’s like to love someone who is going through a life-threatening illness. Both of my parents had cancer, and I remember my father telling me, when my mother was diagnosed, that it was easier to be the patient than the caretaker. After watching what my husband went through when I was diagnosed, I think my dad was right. I hope that people are kind to Jac’s mom and see that, by the end of the book, she’s really trying.

This was an intense and emotional book to read, so I can only imagine what it must have been like to write. How did you take care of yourself as you worked on this book?
Does crying on the floor count as taking care of yourself? I kid. I think the one saving grace I had was that I had some distance between my diagnosis and writing this. I couldn’t have done it right after I was diagnosed. My whole world felt upside down. But with some distance, I realized that I had some things I wanted to share. A story I wanted to tell. Because, truthfully, even though it’s on the book jacket, the word cancer is only used once in the book. Because I never thought it was a “cancer book.” To me, it’s about trauma. About the elasticity of trauma and the work that goes into healing that trauma. That was the story I wanted to tell.

What do you hope kids who feel trapped in their own Houses take away from Jac’s story?
I hope they feel seen. I hope that they know that everything you experience, even the scary things—and maybe especially the scary things—makes you who you are. I hope they know that they might be different now, but that’s OK. All of it matters. And I hope that they remember that even if all the movies and books always depict the sick kid dying, that sometimes, the characters live. Just like they lived.

Did you trick or treat as a kid? If so, what was your favorite candy to receive? If we were to trick-or-treat at your house this year, what would we find in our buckets?
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday and I definitely went trick-or-treating, probably longer than most kids! Milky Ways are definitely my favorite chocolate, but I do love Starburst. Especially the orange ones. If you went trick-or-treating at my house, it’s M&M’S for everyone!

If you found yourself in the opposite of a haunted House—a house filled with joy and delight and serenity—what would await you inside?
Oh, I love this question. It would be filled with books and comfy nooks for naps and endless cups of tea and bottles of wine and all the best comfort food. It would always be dusk so the light would soften everything and the temperature would be just chilly enough so that you would want to snuggle in a blanket. And the house would know exactly what kind of music I’d want to hear without my even asking.

Read our starred review of ‘This Appearing House.’

Author photo of Ally Malinenko courtesy of Bill Wadman.

Ally Malinenko’s This Appearing House is a surreal and horror-filled story about a girl who must confront her deepest fears and chart a path toward a new future.

Nonfiction Memoir

Hua Hsu immortalizes a friendship cut tragically short

Interview by Alden Mudge

For 24 years, Hua Hsu has been carrying around a padded envelope stuffed with memorabilia. Things like “a pack of Export A’s with two cigarettes left,” a funeral program, letters, cassette tapes, receipts, punchlines written on napkins, a paperback copy of Edward Carr’s What Is History? Hsu hastily gathered all of these things and more in the aftermath of the murder of his friend Ken, who was killed in a carjacking in 1998, the summer before their senior year at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I’m an archivist at heart,” Hsu says during a call to his home in Brooklyn, New York. When his friend was killed, Hsu says he “just began writing everything down.” His obsessive cataloging even led his college friends to choose him to deliver the eulogy at Ken’s funeral. Hsu has continued poring over his gathered notes and memorabilia ever since, trying to find a way “to capture certain feelings since those days.” But until recently, he says, “it didn’t seem to have any possibility of becoming a narrative.”

Read our starred review of ‘Stay True’ by Hua Hsu.

As he describes in his richly probing memoir, Stay True, Hsu grew up in Cupertino, California, the only child of parents who came to the U.S. in the 1960s for college and to escape a repressive regime in Taiwan. He was an often solitary child who found expression through and distinguished himself with his avid love of music, which he wrote about in vibrant personal zines. At Berkeley, he curated mixtapes for every occasion, like trips in his Volvo with Ken and others to pick up friends from the airport or even just for local food runs. Outside of curating the aesthetics of his personal identity, Hsu spent those years tutoring inmates at San Quentin State Prison, volunteering as a mentor for youths in neighboring Richmond, California, and participating in the growing Asian American-led political movements of the 1990s.

Hsu says he hopes Stay True captures the feeling of that moment. “I want the book to sound like what life was like then. It’s hard to describe to someone who didn’t experience America Online what boredom felt like at the time, or what the pace of life is like if you’re in college pre-internet, or just what it felt like to be at Berkeley. . . . I didn’t want it to be purely nostalgic. I wanted it to feel like you’re just hanging out in this other time.”

“I didn’t want it to be purely nostalgic. I wanted it to feel like you’re just hanging out in this other time.”

Within these descriptions of pre-Y2K Northern California, Ken often seems elusive. Hsu quotes his therapist and another friend who asked him how close he really was to Ken, and foregrounding that question was deliberate, Hsu says. “When you’re young, you’re just living day to day. Then if there’s some kind of fracture or trauma, you’re forced to step out of your context and examine what’s meaningful to you. There’s a way I took this friendship for granted. When I was writing in my journal, I was always returning to how to describe [Ken]: his voice, his laugh, his skin. You’d never have occasion to do something like that if he were still alive. The question of closeness only becomes visible when it’s no longer there.”

Hsu, who arrived at Berkeley with alternative rock sensibilities and a deliberately oddball style of dress, did not immediately like Ken, a handsome, conventionally dressed, self-assured fraternity member. Ken was a Japanese American whose grandparents had been incarcerated in an internment camp during World War II, but compared to Hsu, Ken had thoroughly assimilated, down to the Abercrombie wardrobe. In this way, Ken seemed to represent to Hsu a different life path—one he was initially skeptical about. “He was comfortable in his own skin,” Hsu says. “He was confident. . . . It started off as something I would just dismiss, and then it became intriguing.”

One of Stay True‘s many fascinating qualities is its examination of the differing ways Asian Americans embrace and reject American culture. In particular, Hsu writes lovingly of his parents’ experiences as new immigrants. At one point, Hsu’s father was able to return to Taiwan to work as a well-paid professional. This being the pre-internet age, he communicated with his son via fax machine while he was in Taiwan, and the fatherly love expressed in those faxes is remarkable. At another point, Hsu describes his mother, no longer among the newest immigrants to her San Jose suburb, almost comically deriding the rudeness of more recent Chinese immigrants to burgeoning Silicon Valley.

“The question of closeness only becomes visible when it’s no longer there.”

But Stay True‘s focus remains on a friendship: its qualities, its vagaries, its lingering questions and impacts, frozen and spotlighted by its traumatic end. After Berkeley, Hsu went on to Harvard, where he continued to obsess over his late friend while feeling “marooned” on the East Coast. These days, he says he “doesn’t feel entirely at home anywhere,” but he’s at least acclimated to the East Coast. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and until recently, he was an associate professor of English and director of American Studies at Vassar College. In 2022, he became a professor of literature at Bard College, teaching writing and Asian literature. He and his wife have a 7-year-old son. Marital strife, he jokes, centers on alternate street parking and who will fulfill the work quota at the food co-op.

So much has changed in the last 24 years—but creating this book after so much time and deliberation has not brought Hsu catharsis or closure, he says. “That feels too climactic. But it has given me a lot of peace.”

Headshot of Hua Hsu by Devlin Claro

Ever since his friend was murdered in 1998, Hua Hsu has been searching for a way to capture the feeling of their time together.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fantasy

Who wouldn’t want to live in Baba Yaga’s house?

Interview by Chris Pickens

Estranged siblings Bellatine and Isaac Yaga couldn’t be more different, both in their personalities and in their mysterious abilities. The restless Isaac embraces his gift for mimicry, while Bellatine lives a quiet life, fiercely resisting the urge to give life to inanimate objects. But when they reunite to collect a family inheritance, they get the shock of their lives: Their great-great-grandmother has left them Thistlefoot, a sentient cottage with chicken legs.

For readers that aren’t familiar with her, can you give a brief synopsis of Baba Yaga and her importance in Slavic folklore?
Baba Yaga is a magical crone, hidden deep in the forests of Eastern Europe. Lost in the woods? Maybe Baba Yaga will help you find your way home. Or . . . maybe she’ll devour you and display your glowing skull on pike. Depends on her mood, which is, to put it politely, finicky. She lives in a hut on chicken legs that never stands still, and she flies through the air in a mortar and pestle. Like any good monster, she is built of opposites: She’s ferocious and motherly, supernatural and one with nature, feminine and beastly, helper and harmer. And I think it’s the fact that she embodies all these elements, all this unpredictability, that makes her one of the most famous figures in Slavic folklore. Who is Baba Yaga? She’s whoever the story needs her to be—just before she kills the story and eats it for supper.

“Writing from folklore and fairy tales, to me, is actually freeing rather than confining.”

What was it like working with preexisting characters like Baba Yaga and her chicken-footed house? Did it ever become confining, or was it easy to spin your own tale with the parts you had?
Writing from folklore and fairy tales, to me, is actually freeing rather than confining. Instead of wrestling with a blank page and trying to conjure something from nothing, these archetypal figures serve as inspiration and guidance. Companions, of sorts.

A folk tale, a real folk tale, is designed to shape-shift, to adapt to new eras and new contexts. That’s how they survive over centuries, by mutating again and again to remain ever relevant to each new culture that adopts them. Thistlefoot leans into that transformative ability: What if Baba Yaga is no longer a crone in the woods but a young Russian Jewish woman during World War I? Or what if Baba Yaga’s hut weren’t in Russia at all but modern-day America? It becomes a game of experimentation, with endless variants. These tales have already been re-imagined a thousand times, so what’s one more?

What does the folklore in Thistlefoot tell us about the people and places from which it originated?
This is what I adore about folklore: how it functions as a mirror. Specifically, a mirror reflecting a community’s taboos and fears. People would rather do anything than look at the prickly, ugly, awkward parts of life head-on. So rather than the embarrassment of, say, telling your young Scottish daughter not to sleep with hot, mysterious men on the beach, mothers would instead caution them to fear the handsome . . . kelpies . . . yes, that’s right, those sexy . . . horses . . . who would offer maidens a “ride”—before ripping out their organs. It’s supernatural metaphor at its best. Fantastical and exaggerated, while also serving as a metaphorical parallel for real-life issues.

In Thistlefoot, I use the folklore as a window into a violent period of European history—specifically pogroms in the Russian empire, which were systematic, military-sanctioned massacres against the Jewish people. In the center of the novel is the story of a pogrom my own ancestors lived through in 1919. Told plainly, the facts are horrific. Unbearable, really. But filtering it through folklore allowed me to explore this history with softened edges. Folklore lets us look at jagged truths through a sheer curtain, and then, once we’ve grown acclimated, that curtain can be yanked away. This is one of the themes throughout the book, in fact: Memory can be reformed into folk tales to make it not only more bearable, but more permanent. More easily honored and held.

How did you go about creating the magic that each of the Yaga siblings has?
The siblings both have these abilities that are intrinsically linked to who they are and to this generational history they’re discovering. It was important to me that each power held tension in it, and that the powers reflected who the characters are at their cores. Bellatine, who sees her power as a curse, is constantly battling with her ability. It turns her into a control freak, at war with her own body and the world around her. For Isaac, who has this incredible ability to mimic other people, his power is part of his restless nature, his self-hatred and his desperation to be anyone but himself.

It’s funny, even I was conned a little by Isaac—because it wasn’t until a late-stage draft that I even realized Isaac’s abilities were magic. I think it was actually my editor or my agent who was like, “Uh, this isn’t like . . . a normal thing people can do.” Until then, I sort of listened to Isaac when he insisted that he was simply a skillful actor. But of course there was an element of the paranormal to it.

“In my future books, I intend to get even weirder.”

I mean this as a compliment: This book is stuffed full of weird. Was there ever a moment when you were writing that you thought, “OK, I may lose the reader on this bit”?
Ha. No. I mean, of course I feared losing the reader sometimes—drafting is full of insecure moments—but never because of weirdness. Honestly, I sometimes worried it wasn’t weird enough. The images in the book are fantastical, but the structure of the novel is fairly conventional. I love weird fiction. I’m most inspired by surrealism. Slipstream. I’m obsessed with Kelly Link, Sofia Samatar, Karen Russell, Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter. Writers who don’t shy away from operating on emotional logic and dream logic rather than worldly logic. So no, I did not worry it was too weird. In my future books, I intend to get even weirder.

There are so many details about Thistlefoot that I was drawn to: how it walks, what it looks like, what it sounds like. What was important to you to include when describing and creating a living house?
It was a unique challenge to create a being that is part setting, part character, part animal, part vehicle, etc. First off, I wanted it to have real personality, a sort of arrogance, but also be hospitable. It’s a fiercely protective being because it exists to be a haven for this family. Writers like Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote such wry, winking shtetl stories, inspired the house’s voice in its first-person chapters. And of course, I had a lot of fun with the visuals. Covering it in velvet curtains and paper lanterns when it becomes a mobile theater. Cultivating a garden of yams and alfalfa in its sod roof.

When you’re working in magical realism, that delicious sense of the uncanny is created by holding unfamiliar magic up against familiar, real-world details. In this case, the magic in Thistlefoot‘s world is that trauma can literally, physically alter a space—like causing a house to sprout legs. But to balance that, and to highlight the significance of that strangeness, it was essential that everything else in the world remained rooted in our own logic system. So I did a lot of research into what actual houses from Russian and Ukrainian shtetls would have looked like, including the materials and carpentry practices that would have been used. Yes, the house is wild and whimsical and cartoony, kicking around on these big chicken legs and laying giant eggs and telling tall tales—but it’s also historically accurate, down to the smallest detail. For example, I originally had Bellatine pulling old nails out of the walls while she refurbished it, but then a carpenter friend told me that back in early 1900s Russia, where the house was built, they wouldn’t have used nails because metal was too expensive. They would have fixed boards together with wooden joinery instead. So I went back in and cut the nails. Wooden joinery only!

As a puppeteer yourself, what’s one misconception of the art form a layperson might have? What do you love most about performing?
Ah, so I actually can’t claim the esteemed title of puppeteer—yet! I did travel with a scrolling panoramic shadow puppetry show to promote my narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, but that was designed by my collaborator, Wooly Mar. I just turned the crank. And I’m only starting to work with hand-held, figurative puppets now for the first time as I prepare for a very elaborate and kooky Thistlefoot book tour. So I’m going to defer to a conversation I had with my friend Shoshana Bass, who is a professional puppeteer.

While I was writing Thistlefoot, Shoshana was adamant that I refer to the puppets in the Yaga siblings” puppet show as being “animated” rather than “manipulated.” She told me that the most common misunderstanding about puppetry is that it’s about controlling something else. We even use “puppet master” as a means of saying someone is manipulative or Machiavellian. In reality, Shoshana explained, the art of puppetry is the opposite. It’s about stepping back to be a support system for this being in your care and allowing it to live. A puppeteer follows the puppet’s lead, not the other way around.

As for performing, I love the opportunity to collaborate with amazing artists and to connect with a live audience. Writing can be isolating as hell, so to switch from Hermit to Traveling Bard, where the book becomes a carriage I ride out into the world . . . that’s what makes all the isolation worth it. I was also raised as a professional child clown (as in, I was a child who was a clown, not a clown for children), so I guess it’s in my blood.

Read our starred review of ‘Thistlefoot’ by GennaRose Nethercott.

When you think back to writing this book, what sections stand out most in your mind?
First, the folk tale chapters in Thistlefoot’s voice. They were just such a joy to write. I loved existing in the house’s playful, unreliable, teasing voice and getting to tell these compact stories within the greater narrative. They’re my favorite parts of the book, both to read and to have written, and are the excerpts I’m currently working on with Wooly Mar and Shoshana Bass to translate into live puppet shows for my book tour.

And on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, something that stands out is . . . my mortal enemy. A chapter I bitterly named “This Fucking Chapter.” A spiteful bastard of a chapter I wrote and rewrote and re-rewrote at least 12 times, and it got worse each time. I won’t even bother mentioning which one, because it’s honestly a nothing of a chapter. You wouldn’t even notice anything odd about it at this point; it’s sort of a neutral, expositional moment. But oh god. It shaved years off my life. This chapter . . . it laid one eye on me and said, “That one. Let’s kill her. It’ll be fun.”

Anyway, it ultimately turned out just fine.

Would you rather be able to animate the inert or perfectly mimic anyone you met?
Ooh, that’s a good one! Hm. Probably animating the inert, just because it’s the more dramatic of the two. One of my prized possessions is a handmade cotton and silk doll I sewed a few years ago. Her name is My Beautiful Daughters, and she has two heads. My friends all think she’s cursed, but she’s my gal. Might be nice to wake her up for tea and a chat.

Photo of GennaRose Nethercott by Kirk Murphy.

GennaRose Nethercott makes herself at home with Slavic folklore in her debut novel, Thistlefoot.

Nonfiction Graphic Memoirs

Kate Beaton’s ‘Ducks’: From crude oil to a refined graphic memoir

Interview by Laura Sackton

In 2005, in order to pay off her student loans, Kate Beaton left her home in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to work on the Alberta oil sands, a vast region in Canada that contains one of the largest deposits of crude oil in the world. During this time, Beaton began writing “Hark! A Vagrant,” a witty, irreverent webcomic about history, literary figures and her own life. The beloved series has been collected into two bestselling books, Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Beaton’s first full-length graphic memoir, is a beautiful and nuanced account of her time working in the town of Fort McMurray, as well as at various temporary work camps owned by several oil companies. It directly addresses the sexual harassment and violence that she and others experienced in the oil sands, as well as the toxic masculinity that permeates the work camps.

We talked with Beaton about the difficulties of capturing the sometimes contradictory realities of such a complicated place.

You started posting “Hark! A Vagrant” 15 years ago. How have you changed as a writer and artist since then?
I’ve changed a lot. I was only 23 when I started making things that would be “Hark! A Vagrant.” I had gone through a lot in some ways, but I was very young and inexperienced, and I look at some of my old work and cringe at it, but this is the same for almost anyone making things in the public eye. Everyone is a young fool for a while, and the world changes around you, and you get older and hopefully not more foolish but the other way around.

Right now I’m 38, and it has been a long time since I was a fresh face on the comics scene. I’m more like the wallpaper or a worn-out chair, but I like being that. No one is surprised I’m here.

How did writing those comics affect your life in the work camps? Did you have any sense of how your career would unfold?
After I had comics in my life, working in the camps got easier, because I had this thing that was just for me. Before I had that, I lost myself. It was just work and people chipping away at you in a certain way. Then I had comics and I’d go home to my little camp room after work and draw them and put them online, and here I was in a work camp in the oil sands, very alone in many ways, and I was connecting to people who saw me for who I was through my work. I felt like myself. And I didn’t want to give that up or lose that.

As the book begins, you write about the tension between loving your home in Cape Breton and needing to leave it to find work. During your time in the oil sands, some of the most poignant, powerful moments—both good and bad—are the interactions you have with people from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. Talk to me about how you feel about these places. Do you see this memoir as being about Cape Breton as well as about Alberta?
It makes sense that it is. Cape Breton has always exported workers. They leave for where the work is, and they leave together. To Boston, Sudbury, Windsor, Alberta—not always, but often you see it. And when they do, there is a shared history and a connection that is always happening.

My grandfather went out on harvest trains in the 1930s, from Nova Scotia to the prairies. There were 1,200 people on the train, he said, and there was one car for schoolteachers. Women. Along the way, the men smashed up the train and looted. “They were full of the devil,” he said. How do you think that car of women felt with those 1,200 men? I know how they felt.

You think your story is new, you think you have something new to say, but really it is all something you are born into. My mother’s family all went to work in the car factories of Windsor, and they would come visit in the summer. And I would watch my aunts go crying into the car to go back and Grandma go silently back into the house with her private sorrow, and I would know that’s going to be me someday—or rather, that this is the choice I will have to make, to stay or to go wherever the work is.

When it really was time for me to go, Alberta was where the work was, and I went. I thought nothing of it at all. And I had no idea, none at all, what I was doing. Then you come home and talk to your relatives about what happened when they left, and they all say the same thing: “We had no idea what we were doing.” “I’ve never been so cold.” “I’ve never been so lonely.” “Thank god I knew this other person from home.”

“Everyone is a young fool for a while, and the world changes around you, and you get older and hopefully not more foolish but the other way around.”

One of the many remarkable things about your memoir is its nuance: You write so honestly about a complicated place. As many readers will likely not have given oil mining much thought beyond “necessary jobs” or “climate destruction,” what do you hope they take away from reading Ducks?
Nuance is not a bad thing to take away. I think it is a book about empathy—however you want to take that, and whomever or whatever you think that comment is about. Then that is what it is about.

You convey so much emotion through your characters” facial expressions, images of massive equipment and views of the surrounding landscape, both natural and human. What’s your drawing process like when bringing scenes from your memory to the page?
Oh, I had a lot of visual references. I can’t just draw an excavator from memory! But I knew what I was looking for in references—that was memory. You see those images again, and you can really smell it and feel it, being out there. I just wanted people to feel like they were there.

There are so many people in the book—by my count, over 40 named characters! What are the challenges or joys of drawing so many different people?
The challenge was that I drew a lot of people the same! And my editors made me go back and change some of them because people were getting confused—haha! But when you have a bunch of guys in hard hats, safety glasses and safety vests, they do start looking alike. So that was challenging for sure. I was mostly concerned that I didn’t mess up on any of them and make people confused.

Ducks illustration — *Illustration from ‘**Ducks’** © 2022 by Kate Beaton. Reproduced by permission of Drawn & Quarterly.*

Since your time in Alberta, you’ve lived all over Canada, as well as in New York. Now that you’re back in Cape Breton, how does it feel to be home?
It feels natural. I liked being away in those places. I think it was a healthy thing. I learned a lot from being in cities like Toronto and New York. But I always felt like a peg on a board there too, like a thing that didn’t fit in the picture. Here, I feel like part of the painting.

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your 21-year-old self who has just arrived in Alberta? What would you say to other young women thinking about working in the oil sands?
My advice would be that you can actually ask for better money or apply for a better job. Someone told me that I wasn’t allowed to do either in the first year that I was there, and I believed them. And even the second year that I was there, I didn’t challenge the money that I was being paid, and I was in one of the lowest-paid tiers of people on site. I just didn’t know any better. And we are not really raised to know better or to ask for more when other people have no problem doing that.

Photo of Kate Beaton by Stephen Rankin Photography.

The award-winning comics artist solidifies her reputation for storytelling prowess and remarkable range.

Fiction Historical Fiction Family Drama

A new groove for Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

Interview by Langston Collin Wilkins

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s third novel, On the Rooftop, is a welcome disruption, both to literary trends and in her own publishing career. In a time of immense social upheaval, when many African American writers are foregrounding issues of race, economics and oppression in their books, Sexton chose to write a novel that centers on Black ambition and resiliency.

“With [my previous two novels], it felt like most of my interviews were sociological conversations,” Sexton says from her California home, “but I wanted to be talking about the work.” So for On the Rooftop, she didn’t have a rigid agenda. Instead, her novel emphasizes “the endurance and the joy of a community . . . while also drawing attention to the history of the issues and the fact that they still continue to exist.”

Set in 1950s San Francisco, On the Rooftop focuses on the multifaceted yet endearing Vivian, who has complicated relationships with her three daughters, Ruth, Esther and Chloe. The widowed Vivian dreams of stardom for her musically gifted daughters, who sing together as the Salvations. The young women are popular performers at a local spot called the Champagne Supper Club, and Vivian has hooked the attention of an enigmatic talent manager.

However, just as the Salvations are on the cusp of fame, Vivian’s aspirations are challenged by personal trauma and their neighborhood’s changing landscape. Her daughters are also beginning to prioritize their own desires over their mother’s prescribed plan. Loosely inspired by Fiddler on the Roof and told from multiple perspectives, On the Rooftop is a masterful examination of family and community that celebrates the legacy of Black dreams and determination.

“The music really exemplified the endurance of this community. They came here with so much optimism.”

Readers of Sexton’s previous historical novels will recognize On the Rooftop‘s exploration of the often-complex relationships between mothers and daughters. “I can’t escape it,” Sexton says. “There is just so much to be mined. They are such primal relationships, and even the best ones are fraught.”

In the novel, Sexton describes Vivian’s feelings about motherhood with care and nuance, successfully avoiding tropes and instead creating a character who embodies very specific personal and cultural dynamics. Vivian is a Louisiana transplant who lost her husband, Ellis, long ago, and whose own musical dreams were stunted by her difficult life. This is not, however, your typical parent-living-through-their-child story. “I feel like Vivian has some challenges around when to let go, but I think she ultimately does learn to do so,” Sexton says. “At her best level, she has learned when it’s time to step aside, and I think that’s what parenting is—surrendering to the child’s metamorphosis into an adult.”

The distinct relationships between Vivian and each of her daughters reflect their divergent personalities, histories and ambitions. Vivian puts much of her faith in Ruth—the eldest, the quintessential rock, the de facto leader of the sisters. Ruth has a strained relationship with middle sister Esther, who dreams of making an impact but has conflicting ideas about how to do so. Chloe, the youngest daughter, yearns for her mother, sisters and community to recognize her gifts.

Sexton notes that despite their differences, all four women are ultimately searching for the same thing: security. “I love that through each of the girls, you get a different window into what security means,” she says. “The goal is for all of them to feel safe in their own separate worlds.”

On the Rooftop book cover — Read our starred review of ‘On the Rooftop.’

The past is ever-present for each of them, and nodes of memory function as creative forces, influencing the women as they navigate generational trauma, interpersonal violence and grief. Vivian, for example, grapples with recollections from her Louisiana homeland and the aftermath of Ellis’ death. As Sexton notes, these memories catalyze Vivian’s goals for her daughters, her self-esteem and her ability to love again.

“I feel like honoring the memories that you hold is a symbol for the entire book,” she says. “For Vivian . . . she has these painful memories of segregation in the South, of humiliation in the South and of her father’s tragic death in the South. She can’t forget those memories. She can’t erase them, and she can’t bury them. She has to somehow continue to hold those memories and almost transform them into something educational for herself in order to allow this new world to enter into her space.”

Vivian’s memories were also an important factor in Sexton’s writing process. After setting her previous two novels in her hometown of New Orleans, the author wanted to explore the Bay Area, her home of 15 years. The former lawyer, who has a degree in creative writing from Dartmouth College, was cautious, however, feeling that she had yet to possess the cultural authority to imagine her adopted home. “It made sense to me to make Vivian someone who had been born in Louisiana, so we were both coming from the same place,” Sexton says. “She was basically a visitor. Her lens and my lens are not any different.”

During the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore District was considered the “Harlem of the West,” a nod to its similarity to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. The Fillmore’s Black community began to emerge during what is known as the Great Migration, a national trend of northern and western movement as many African Americans left the South in search of new residential and occupational opportunities and to escape the horrors of Jim Crow. The predominantly Black neighborhood became the center of San Francisco’s vibrant jazz scene, where transcendent legends collaborated with local musicians in the many clubs that lined the streets.

“Our ancestors have done it, and our descendants will do it. We’re not all alone in this.”

Sexton has a personal connection to the Great Migration. Similar to her characters, members of her own family moved from Louisiana to California in the 1940s and ’50s. When Sexton arrived in the area decades later, these family members welcomed her with open arms, allowing her to immediately feel a sense of community in her new home. She inscribes this sentiment into On the Rooftop.

“I love that they brought Louisiana to the Bay Area,” Sexton says, “and that they created this mini-community that was an echo of their own that they had left back home, [where] they could access all of the sources of comfort. . . . They founded the same churches that they would have gone to back home.”

In the novel, Vivian and her daughters dream of musical stardom as a way to secure liberty in the face of racial and economic oppression, and as the Salvations channel their existential angst into jazz and blues numbers performed at Black-owned Fillmore clubs, they share stages with iconic musicians such as Dinah Washington and Lena Horne. While brief, these cameos ground the story in very real historical dynamics. From blues to jazz to gospel and hip hop, music has been the lifeblood of Black people in America, conveying emotion, building community and offering pathways to freedom. Music feels like its own character in On the Rooftop, a vibrant entity that seems to breathe, occupy space and impact social activity.

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton author photo — Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of ‘On the Rooftop’

“Setting [On the Rooftop] in the jazz era really enlivens the book,” Sexton says. “The music really exemplified the endurance of this community. They came here with so much optimism and so much hope, you know, to work in the shipyards. They had more money than they ever had before. They re-created this community so it felt like home. And this musical scene was part of this.”

In the book, the community’s camaraderie and stability are undermined by white businessmen who begin buying up property in the area. For these businessmen and their partners in government, the Fillmore was a blight, despite being a strong Black residential and business base. Some property owners sold out for a quick windfall, while others resisted until the seemingly benevolent offers turned into harassment. Some continued to fight, as Esther does in the novel.

This process, known as “urban renewal,” affected African American communities across the country in the 1950s and ’60s and is an antecedent to present-day gentrification. While some Black neighborhoods were wiped out through this process, others were able to persist and still exist in some form. With On the Rooftop, Sexton hoped to present a portrait of community resiliency for contemporary neighborhoods resisting gentrification.

“I want people to be aware of the fact that it’s been around for a long time and that it continues,” Sexton says. “We need to start having conversations, and we need to start creating policies that preempt it, right, that abolish it. And I want people to experience the joy and the endurance of a community that has undergone it and still continued to flourish.”

Sexton’s work entertains and inspires at the same time, and with On the Rooftop, she urges us to find comfort in the triumphs of our past. “I hope that it will relay the security of knowing that we’re not all alone in this,” she says. “Our ancestors have done it, and our descendants will do it. We’re not all alone in this. We kind of have a blueprint for how to fix it and how to heal ourselves in the process.”

Photos of Margaret Wilkerson Sexton by Smeeta Mahanti

In the third novel from the author of A Kind of Freedom and The Revisioners, the sweetest song comes from the heart of San Francisco's 1950s jazz scene.

YA Fiction

How Isaac Blum created the funniest YA narrator of the year

Interview by Stephanie Appell

When Orthodox Jewish teen Hoodie Rosen sees a girl dancing on the sidewalk outside the window of his yeshiva classroom, he has no idea that the connection they’ll form will lead them to question everything they believe and change both of their lives forever.

Debut novelist Isaac Blum’s The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen might be the funniest YA book of the year, thanks to Hoodie’s often hilarious, deeply authentic narration. It’s also an unflinching portrait of how hate can take root in a community—with tragic results.

Blum spoke with BookPage about balancing humor with heartbreak and horror, and why his novel’s intense emotions will ring true for teen readers.

Tell us about Hoodie and Anna-Marie when we first meet them.
Yehuda “Hoodie” Rosen is goofy and sarcastic. He attends yeshiva, where he studies Jewish stuff plus “regular” school stuff. He doesn’t take much seriously. He hates zucchini.

Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary is a more “typical” teenager. She goes to the local public school and spends a lot of time thinking about boys. She practices different dances and makes TikTok videos with her friends. Compared to Hoodie, she’s serious, thoughtful and confident in her place in the world.

When the book starts, Hoodie has just moved to a new town, where his father is helping their Orthodox community build a high-rise apartment building to house more Orthodox families. Anna-Marie is mourning her father, who has recently passed away. She’s lived in Tregaron, Pennsylvania, all her life, and her mother is the mayor and hellbent on preventing the Orthodox community from growing in their town.

You do a great job of representing how neither Hoodie nor Anna-Marie see each other clearly, and yet they form what turns out to be a life-changing connection. What was challenging and what was fun about writing their relationship?
The difficult part was making their respective confusion feel true. I needed them to have very different understandings of their relationship, but for both of their perspectives to feel valid to the reader. That was challenging, and I asked myself over and over, “Will the reader buy what Hoodie’s thinking here? Will the reader understand why Anna-Marie thinks about this so differently?” I relied heavily on early readers to help me get that right.

“You’re going to deeply trust somebody who works hard to know you.”

The fun part was that once I got that balance where I wanted it, I could use Hoodie’s and Anna-Marie’s inability to read each other for some funny and surprising moments. I also think their initially crossed signals make the relationship they do create more meaningful, because they had to work to get there. It’s hard-earned. You’re going to deeply trust somebody who works hard to know you.

My list of favorite supporting characters in this book is not short. (The list is topped by Hoodie’s sisters Chana and Zippy and his friend Moshe Tzvi.) Who was your favorite supporting character to write?
You and I have the same top three. I’d probably even put them in that order, so that makes Chana my favorite. She was definitely the most fun to write.

The thing about Zippy and Moshe Tzvi is that they both have some heavy lifting to do in the book. Zippy has to help Hoodie come of age, show him that she’ll love him unconditionally and then cede the eldest sibling position to him. Moshe Tzvi has to be the studious foil to Hoodie’s slacker, and then he has to have his own coming-of-age arc, in which he grows into a place where he can disagree with his father about Hoodie’s place in the community.

Chana has no such responsibilities. She just stands up on the roof and throws soup at people. Writing her was just me sitting around thinking of silly pranks for her to pull.

Hoodie narrates from some unknown point in the future. It’s right there in the opening line: “Later, I tried to explain to Rabbi Moritz why it was ironic that my horrible crime was the thing that saved the whole community.” Was this perspective always part of the novel? Why did you employ it?
That perspective is there because of the opening line, or at least the first couple paragraphs. Before I’d outlined the novel at all, those first lines came into my head, and I wrote them like that, and I never changed them. But I like this narrative tool for a couple reasons:

It establishes tension and a bit of suspense right off the bat. Hoodie tells the reader that the events of the novel “humiliated him on a global scale,” “put him in the ICU” and “ruined his life.” Hopefully the reader wonders how all that went down and looks forward to reading about it.

That narrative device also lets the reader know that Hoodie makes it to the end of the novel alive and on good enough terms with Rabbi Moritz that Hoodie can try to explain the story’s ironies to him. I’m not categorically against having horrible things happen to my protagonist, but there’s enough grave stuff going on already in this book, and I didn’t see the need for the reader to worry about Hoodie’s fate.

“I think that being a high school teacher is a great job if you’re going to write YA.”

You’ve taught English at Orthodox schools. How did those experiences come into play as you worked on the novel?
I think that being a high school teacher is a great job if you’re going to write YA. Whether you want to or not, as a teacher you learn a ton about your students’ worlds. And if you forget what it’s actually like to be a teenager, you’re reminded every day. In this case, if you happen to be writing a book from the point of view of an Orthodox yeshiva student, it certainly helps if you spend your days surrounded by Orthodox yeshiva students.

While the novel is not based on my students—I don’t think that would be fair to them—it’s certainly influenced by them: their struggles to balance modernity with tradition, their fears of antisemitism and the way the rest of the world sees them, and their humanity and sense of humor.

The novel itself was inspired by a real-life event, too. Can you tell us about that?
On December 10, 2019, there was a shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey. Two shooters opened fire on shoppers in a targeted antisemitic attack. It was one of a number of violent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions around that time, but this one in particular moved me. Within a week of the shooting, I started outlining the story of an Orthodox Jewish teen who finds himself caught in the middle of violent antisemitism—plus all of the normal things teens are caught in the middle of, like crises of identity, first love, etc.

The shooting at the market followed months of growing tension—in Jersey City and elsewhere—between long-established communities and a new influx of Orthodox Jews. I created my own long-established community, the fictional town of Tregaron, Pennsylvania, and put Hoodie at the center of his community’s move into the town.

What do you hope readers take away from Hoodie’s deep connections to his family and his community?
I have two answers to this question, one specific, one general:

In many mainstream depictions of Orthodox Judaism, the protagonist is depicted as oppressed by their own community. There are lots of “leaving narratives,” stories where the main character is fleeing the religion, leaving their family behind. And while any orthodoxy won’t be for everybody—Hoodie isn’t sure if it’s for him—a close-knit community like Hoodie’s has so much warmth and love to offer. I wanted to make sure readers saw the positive, supportive qualities of Hoodie’s community alongside the flaws.

“It’s totally cool to be furious with the people you love. While that’s a painful feeling, it can be a starting point for growth.”

The more general point is that all families and communities are like that: flawed. With the caveat that some family relationships aren’t reconcilable, I hope readers see Hoodie’s story as an argument that it’s worth finding ways to maintain connections to your family or community, even when you’re angry at them, even when they’ve wronged you. It’s totally cool to be furious with the people you love. While that’s a painful feeling, it can be a starting point for growth.

The novel swings very quickly between humor, contemplation and heartbreak. Why was this important to you? What was the key to getting these shifts right?
I think that’s the adolescent experience. Teens feel stuff really strongly. We all cycle through our moods and feelings, from humor to contemplation to heartbreak and back again. But I think teens cycle quicker, and they feel each one more intensely. And I think it’s important to show that those seemingly contradictory feelings are going to exist next to each other, that you can experience heartbreak with a sense of humor, or that you can ask yourself important life questions without being overwhelmed by the gravity of them.

The key to the shifts for me, honestly, was self-restraint. It’s my instinct, like it’s Hoodie’s, to turn everything into a quip or a joke, to deflect from the serious back to the humorous. So when I thought Hoodie should take a step back and ask a big question, or when I knew I had to write a heavy scene, I tried to rein in that side of me and let those moments breathe.

How did you make sure the humorous moments were actually funny?
I still have no idea if the humorous moments are actually funny. When you write a novel, you spend a lot of time with it, so it has to be something you want to read. I had fun writing goofy scenes. I enjoyed reading them later. I was amused by them. But it’s often hard to judge your own work, and of course you don’t know if the reader will share your sense of humor.

To that end, I have a critique partner—let’s call him Rob, because that’s his name—who functions as a kind of snark police. When I’m too self-indulgent with the goofiness, especially to the point where it distracts from the narrative, he berates me and forces me to trim the excess stuff that’s not funny, and I’m very grateful.

“Sometimes in the most horrific moments, levity really does help. You can take the world seriously, confront its horrors and still find time to laugh.”

This novel has some awful events. I’d like the humor to show that while existence contains innumerable ills, such as bigotry, hate crime and zucchini, it’s worth keeping your sense of humor. Sometimes in the most horrific moments, levity really does help. You can take the world seriously, confront its horrors and still find time to laugh.

Hoodie asks himself big questions about whether the life he thought he was supposed to want is the life he actually wants. What advice would you give teens asking themselves similar questions?
Oh man. I’m certain that I’m not qualified to give this advice. But here are two thoughts:

First, you can only be you. So once you figure out who that person is, just be that person. Hoodie finds a way to be himself and still be part of his community, but that’s not possible for everybody. And if you figure out who you are, and the people around you won’t accept that person, then the flaw is with them, not with you.

Second, lean on people you trust, people who will support you unconditionally. Find those people and let them help you.

Hoodie memorably waxes poetic about his love for Starburst, so I have to ask: What is your favorite Starburst flavor? What is your least favorite? What do you hope never becomes a Starburst flavor?
Most flavors should not be Starburst flavors. Starburst flavors should be limited to fruit. I tend to think of them in terms of color. Pink is my favorite. I assume pink is everyone’s favorite. I don’t understand why they make nonpink flavors. Yellow and orange are bad. Those are the ones you give away to your friends when you pretend to be a good sharer.

Read our review of ‘The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen.’

Author photo of Isaac Blum courtesy of Milton Lindsay.

The debut novelist explores faith, friendship and family in The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen.

Fiction Popular Fiction

Taylor Jenkins Reid spills the tea on her book-loving life

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

First we met Evelyn Hugo in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Then came Daisy Jones of Daisy Jones & The Six, followed by Nina Riva from Malibu Rising. Author Taylor Jenkins Reid brings her quartet of novels about fictional female celebrities to a close with the highly anticipated Carrie Soto Is Back, about a tennis player’s major comeback. In anticipation of its release, we volleyed over a few questions about the author’s favorite bookstores and libraries.

What are your bookstore rituals?
I seem to have a habit of hitting up the front fiction shelves, then making a beeline for the cookbooks and then hitting up fiction again. It’s very hard for me to leave a store without a novel or a cookbook. Not sure it’s ever happened.

What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack?
A very fancy—perhaps even artisanal and overpriced—flavored black iced tea.

“I love literature but also deeply love architecture. Libraries are such a beautiful way of exploring both.”

What’s the last thing you bought at your local bookstore?
One of the volumes of the Bad Guys series by Aaron Blabey. My daughter absolutely loves that series, and it is such a treat to take her to the store and let her buy a new one. I love watching her come home and go right to her bedroom so she can devour it cover to cover.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
I love all animals, but my heart belongs to dogs!

How is your own personal library organized?
By color and sections that make sense only in my brain. To me, the organizing principle of a home library is “How will you best remember where the book is?” and so I do that by color of the book and a general “vibe” that defies logic but works every time for me.

While writing your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful?
When I first started writing, I was trying to absorb as many of my contemporaries as I could. I was voracious. At the Beverly Hills Public Library, they had a Friends of the Library store, and that store would have a used book sale two times a year. I used to go in there and ask the volunteer behind the desk what books I should get and come home with a stack of 20. It was such a lovely way to read outside of my own taste, picking those used books up for a dollar or two each.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
The library at my elementary school felt like such a special place. We only really went there during specific free periods or during the coolest, most magical time of the year: the Scholastic Book Fair. That sense I still get in a library or bookstore, that there are so many books I want to read and so little time, started right there.

Do you have a favorite library from literature?
I’m forever intrigued by Jay Gatsby’s library—all real books and none ever read.

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet?
Oh, absolutely. I love literature but also deeply love architecture. Libraries are such a beautiful way of exploring both. I was blessed to go to college near the Boston Central Library, which may have formed my taste in libraries. It is such a gorgeous building.

I hope one day I get to see some of the libraries at Oxford, the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Spain and the George Peabody Library in Baltimore.

Photo of Taylor Jenkins Reid by Michael Buckner.

So many books, so little time! The bestselling author of Carrie Soto Is Back discusses bookstore rituals, her devotion to cookbooks and more.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Science Fiction

In Ruthanna Emrys’ new novel, humanity has begun to heal the Earth—and then the aliens show up

Interview by Chris Pickens

The Ringers, the aliens that descend to Earth at the beginning of Ruthanna Emrys’ A Half-Built Garden, are perhaps the best-case scenario as far as aliens go. They’re a multicultural community made up of different interstellar life-forms, they value parenthood to the point that they show up to negotiations with children in tow, and they’ve come to Earth for the express purpose of airlifting humans off of our doomed planet. The only problem? Communities like the one protagonist Judy Wallach-Stevens belongs to have made enormous progress in healing the Earth, and they may not want to abandon it after all.

What interested you in a first-contact story that takes a more peaceful route than the murderous invader angle we see so often?
First contact has been my favorite subgenre of science fiction since I was a teenager. “Exposure Therapy”—my first professional publication, in Analog many years ago—was a first-contact story. The challenges of communication and cooperation are so interesting, and aliens let me turn the questions that humans face with one another up to 11.

I have trouble seeing how a propensity for murderous invasion is compatible with the level of internal cooperation needed for interstellar travel. I’m sure I could come up with reasons to justify it if I tried, but murderous invasion is banal and evil, and not a direction that I’m terribly excited to write about. There’s metal and water spread throughout the universe. Why come all this way to kill people when the only resources that differ across star systems are the ones produced by thriving, living sapients? Interstellar invasion to kidnap artists and bring them back to Alpha Centauri . . . that I could get into. I think Catherynne Valente wrote that one!

I’m also an optimist who likes stories in which communication and cooperation are possible. During the process of writing the book, we brought an African grey parrot into our household, and next time I write a first contact, it will probably be influenced by the difficulties of communicating with an English-speaking nonhuman from Earth.

“I have trouble seeing how a propensity for murderous invasion is compatible with the level of internal cooperation needed for interstellar travel.”

Were there any ideas about the way the Ringers look that you discarded or modified over time? What was the initial spark for their appearance?
In my first two books, Winter Tide and Deep Roots, I used aliens originally invented by H.P. Lovecraft, who, for all his faults, was very good at nonhumanoid body plans. So I didn’t want bipeds with funny foreheads—but I did want forms that stemmed from recognizable ecological niches and that could, with some effort, be compatible with living in the same environments as humans. So, no visitors from gas giants.

The plains-folk were sparked by M.C. Escher’s roly-polies, which have fascinated me from the time I was a little kid looking at my parents’ Escher coffee-table book. I made them bigger and more reasonably biological, but still something that curls up in a ball for defense with (some of their) eyes sticking out. I added the extra limbs and eyes and skinsong later, because complicated sensoria are fun.

I don’t recall the tree-folk origin as clearly, but playing with body plans that make humans nervous is always fun, and arboreal biology is also fun to play with. I wanted something that would look more aggressive than it is, so “sort of a giant spider if you don’t look too closely” seemed like a promising direction. I added the extra eyes and mouths and manipulators later, because complicated sensoria and radial symmetry are fun.

The gender and parenting aspects of both species came out of themes that I wanted to play with as sources of friction and connection between species—in particular, that for the plains-folk, being a mother is an indication of dominance and leadership, and the way that shapes the whole culture of the Ringers.

“Why would you even make a Dyson sphere—and what would it take to make one and still be worth talking to?” was also a core question that shaped the Rings. Politically speaking, I think Dyson spheres are a bad idea; I wrote the Ringers to argue with me.

The choice of whether to stay on Earth or to abandon the planet lies at the heart of this book. Do you foresee humanity having to make a similar choice at some point in the future?
I’m not actually convinced that it’s a feasible choice; that’s another place where I wrote the book to argue with myself, as well as with the assumption threaded through so much science fiction that life in space is our inevitable destiny. The Ringers have made several technological advances that make this assumption viable, but it’s not clear yet that those advances are feasible in the real world.

I have some serious side-eye for triumphalist predictions about terraforming from a species that so far seems very skilled at taking a habitable planet and making it less habitable. When we’ve proven that we can keep the air breathable and the temperature under control on the easy setting, I think we’ll be ready to spread out!

Motherhood in all its forms is a key element of the story. Was it clear from the beginning that this story would circle around it, or did that element emerge in the drafting process? What about motherhood did you most want to convey or examine while writing?
Parenthood (not just motherhood) was one of my major starting points. In particular, I wanted to challenge the way that our current culture places parenting in conflict with accomplishing just about everything else, and with playing any other role. Modern American culture is worse about motherhood, but that’s because fathers are expected to prioritize those other roles. Every culture in A Half-Built Garden, even the corporate one, has some way of better integrating parenting into the rest of life. Some of them have all-new problems, but that’s where plot comes from!

What aspects of your version of Earth’s future do you think are most likely to become reality?
Sea level rise and unpleasant weather, unfortunately. But 80% of the technology for the dandelion networks is out there and already being used by citizen scientists, and that—along with the algorithms that deliberately build in biases that we want—is ready to become reality if we work at it!

This book is full of different communities. (I loved the strangeness of the social games on the corporate island of Asterion!) Was one of these groups more fun to construct than another?
They were all fun in their own ways. The Chesapeake Bay Watershed Network builds on things I love about my own communities and want to see grow. Judy’s neighborhood is, in fact, my neighborhood, with some additions that we’ve started (the food forest) or discussed putting in (the runoff mitigation garden with the frogs). The remnant U.S. government is a love letter to the nerdy wonks I’ve worked with inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C.

Asterion was definitely a lot of fun to write, and I wasn’t planning them at the start of the story. At some point I got stuck figuring out the corporate reps, and I decided that what this book needed was really sexy villains. And people who, like me, are actually a lot more into gender presentation than gender per se. I wouldn’t want to live on their island, but I would enjoy a vacation there a lot more than Judy does! As long as they’ve labeled the food.

The Ringer multiculture was also a lot of fun, both in figuring out how to build infrastructure for the two species’ symbiosis and dropping hints of what things are like in other habitats. My secret favorites are the tech-obsessed group with the food pills, though, like Cytosine. I wouldn’t be terribly excited about their potluck contributions.

Read our review of ‘A Half-Built Garden’ by Ruthanna Emrys.

When you think back to writing this book, do any sections stand out to you?
A Half-Built Garden is in many ways a novel of manners, and my favorite novel-of-manners trope is the fraught dinner party. So I knew early on that each group would get to host a fraught dinner party and that the Chesapeake party would be a Passover Seder. Since most novels-of-manners are British or pseudo-British, I really feel that literature doesn’t contain enough fraught Seders. I loved writing a science fictional version of my family’s weird progressive interfaith Seder and how well suited it was for forcing people to talk to one another at a time when some of them would rather have hidden from the consequences of previous events.

If aliens landed on Earth today, what do you think would happen? Could we exist peacefully, or perhaps even join their civilization?
It depends on where they land! Come to suburban Maryland, and like Dinar, my family will be eager to host the world’s most high-stakes potluck on no notice and to invite friends at NASA to join us before anyone less friendly can get there. On the other hand, I can imagine landing sites where people would be a lot less welcoming. And plenty of companies, like Asterion, would push to build franchises on the nearest Dyson sphere. I hope that the aliens would be enough like us to accept us despite shared imperfections—and enough unlike us to accept us despite those imperfections!

I did cheat a bit by having the Ringers learn human languages from our broadcasts; I didn’t want the whole plot to be about language learning, even if Judy’s linguistics-nerd co-parent is annoyed about it. In practice, I think we’d have a long process of finding common communication methods, and if parrots are any indication, there would probably be a lot of reasonable-to-one-side biting along the way.

Photo of Ruthanna Emrys credit Jamie Anfenson-Comeau.

We talked to the author about writing a book to argue with herself and why literature needs more fraught Seders.

Fiction Historical Fiction

Anthony Marra is lookin’ at you, kid

Interview by Alice Cary

“One of the great things about writing a book about 1940s Hollywood is that you can watch a bunch of old movies and call it research,” Anthony Marra says about Mercury Pictures Presents, a sprawling, bighearted tragicomedy set in Hollywood during World War II, with additional storylines in Italy and Germany. It took six years to write. “So yeah, I did a lot of research,” he says, laughing. “I’m in my sweatpants watching Humphrey Bogart, saying, ‘Don’t worry, this is work.'”

Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and the story collection The Tsar of Love and Techno, speaks from his home in New Haven, Connecticut, with a voice that’s full of humor, passion and compassion, just like his prose. After previously setting books in Chechnya and the Soviet Union, he says he wanted to set this novel a little closer to home.

Initially, he was toying with two seemingly separate ideas, the first being a story set in Los Angeles, the author’s former home. “Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said that if you tip the world over, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles,” Marra says. “That was never more true than it was during the ’30s and ’40s, when you had thousands and thousands of European refugees landing there.”

The other idea focused on southern Italy, the home of Marra’s great-grandmother and her family. But during a trip to the island of Lipari, the author noticed a plaque commemorating anti-Fascists, artists and intellectuals who had been exiled there during Benito Mussolini’s regime.

“It seemed so strange,” Marra recalls, “that this island paradise to which I could trace my own roots had once been Mussolini’s Alcatraz. It occurred to me that a number of European refugees would refer to LA as ‘sunny Siberia,’ and I thought the same term could have easily been applied to a place like Lipari.” Marra realized that he could weave his two story ideas together into one, “about two Siberias on either ends of the world, and this one family divided between them.”

“Frank Lloyd Wright supposedly said that if you tip the world over, all the loose pieces will land in Los Angeles. That was never more true than it was during the ’30s and ’40s, when you had thousands and thousands of European refugees landing there.”

Mercury Pictures Presents is the story of Maria Lagana, who flees Rome with her mother after Fascists condemn Maria’s activist father to confino (internal exile) in a Calabrian village. Devastatingly, it was 12-year-old Maria’s actions that accidentally led to her father’s betrayal—a theme that Marra explores in similar ways in The Tsar of Love and Techno. “Totalitarian ideology invariably undermines the family as an institution by turning each member into a potential betrayer,” the author explains. “The people you’re closest to have the power to take away your freedom, or even your life, simply by saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

Mercury Pictures Presents cover — Read our review: “It’s full of passion, energy and exuberance, just like the Hollywood world it portrays.”

Fifteen years later, in 1941, Maria lives in Los Angeles with her mother and works as a producer at Mercury Pictures International. Maria’s boss is Artie Feldman, described in the novel as a fast-talking, “middle-aged narcissist whose bald spot had outpaced his toupees.” This is where Marra’s movie watching comes in handy, particularly in the way he mirrors the screwball-comedy dialogue of the era’s films. It’s apparent that His Girl Friday was a big influence, and Maria will remind readers of Rosalind Russell’s character, just “a lot more Italian,” Marra says. It’s easy to see why Maria was the first character that came to him when he started crafting the novel. “I really just fell in love with her.”

Despite the abundance of World War II novels and movies, Marra was surprised to find this chapter of Hollywood history to be “a little hidden.” As he plunged into researching the 1940s world of madcap moviemaking, he meticulously explored more serious subjects with equal fervor, including wartime challenges, xenophobia and immigration. For example, immigrants were subject to curfews, so Hollywood studios frequently adjusted shooting schedules to ensure workers could get home on time. Immigrants like Maria had to register as “enemy aliens,” confine their movements to a 5-mile radius and surrender certain items like flashlights, radios and cameras—anything that might be used to communicate with the enemy.

Such restrictions are particularly problematic for another central character of the novel, Italian immigrant and photographer Vincent Cortese. As he complains to Maria, “You travel halfway around the world just to end up in confino again. How does an itinerant photographer make a living if he’s prohibited from being an itinerant and a photographer?”

Elements of photography and filmmaking are all over Mercury Pictures Presents, to the extent that Marra considers his role to be as directorial as it is authorial. “I tried to draw upon the grammar of cinema as I constructed this world,” he says. At times, the narrative zooms in and out, cutting from present day to the future and back again. Other scenes have an undeniably cinematic quality, such as when Vincent and another character step outside to discover that it’s snowing in Los Angeles, which really happened on New Year’s Day in 1942. Even the process of editing out unnecessary scenes was informed by filmmaking. “If you look at Dostoevsky,” Marra says, “where people are ranting for pages at a time, you can tell that clearly Dostoevsky was a man who had never seen a movie.”

“I tried to draw upon the grammar of cinema as I constructed this world.”

Marra is especially intrigued by the machinations of fantasy, escapism and propaganda in this period, particularly as the government turned to Hollywood “to use the tools of cinema to mobilize the country for war,” he says. “I was interested in exploring how the camera—and more broadly, art—can be this source of witness and documentation, but also a source of deception. And how we as viewers are asked to tell the difference.”

But for every element of darkness and wartime despair, the novel also contains just as much joy, particularly in moments of comic relief. Marra considers this his “most comic work yet,” and found that humor “collapses the distance between character and reader in a way that nothing else really does. A good joke is really powerful in terms of bringing the reader to care about a character.”

Familial bonds provide some of the most buoyant opportunities for comedy. Most memorably, a lively trio of aunts, inspired by the author’s own great-aunts, provide a lifeline for Maria and her mother in LA. “In their black dresses and sunglasses,” Marra writes, “they looked like Grim Reapers going as Greta Garbo for Halloween.” He even gave them his great-aunts’ real names: Mimi, Lala and Pep.

“Even though I initially began working on this book some years ago, it was only during [COVID-19] lockdown that it took off,” Marra says. “I felt like I was drawing more and more on relatives and friends, if only to have the opportunity to keep company with those people again. . . . Obviously, staying inside during COVID is a lot different than experiencing confino, but I think just the sense that you’re isolated from your loved ones and limited in what you can do informed how I approached the characters and their stories.”

As Marra writes in an early scene, “So much of a movie’s meaning came down to who it deemed worthy of a close-up, a perspective, a face.” With Mercury Pictures Presents, he fits a multitude of memorable personalities into his frame, transforming the novel into something quite like an epic film. After all, he says, novels are most like movies in their power to “transport a reader to a place far from their daily life that nonetheless speaks to them in a deep way.”

Photo of Anthony Marra by Paul Duda.

Comedy and tragedy collide in the author's second novel, set amid the highs and lows of World War II-era Hollywood.

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

The heartfelt, trope-tastic, laugh-till-your-sides-hurt, best YA rom-com of the summer

Interview by Stephanie Appell

Sometimes our hearts can be so clueless. Neil Kearney finds this out the hard way when his friend-with-benefits catches feelings. Neil doesn’t reciprocate, so now he’s lost not only a steady hookup but also a date to his brother’s wedding.

The solution? Neil ropes his obnoxiously earnest, annoyingly hardworking, aggravatingly kind boarding school roommate, Wyatt Fowler, into pretending to be boyfriends for the weeklong nuptial festivities. Sure, Neil and Wyatt can hardly stand each other (Wyatt wears Crocs, for goodness sake!), but what’s the worst that can happen in a week?

Acclaimed author Mason Deaver’s third YA novel, The Feeling of Falling in Love, is a rom-com romp about finding love and yourself when you least expect it.

In the novel’s acknowledgments, you mention that it took years to crack this story. What turned out to be the key to unlocking it?
The book has been through so many iterations. It was originally a road trip novel in which Neil enlisted Wyatt to help him get revenge on a boy who cheated on him, and along the way, Neil and Wyatt would fall in love but deny their feelings. So, different, but not that different. Neil and Wyatt largely stayed the same since those original drafts, but I could never really figure out how to connect myself to that plot. And if I can’t do that, then I can’t write something; that’s just how my brain is.

Then I watched My Best Friend’s Wedding at the suggestion of another writer-friend, and everything that I wasn’t getting clicked in an instant: a wedding instead of a road trip, fake dating while also actually falling in love slowly over the week, family drama.

How would you describe Neil and Wyatt when we first meet them?
Neil and Wyatt start the book in very opposite places. Neil begins the book in (what I think he’d believe is) a time of contentment. He has friends, he has his thing with Josh, he’s away from his family. Wyatt really is the only thing that concerns him, simply because Wyatt is Wyatt.

Wyatt, however, is frustrated, a fish out of water in a school full of people who make them feel unwelcome, away from their family when they’d love to be back home, doing double the work just to make sure they can maintain their place at a prestigious school they’d probably rather not be at.

But as we move along to the wedding, Neil feels more unwelcome because of who his family is and how they treat him, and while Wyatt might not feel at home around Neil’s family, they’re able to handle the situation better than Neil. It’s a chance for Wyatt to understand where Neil is coming from and what he’s gone through, while Neil comes to understand how his actions have made Wyatt feel.

I think that’s what makes them both perfect for each other: They’re missing what the other has, and they’re never afraid to challenge each other.

“It’s a scary thing, asking someone to love you, and it’s never just once. Love is a risk you take every single day.”

The Feeling of Falling in Love has such great tropes, including a time-constrained plot, fake dating, a wedding and an enemies-to-lovers romance. What do you love about these tropes?
This book has some of my favorite tropes, even ones you didn’t mention, like a grumpy/sunshine dynamic and a height difference. But enemies-to-lovers (or enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, rather) is an absolute favorite of mine. I love exploring just why these characters dislike each other—sometimes for valid reasons, other times for something shallow and silly—and watching as they slowly find common ground, a connection.

What elements of the tropes did you want to preserve in this book versus what elements did you want to upend or subvert?
I wanted to subvert something you might not think of as a trope—but sometimes tropes can be a bad thing—which is the idea of a trans/cis romance. It’s so common in stories about a transgender person falling in love for them to find a relationship with a cisgender person. Even my own work includes it. Wyatt’s character was trying to tell me something about themselves I hadn’t cracked yet. And now the book gets to be a sweet romance between two trans teens, something even more rare than the trans rom-com.

Neil’s reflection on his relationship to his body after gender-confirmation surgery is so powerful and complex. Why was it important to you to include these moments in the story?
Neil’s relationship to his body is a story that mirrors mine and many other trans people’s stories. There’s this idea that surgery is a magical fix for trans people, or that it’s this necessary party of transitioning, and that once you’ve gotten it, all your dysphoria vanishes—when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some trans people want surgery, and nothing can be more affirming. Others are fine with just having one surgery over the other. Some might not want surgery at all or even to undergo hormone replacement therapy. There’s no one singular way to be trans, and so long as you’re comfortable with where you are in your journey, nothing else has to matter.

I very much wanted to explore how different trans experiences can be. Neil is at a place in his journey where he wanted top surgery but not bottom surgery, where he was offered the chance to cover his scars but decided they’re a point of pride for him. He’s very proud of his trans body, and he likes who he is, for the most part.

“Neil and Wyatt rhyme with each other. They have what the other doesn’t, both literally and metaphorically.”

I also really love that you explore how deeply class differences impact how Neil and Wyatt have been perceiving each other. How did you craft this aspect of the novel, and what do you hope readers take from it?
On the surface, it was such an easy way to make Neil unlikable. He’s a spoiled rich kid with no regard for anyone but himself. He dresses in expensive brands, throws money at his problems and doesn’t seem to have a care in the world. I love characters like that, the irredeemable jerks you aren’t meant to like.

But beyond the surface of Neil’s character, I wanted to explore this idea that money hasn’t really gotten him anywhere. He afforded the surgeries and his expensive school, but at the cost of any real connections in his life, both to his friends and to his family.

Neil and Wyatt rhyme with each other. They have what the other doesn’t, both literally and metaphorically. Neil’s money would solve so many of Wyatt’s issues at home, allow their parents to take a break and pay off loans or buy new clothing. But Wyatt’s family have these rich connections with one another, and they’re an actual family who love and care for one another. So Neil has something Wyatt wants, and Wyatt has something that Neil wants. The two of them go together in that sense.

There are two incredibly rich scenes in this book that both involve suits. What kinds of research did you do to create these scenes? Why are these scenes so meaningful for Neil and for Wyatt, and how did you create that richness of meaning?
Just as reaffirming as surgery can be, fashion for trans people is instrumental in our ability to represent ourselves. Sure, clothing has no gender and anyone should be able to wear whatever they want, but for trans people, that euphoria of searching through the men’s or women’s section can mean so much as we find cuts and styles that make us feel welcome in our bodies.

I spent way too much time researching the brands in the book, even the ones that aren’t named, scoping their websites and using their catalogs to give Neil his knowledge and love of fashion. Neil loves the feeling of a suit and that euphoria it gives him to dress exactly how he feels, while Wyatt has never had access to these kinds of clothes before. Wyatt becomes uncomfortable when presented with clothes that could put groceries on his family’s dinner table, whereas Neil doesn’t bat an eye as he swipes his mother’s credit card without even asking Wyatt how he feels.

The novel includes a number of what I’d call near kisses—moments when it seems like Neil and Wyatt are definitely going to kiss, but don’t. Be honest: Did you ever laugh an evil laugh while writing these?
Absolutely I evil laugh. I love these fake-out moments, these just misses. It adds so much to the characters, gives them so much to reflect on, these fleeting moments when something could’ve happened, but didn’t.

“There’s still such a lack of romance stories centered on trans characters, on trans joy, trans happiness and trans characters finding love in both themselves and each other. It makes me sad that we don’t have more.”

Toward the end of the novel, a few different characters offer Neil some pretty similar pieces of advice. My favorite is when Neil’s cousin tells him, “Love is a risk, okay? Every single person in love takes a risk every single day of their lives.” What advice would you give someone who, like Neil, finds love absolutely terrifying?
That entire ending is a conversation with myself, I think. Being trans and wanting love are two things that always seem at odds with each other. Wanting a relationship with someone means outing myself and having that conversation, something that could potentially go very badly and end things. Or, possibly worse, they just don’t understand your identity.

It’s a scary thing, asking someone to love you, and it’s never just once. Love is a risk you take every single day, and it’s never one of those things that gets less scary, you just learn how to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

That’s what Neil is struggling with: letting someone in who could possibly hurt him, letting someone see the uglier side of him, working on himself to keep this relationship alive. It’s the lesson he learns in the book, that love is a risk worth taking.

I’m ending at the beginning: This book is dedicated to “every trans person who ever believed they were too complicated for a love story.” Why are stories of trans love and trans joy so important?
I grew up never seeing stories about queer love. The first time I ever read a book where a queer character got a happy ending, got the boy and the kiss, was Becky Albertalli‘s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. Steadily, year by year, we’ve been opening ourselves up to so many different stories by so many different kinds of writers, and it’s amazing to see.

But there’s still such a lack of romance stories centered on trans characters, on trans joy, trans happiness and trans characters finding love in both themselves and each other. It makes me sad that we don’t have more. But that just means that we need to foster trans writers, uplift their work and convince them that their stories are worth being told and worth being put on shelves.

Read our starred review of ‘The Feeling of Falling in Love.’

Author photo of Mason Deaver courtesy of Mason Deaver.

Acclaimed author Mason Deaver's third YA novel, The Feeling of Falling in Love, is a rom-com romp about finding love and yourself when you least expect it.

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