Heather Seggel

YA FictionYA

Rick Yancey

Interview by Heather Seggel

In last year’s The Monstrumologist, Rick Yancey introduced readers to a terrifying world much like our own, where monsters are not only real but also the subject of scientific study. Now the adventures of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop and his young ward, Will Henry, continue in The Curse of the Wendigo. Readers who couldn’t put down The Monstrumologist—or who couldn’t sleep after finishing it—will not be disappointed in Yancey’s follow-up, which serves up at least as much blood and guts as its predecessor.

After tracking him for days across a frozen wasteland, following a trail of destruction, entrails and eyeballs, BookPage caught up with Rick Yancey long enough to ask him a few questions about the appeal of horror, the line between fact and fiction—and what really scares him.

What inspired you to mix real science and history with myth and legend in this series? More than once I had to stop and separate fact from fiction, then doubted my own memory as to what was “real.”
The tension between fact and fiction is wholly intentional and meant to create a sense of unease in the reader. This harkens back to our childhood: What is that noise under my bed? What was that shadow in the closet? The sound and sight were real phenomena—and our overactive imaginations fill in the cause. The Monstrumologist is history with a single element altered: that monsters are indeed real biological organisms with a singular defining characteristic: They want to eat us. So I must be “true” to history while also staying true to that one conceit. It is lovely to hear I was successful, at least with one reader.

You indicated that a lot of research and fact-checking went into this book. How important was it to have so much “reality” in what is (hopefully) a work of fiction?
It’s a work of fiction. I swear. Please believe me. It is fiction. Sleep well tonight.

In The Curse of the Wendigo, I was relieved to see Dr. Warthrop begin to think more kindly of Will. Then I was relieved of that relief when he went right back to screaming at him. Will that push and pull in their relationship continue to evolve over time?
It would be pretty boring if it didn’t! Life depends on evolution and I certainly don’t intend to have their relationship rotting away like a corpse. Nothing is more boring than a book or series with static relationships; it’s like watching paint dry. Now I understand there are some books that actually play to this and writers who make a lot of money by “creating” cookie-cutter plots and stock characters, and even publishers who support their businesses with the equivalent of fast food: bland, generic and utterly predictable. Let’s face it, when you order your Quarter Pounder, you know it’s going to taste exactly the same as your Quarter Pounder from last week.

It’s interesting that “Rick Yancey” is kind of the über-narrator of this whole story. Why did you choose to enter the narrative?
The first reason has to do with the blurring of fact and fiction. The second probably has to do with my ego, which is about the size of the solar system (including Pluto).

Do you have a planned endpoint for the series? And will there come a point when you’ve run out of places to stick an eyeball for maximum gross-out? Seriously, though, how do you keep the gore fresh?
I would be happy to continue the series as long as the publisher would be happy to have me continue. After all, Will Henry lived to the ripe old age of 131, so the potential is there for dozens of stories. As for the gore . . . this isn’t butterfly collecting—this is hunting down horrifying, nightmarish creatures that depend upon our meat for their survival. I think you have to show what this means. As a reader, I would feel cheated if that basic premise was not explored to its fullest.

On that note, some of the scenes in this book were not just incredibly gross, but shocking, too. You already have a terrific mystery and very scary story—what prompted you to top those off with such terrifying tableaux?
Why do we cover our eyes in scary movies only to peek through our fingers? That’s what I’m doing as a writer—peeking through my fingers.

Why do we still love to be “safely” scared by books or movies?
Boy, I don’t know. I saw Paranormal Activity and didn’t sleep well for days. I kept waking up expecting to see my wife hovering over me with a death-stare. I really don’t care much for horror films, though I admire films like The Exorcist and Silence of the Lambs, but I admire them for elements other than the scary parts—acting, writing, direction. I went through a Stephen King phase in my 20s but haven’t picked up a book of his since. Never read Lovecraft, which is funny, since a lot of readers compared The Monstrumologist to his work.

Do you think that love of horror is, on some level, a “guy thing”? Who do you consider the audience for these books to be?
I don’t think the horror genre is a guy thing. Fear is a human thing. It’s practically the first emotion we have. It’s merciful, in a sense, that we cannot remember the utter horror of being ejected from our mothers’ wombs into a cold, brutally bright world so alien to anything we’ve experienced. The series is marketed to young adults, but based on feedback I’ve received, as many adults as teens have read the books. When I write, I don’t consider the age of my audience, beyond assuming they are old enough to read. I try to be true to the characters and, since I write in the first person, to a particular character’s voice. I purposefully don’t “dumb it down” in consideration of how the publisher has chosen to market the books.

What scared the living daylights out of you when you were the age of your readers? Did it influence the ways you build suspense and set scenes in this series?
My biggest fear (then and now): social situations. In my teens, I worked part-time at a cattle ranch, and working with farm animals often plunges you elbow-deep into some pretty disgusting things. I became acquainted with the stench of decay early. When people ask this question, I always think back to when I was 10 or 11 and had a terrible nightmare in which some huge, hulking, faceless shadow was chasing me . . . it couldn’t find me, but I knew in my dream it was only a matter of time until it did and then I could be assured it was going to rip me limb from limb. That dream stayed with me and is probably the germ for The Monstrumologist.

What makes this a “teen” novel? Stephen King is shelved in adult fiction, but these books are both scarier and grosser than many of his. (Wait, did I answer my own question?)
The line between YA and “adult” grows more blurry by the day. What is it that separates them? A young protagonist? Content? The “message?” I don’t really know, and maybe you have answered your own question. Thanks for the comparison to King, though, which I will take as a compliment.

Read our review of The Curse of the Wendigo.

In last year’s The Monstrumologist, Rick Yancey introduced readers to a terrifying world much like our own, where monsters are not only real but also the subject of scientific study. Now the adventures of Dr. Pellinore Warthrop and his young ward, Will Henry, continue in…

Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Daniel Handler

Interview by Heather Seggel

Daniel Handler is a force to be reckoned with in the world of children’s literature. He’s a beloved and best-selling author of both middle grade and picture books, but don’t be surprised if you don’t recognize his name: He’s best known for the Series of Unfortunate Events, written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. For his latest book, Why We Broke Up, an illustrated novel for teens, Handler teamed up with illustrator Maira Kalman to create an intoxicating, melancholy meditation on love. This tale of romance gone sour has won starred reviews, many accolades and now a Printz Honor from the American Library Association.

Handler graciously answered a few questions about how he wrote Why We Broke Up, though he prefers to remain mum on the subject of his own worst breakup.

We know why Minerva and Ed broke up, but why did they ever get together? They're such different people; did they ever stand a chance?
A chance of what? Nothing lasts forever, even in high school.

Writing from Min's perspective, you hit on a lot of very true ideas about being a teenage girl in love and the places that can lead. As a non-teenage male, how did it feel to wear that particular hat?
Intimidating. Young women are among the grooviest and most powerful creatures on the planet, and in my experience they only lend hats to one another.

What do you think Ed's reaction to receiving Min's letter and the box might be?
Outwardly, a scowl and a shrug. Inwardly, everything Min hopes for.

Min is obsessed with old movies, constantly comparing scenes from her life with scenes in the movies she loves, which are all made up. How did you decide to use film in this way, and why did you use made-up films instead of existing classics?
If I say, I’m having a day like The World Of Henry Orient (a real film), you might think I mean a magical, youthful one, or an insufferable one, or you won’t know what I’m talking about. But if I say that my day reminds me of the closing scene of Uptown Scoundrels, when Gladys Finn throws a drink in her ex-husband’s face and then puts out her cigarette in his lapel, which bursts into flames as she wraps her ermine stole around her throat and disappears into the starry night, then we all know what we’re talking about.

Young women are among the grooviest and most powerful creatures on the planet, and in my experience they only lend hats to one another.

How did you come to collaborate with Maira Kalman? Her paintings really enrich the story, and made me think there should be picture books of some kind for readers of every age. Would you do something similar again?
I came to collaborate with Maira by a) being an enormous fan of her work; b) managing to acquire an introduction; c) slowly cultivating her friendship and lulling her into an unsuspecting state; d) taking her to lunch at a restaurant so delicious anyone would agree to anything. Why We Broke Up is our second collaboration, following the picture book 13 Words, and we have other plans afoot.

You created a somewhat unusual website to promote the book: the Why We Broke Up Project, where you ask readers to submit their own terrible breakup stories. But your own worst breakup story is conspicuously missing. Why?
Well-founded fear of retaliation.

You've written for adults, young adults and (as Lemony Snicket) younger children as well. What are the differences, if any, between these processes?
None whatsoever. I just try to tell an interesting story, interestingly.

What's next for you?
A new Snicket series begins this fall, so you’ve been warned.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of Why We Broke Up.

Daniel Handler is a force to be reckoned with in the world of children’s literature. He’s a beloved and best-selling author of both middle grade and picture books, but don’t be surprised if you don’t recognize his name: He’s best known for the Series of…

Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Robin LaFevers

Interview by Heather Seggel

Grave Mercy, the first volume in an exciting new trilogy for teens, is set in a 15th-century French convent where the nuns are trained killers for the god of death. There’s wealth beyond imagining, stark and stunning violence and a romance in the midst of it all. Make no mistake: This book is vividly imagined. So it’s surprising to hear how easily it might never have come to exist.

“I had always wanted to be a writer,” author Robin LaFevers says from her home in southern California. “Since I was a little kid that [desire] had always been there, but the well-meaning adults in my life tried to redirect me” away from work that had a high risk of rejection and no guarantee of financial security. LaFevers didn’t argue: “I listened to them.” But no clear career path emerged, so she held a handful of jobs, including work at a bank, a brokerage house and a stint as a truck driver for an energy company. As she describes it, “I really just drifted” for a number of years.

Her eventual success took root after the birth of her two sons. “I was a stay-at-home mom,” she says. “Books were our salvation. We would just read for hours.” LaFevers reconnected with her childhood love of books, especially the way books we love as kids continue to resonate as we grow up. Figuring it was safe to risk rejection, and seeking a diversion from 24/7 mom duties (“I really needed to save my sanity”), she decided to go for broke and begin what she calls an “eight-year apprenticeship,” leading to the publication of her first book, The Falconmaster, in 2003. Several books in, she landed a contract that enabled her to quit a part-time job and jump into writing full time.

"I'm so tired of the bad boy, semi-stalker love interest and lust at first sight. I wanted to show that real love opens the world up to you."

With one early exception, all of LaFevers’ work is historical fantasy, which mingles real facts and people with fictional and supernatural details. Her interest in the genre is grounded in how often these seemingly divergent areas overlap. “So many of the things we think of as fantasy elements, like wizards and alchemy, people actually believed as science at one point,” she says. “It makes me aware of how much we shape our reality. In 500 years, what are they going to be laughing about that we believed was real? That’s much more interesting to me than the events and places and dates of history—it’s how people moved in a world” built around beliefs much different than those of our present day.

In Grave Mercy, the worlds of history and fantasy come together when Ismae, newly escaped from a life of abuse and arranged marriage to a cretin, is taken in by the convent of St. Mortain. While you won’t find assassin nuns in any history book, Ismae’s job takes her to Brittany and Duchess Anne, who really did rule the region at the ripe old age of 12. That the characters in this story are teens is entirely faithful to the roles they occupied in society, “doing really big, important, cool things” as military and political leaders.

LaFevers recalls that those adult responsibilities aroused one editor’s suspicions. “My editor kept saying, ‘Really?! She just seems too old to be 12!’” while reading about the unusually sophisticated Anne. “I said, we can change [the character] but all people have to do is Google her to find out she really was 12, and she really was speaking and writing Greek and Latin at five and a half. She was raised to be a duchess from the moment she was born.” The author, who lives with her husband and a cat she describes as “demonic,” hopes readers will look up the historical characters in the book, but warns that Anne’s real-life story contains some spoilers as far as her future goes in the His Fair Assassin trilogy.

It’s not just the people but the setting for Grave Mercy that lends itself to historical fantasy. LaFevers has posted a photo on her website showing a medieval chapel in the Brittany region of France. “One of the starting points for me” in researching the books “was seeing this church built right next to these two pagan standing stones,” she says. In Grave Mercy those pagan ways include not just “herbwitch” as a job description, but souls rendered visible above the bodies of the dying and a pantheon of saints at the ready to intercede on behalf of virtually any cause. This, too, is true to Brittany as it was in the Middle Ages. “That duchy really clung to their old folk beliefs longer and harder” than many neighboring areas. Even today Brittany observes some holidays tied to pagan beliefs.

For the character Ismae, a world rich with spirits is the backdrop for a journey of personal discovery. Grave Mercy is ultimately “intended to be a story of coming into one’s own mental faculties and learning to think for yourself, make your own decisions, your own choices. It’s about seeing the world with your own eyes, not your parents’ or your convent’s eyes.”

That journey does include a romance between Ismae and Gavriel Duval, a Breton nobleman, but don’t expect this courtship to be business as usual. LaFevers says, “I’m so tired of the bad boy, semi-stalker love interest and lust at first sight [in young adult fiction]. I wanted to show that real love opens the world up to you. You don’t have to give up part of yourself, or be less than who you are, or need to be saved. Two strong people can meet and find common ground.”

The romance develops into a sexual relationship, which is ultimately why the novel is designated for readers 14 and older. However, there’s violence in the tale as well, particularly in the book’s first scenes, that some readers may find alarming. To keep the opening from being mired in gloom, Ismae is seen smiling even as she’s locked into a root cellar by her monstrous new husband, just to show that her spirit hasn’t been broken.

With Ismae, and characters who will take center stage in future volumes, some of the fascination is in what sees them through their difficult backgrounds. “Part of it’s about coping mechanisms,” LaFevers says. “We know people have these really dark [life] circumstances,” but the grim details may not be as useful as the ways people learn to navigate through them. “That’s what I’m trying to focus on.”

Grave Mercy, the first volume in an exciting new trilogy for teens, is set in a 15th-century French convent where the nuns are trained killers for the god of death. There’s wealth beyond imagining, stark and stunning violence and a romance in the midst of…

Memoir

Mary Albanese

Interview by Heather Seggel

When author Mary Albanese abruptly left her home in upstate New York and set out for Alaska, it was with a teaching job in mind. A bump in the road led her to study geology instead, where her fine art and earth science skills served her well drawing maps. But drawing those maps required surveying alarmingly rough and remote terrain, while living on canned beans and rice and carrying a shotgun to ward off bears.

In Midnight Sun, Arctic Moon, Albanese tells the story of her time in Alaska, which reads like a love letter to some of the most unforgiving landscape on earth. BookPage had a few questions about the view from so far above the “lower 48.”

Alaska seems so extreme in every way, it's bound to have made deep impressions on you. What were your most and least favorite things about life there?

I loved the extreme seasons. It served to enhance the grandeur of the already magnificent landscape.

This might sound nuts but I didn’t have any least favorite thing. I loved the challenge of the cold, and of the heavy-duty work. I might not want to do that now, but back in my 20s, it was all a marvelous adventure.

You seemed so eager and ready to hit the tundra; was there anything you were sorry to leave behind in New York?

“If you HAVE to do it, nothing’s going to stop you. Be safe, be smart, work hard, and GO."

I was far from my family who were all very dear to me. But through my letters and phone calls, I made sure I vicariously gave them the best of my Alaska experiences.

It was surprising to read that your decision to study geology instead of education essentially turned on the regretful sigh of a professor who hadn't been able to experience Alaska's great wild spaces. Have you always had such a finely tuned decision meter?

Not at all. I had three majors in college because I couldn’t decide between them. It gave me such a headache debating what I would do with my life. But at that moment, something just seemed to finally fall into place and I went with it. Once I did, I didn’t look back.

The geology fieldwork you did was so tied to details and potential danger. How did you manage to appreciate the scenery while trying not to die every day?

There wasn’t a lot of time to enjoy the scenery but at the same time, you couldn’t be out there and NOT see it.

Author Mary Albanese at a high campsite with snow-capped Mount McKinley in the background.

 

One of the funniest parts of the book is also by far the saddest: a three-month period where you took on every single job or opportunity offered, including black-belt-level karate and conducting an orchestra, only to realize it was an attempt to deal with grief at the loss of your daughter. Do you think that “extreme-ness” is part of why you thrived in Alaska?

Absolutely. I will admit that I am an “experience” junkie. I think it’s why I am suited to be a writer, and it’s also why my writing varies so much. I like each project to be different from the last one.

On the flip side of that, you describe many people who seem to thrive in Alaska's remote environment, then fall apart on return to the lower 48. You've moved several times now and are clearly succeeding. How did you balance that?

After leaving Fairbanks, I had a pretty rough seven years living in Washington State. I felt that part of my soul was missing. Then we got to move back to Alaska. It was wonderful not only to be back, but to realize that Alaska was such a part of me that I carried it inside me. From then on, I knew wherever I was, I could bring my internal “Alaska” with me.

You initially tried to get hired as a teacher in Alaska, which was suffering a shortage, but couldn't land a job. Do you ever imagine what your life would have been like if that first choice had come through?

Before I got to Alaska, I had epic scenarios for my entire life all planned out. But once I made the move to geology, I never looked back. For one thing, I was so busy getting through it all that I didn’t have time to consider alternative lifestyles.

An antler-bedecked bus dubbed the Tundrasaurus carried Albanese and other geologists on an Arctic field trip.

My favorite story in the book is one where you're working with Dr. Thomas Smith in an area that has already been mapped. He disputes your charted finding of chert nodules in metamorphic terrain based on an older, partial map, until you pull one out of your vest and hand it to him, disproving the old map. This couldn't have been the only time something similar happened, and your grace and composure were admirable. Did you ever want to just conk someone with a rock hammer?

Grace and composure? I was terrified of Dr. Smith that first day and it was pure luck that I happened to have one of those chert nodules in my pocket. If I hadn’t, who knows? He might still think I was a dunce.

I really didn’t like it when some guy questioned my ability just because I was female. That really made me see red. I tried to handle the situation with tact and self-control but it didn’t always work.

It seems like among your siblings, the men stay closer to home while the women are rovers. Is that pattern playing out in each of your own families?  

My goodness, now that you mention it, yes! My daughters are off in the world, while my nephews are home-bodies. Hmmmm.

Your story takes place in the 1970s and early '80s, and you've had the opportunity to teach geoscience since then. Do you think girls are joining the field more readily, or does more need to be done? 

As long as women are more likely to be the primary care-tenders of their children, field jobs will be harder for women to pursue.

What advice would you give to a young person making a new start as bold as the one you did?

If you HAVE to do it, nothing’s going to stop you. Be safe, be smart, work hard, and GO.

Finally, it's always a pleasure for me to learn a new word, even if the meaning is appalling. So thank you, and eeeeew, for "horsicles." 

We can all thank my dog-mushing pal Shirley for that one.

When author Mary Albanese abruptly left her home in upstate New York and set out for Alaska, it was with a teaching job in mind. A bump in the road led her to study geology instead, where her fine art and earth science skills served…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Shannon Hale

Interview by Heather Seggel

Author Shannon Hale set the bar high for herself with the publication of Princess Academy in 2005. The fairy tale won a Newbery Honor, and countless fans were taken with the book’s heroine, Miri, and her home in Mount Eskel. Hale intended the novel to stand alone, but Miri, Britta and friends bubbled to the surface of her thoughts over time, and a new story took root.

In Princess Academy: Palace of Stone, Miri journeys to Asland and is caught up in a fledgling political movement. Her loyalties are tested as she tries to unite intellect and instinct and do right by her new friends, along with her home and family.

We contacted Hale at her home in Utah to ask a few questions about how the magic happens.

You originally thought Princess Academy would be a stand-alone story. How did you know you weren't done telling it? What prompted you to write a sequel?
It was one word: revolution. I thought I knew what Miri and her friends were up to after Princess Academy, but about three years ago that word popped into my mind and changed everything. I was so intrigued by the idea of it that I had to tell the story.?

Politics run deep throughout Palace of Stone. Issues of class, fairness and appearance vs. reality infuse the story. What (if anything) do you hope young readers will take away from this that might be useful when studying present-day events?
I hope they get whatever they need from the book. Stories have that wonderful elasticity to them, don't they? We can read about long ago, compare to our day and see things anew. I didn't write the story toward any particular moral or lesson. I tried to be as true to the characters and their story as I could with the hope that readers today could relate and allow the story to help them think through whatever questions they have.

Miri's letters home to Marda are short but bring us so much closer to Miri. Her heart, intelligence and humor come through in an intimate way, apart from all the action. Why did you decide to incorporate letters into the story?
Thank you! It was really one of those moments of grace that I can't plan for. Somewhere in those muggy fourth or fifth drafts, I depend on an idea to occur to me that will help make the story better. I wanted to hear Miri's voice more, I wanted her to be able to connect with home and family so far away and keep Mount Eskel real and present in the action. And then I wrote the words, "Dear Marda," and thought, "Ah-ha!" I had about four letters in one draft, my editor said, "I wouldn't mind more," and they ended up adding this extra layer and voice I was grateful for.

Adolescence is that wonderful time when we start to decide who, exactly, we are. So much of who we are is who we choose to be with. As part of growing up, Miri had to make that choice.

Why do most chapters open with a bit of verse or song?
Ay yi yi, the sticky situations writers get themselves into! In Princess Academy, singing was an important cultural exercise, so I started writing out bits of their songs to help create the setting. I naively thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to have a song at the beginning of each chapter that reflects the upcoming action in an interesting way?" It ended up being one of the most challenging parts of writing that book. I'd set a precedent so I had to do the same for Palace of Stone! I love them now and am glad I put in the sweat. In Palace of Stone, I was able to use not only songs but poems, plays, chants and mnemonic devices. Miri encounters such a bigger, more complicated world in the second book, and I wanted those verses to reflect that.

Miri loves Peder, but his seeming indifference leads her to infatuation with Timon, who may or may not be good for her. This theme occurs in so many ways in YA fiction; why do you think that is? Why did you want Miri to have two suitors?
I think the love triangle is a very effective tool for exploring romance and protracting romantic tension in any book. However, I never thought "love triangle" when I was writing Palace of Stone. A core question of this story is Miri's choice; Mount Eskel or Asland? Peder was her first love from her home, her childhood friend. I wanted her to meet someone who represented the excitement, passion, and complications of the capital city. I wanted the tension of her choice to be reflected in those closest to her. Adolescence is that wonderful time when we start to decide who, exactly, we are. So much of who we are is who we choose to be with. As part of growing up, Miri had to make that choice.

The magic in this book seems to say that where you come from holds great power. Linder can be a communication tool, but too much exposure can crowd the mind and be distracting. Where did the idea of linder first come from, and how did it grow over these two books?
Ooh, I love all your thoughts on the story. That's really beautiful. In Princess Academy, I knew I wanted the setting to be rustic or remote, in contrast with the royal errand placed on it. Once I decided mountaintop quarriers, the story really started to take shape. In researching quarrying, I learned how dangerous the profession was and how the deafening sounds made it impossible to hear warnings or commands. I wanted the villagers to have some talent that was all their own, and so this silent communication made sense. I enjoyed using quarry-speech to explore all those ideas of communication, balance, memory and kinship. For a second book, I knew I'd have to raise the stakes. As Miri grows, so does her power and influence. ?

Female friendships are important to the story, but often fraught with complications due to class or etiquette expectations. What can readers learn from Miri's use of diplomacy to improve relationships?
I think there's a real art to friendship. I think as a young girl, I would have liked to know that friendship is both vital and a struggle for everyone, but that one can learn how to be a better friend. There were tools that could help the earnest, lost little girl I was navigate those tricky relationships. I hope if anything from Miri's experiences resonates with readers, they might feel less alone and better equipped to be the kind of friend they'd like to have.

If Miri lived in the U.S. in the present day, her age notwithstanding, do you think she'd have a shot in politics?
Oh sure! Why not? She's got passion, a strong sense of justice and equality, and intelligence . . . wait, are those prerequisites for politics in the U.S.??

Fill in the blank: If I ruled the world, my first act would be ______.
To guarantee every child access to a good education.?

The skills Miri acquired in the first book are put to use in this one, and she ends up finding a way to fulfill several of her desires. Her future holds great potential, which begs the question: Might there be a volume three?
I was very secretive when writing Palace of Stone. For about a year, no one knew I was working on it besides my husband. But I feel less shy about it now. Yes, there will be a third. I want each book to stand alone. I'm not great at writing a traditional series, I think. But a question came up while writing Palace of Stone, and I soon realized that the answer was another book. And hopefully this one won't take me seven years to complete.?

Author Shannon Hale set the bar high for herself with the publication of Princess Academy in 2005. The fairy tale won a Newbery Honor, and countless fans were taken with the book’s heroine, Miri, and her home in Mount Eskel. Hale intended the novel to…

YA Fiction

Donna Cooner

Interview by Heather Seggel

You could be forgiven for thinking that Skinny, the title of Donna Cooner’s debut novel, represents a goal for main character Ever Davies. But Skinny is a character, and not a nice one. She’s the voice in Ever’s head telling her that, at 15 years old and 302 pounds, she’s not worthy of love or even tolerance. Ever ultimately has gastric-bypass surgery and loses a significant amount of weight, but her life doesn’t truly show improvement until she’s able to turn down the volume on the voice in her head, which she imagines belonging to a “goth Tinker Bell.”

Author Donna Cooner knows a thing or two about that voice. When we speak by phone she makes it clear that honesty is vital to shutting it down. “In doing publicity for the book, some people have asked, ‘What can we NOT ask you?’ I think with teens I want them to be able to ask questions. A lot of the time weight is something that we just don’t discuss, unless you’re rude or bullying. To actually have a conversation where you’re [free to ask] ‘What’s it like to be this heavy?’ or ‘What’s it like to go through the surgery and lose weight suddenly—how does that make you feel?’ I’m hoping it will open up a conversation where young people are more comfortable asking those kinds of questions.”

Cooner is well suited to answer many of them. She had gastric-bypass surgery as an adult 10 years ago, lost more than 100 pounds and has maintained a stable weight since then. But it wasn’t a magic bullet by any means, even where her own negative self-talk is concerned.

There’s a scene in Skinny where Ever suffers a crushing embarrassment in front of her classmates. It’s based on a real-life experience, a very public humiliation, that Cooner had at Colorado State University, where she works as a professor of education. But while Ever’s experience is the catalyst for her to have surgery, Cooner’s embarrassing incident happened after she lost weight. “It didn’t matter how far I’d come personally, professionally, weight-wise—I still have that voice that kicks in,” she says. Reliving the story with friends some time later, she was able to laugh about it, and her friends recommended she capture the moment in writing.

“It didn’t matter how far I’d come personally, professionally, weight-wise—I still have that voice that kicks in.”

Although Skinny is her debut novel, Cooner wrote some picture books and scripts for PBS while working as a kindergarten teacher. The daughter of a teacher and school secretary, she says, “I was immersed in schools for as long as I can remember. I swore I would never be a teacher.” Famous last words: Her current job description boils down to “teaching teachers how to teach,” along with overseeing the certification process. The writing required for tenure in her job put picture books on the back burner for a while. “When I achieved tenure I decided I wanted to go back to my passion for children’s literature. At that time my mother had just been diagnosed with cancer and I started journaling about some issues with childhood, and [what came up] wasn’t picture book material.” Enter Skinny.

The book explains gastric-bypass surgery, in which the stomach is reshaped into a pouch that can hold roughly three tablespoons of food, and some of its aftereffects, which can include vitamin deficiency and the scary-sounding “dumping syndrome,” in detail. It also looks closely at the psychology of making such a big change so quickly, by giving Ever a fast friendship with her stepsister’s best friend Whitney. Whitney's interest in Ever is insincere; in fact, she's only interested in giving Ever a makeover, which will show off her own skills as an artist. Whitney isn't mean, just shallow. The character was inspired “by a group of people I encountered through the surgery who were fascinated with the change aspect, not me.” With makeovers such a pop culture staple, that fascination with big changes is more common than ever.

Despite the amount of media attention paid to the rise of obesity and possible avenues of treatment, talking publicly about her own experience has been unusual. “I didn’t know when I wrote such a personal story that it would become so public. That’s been a bit of an adjustment,” says Cooner. It’s less the struggle with weight than the internal critique that was hard to lay bare. Ever isn’t always an easy character to root for, particularly when she’s cruel to potential friends out of a fierce sense of self-protection. “I struggled to make her a little more likable in the beginning, because she was so immersed in her head,” she says. To that end, despite one or two instances of teasing by others, the emphasis here is pointedly on Ever’s cruelty to herself.

One source of consolation in Ever’s life is the family’s dog, Roxanne, a chocolate lab referred to as a “goat dog” for her tendency to eat anything and everything in her path. Cooner’s author bio describes her as living in Fort Collins, Colorado, with a goat dog named Roxanne. Coincidence? I had to ask. “The dog is actually lying on the floor right beside me, and she’s in trouble because she got into the pantry this afternoon and ate three bags of different kinds of spices,” she laughs. “She’s the ‘goat dog’ of the book, but she’s a very real dog with very real issues.”

Cooner’s weight-loss journey has included some significant achievements above and beyond those found on the scale. Way above and beyond. “I went out and climbed a ‘fourteener’“—that’s a 14,000-foot mountain peak, for the uninitiated—”here in Colorado the year after I had the surgery.” There are more than 50 such peaks in the state, and she has friends who have scaled a dozen or so, notching their climbing gear as they go. She’s happy to note, “I’ve done one! It was a triumph to be able to climb that far and that high after being almost unable to walk down the street,” she says.

Ever also finds that her weight loss leads to personal victories. She’s a Broadway junkie with a gift for singing, and part of her success after losing weight involves auditioning for the school musical. Given the popularity of Amber Riley, the plus-size 26-year-old who plays Mercedes on “Glee” with sexy confidence, I ask Cooner why Ever couldn’t do the same. Isn’t losing the weight, then getting the part and getting the guy a little retrograde? Cooner points out, “Ever isn’t skinny at the end of the book. She becomes healthier and more confident. I think health is an argument” for her choices. “It’s okay to want to get better at something. It doesn’t mean you’re not good as you are, but it’s okay to want to be healthier.”

That’s another area where Ever’s story and Cooner’s overlap. She says having the surgery “was a good decision for me, but I’m not a skinny person. It wasn’t a magic wand. Obesity is a chronic problem. I’m going to continue to struggle with it and want to be healthier.”

Early responses to the book have indicated that Cooner was onto something when she took her struggle public. Readers with weight issues connect very directly with Ever, but one mother wrote to say she’d given the book to her son, who had tried out for sports with no success because his confidence was low, noting she “wanted him to understand the voice in his head.”

That’s just the kind of response Cooner was hoping for. She’s quick to clarify that her experiences are hers alone, both because no two people have the exact same results with gastric-bypass surgery and because she wants the work to speak to a much larger audience, “not just to people who are struggling with weight or body issues.” She mentions a statistic she encountered online estimating that we give ourselves between 300 and 400 self-assessments over the course of a day, and that 80 percent of them are negative. If there’s one thing she is most eager for readers to take away from Skinny, it’s a renewed determination to “struggle with that inner critical voice. Recognize it, and know what harm you’re doing to yourself. When you get to a point where you’re ruling out potential for friends, for activities, for dreams, that’s just so sad. Fight that voice that’s keeping you from being the best person you can possibly be.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that Skinny, the title of Donna Cooner’s debut novel, represents a goal for main character Ever Davies. But Skinny is a character, and not a nice one. She’s the voice in Ever’s head telling her that, at 15 years…

Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Megan Shepherd

Interview by Heather Seggel

In The Madman’s Daughter, Megan Shepherd revisits the H.G. Wells classic The Island of Dr. Moreau from the point of view of Juliet, the doctor’s daughter. Forced to leave her London home, she travels to the island where the father she thought had died is still conducting cutting-edge experiments—sometimes on live animals. The story is full of big ideas, romantic intrigue and exotic locations, but it’s also intense, dark and scary.

There’s an amusing contrast when I reach Shepherd by phone at her home in Asheville, North Carolina: She’s still pinching herself over her good fortune. “It’s a debut novel, so I still can’t believe all this has happened,” she says.

“All this” encompasses a lot for Shepherd. She’s about to launch The Madman’s Daughter with a signing at Highland Books, the store her family owns in Brevard, North Carolina, where she used to work. But the book is the first in a trilogy, which she’s still writing, along with a second series, which took shape, she says, when she asked fellow attendants at a writer’s retreat, “‘Has anyone ever written a book about a human zoo?’ And it was just . . . silence.” People told her, “That’s the weirdest idea we’ve ever heard,” so she gamely dove in.

When asked where the inspiration for The Madman’s Daughter came from, she laughs. “It came out of my love of television, actually. I was a huge fan of the show ‘Lost,’ and thinking I’d like to set a book on a mysterious island, maybe with scientific experiments going on . . . and I realized, oh, H.G. Wells already did that!” But while rereading The Island of Dr. Moreau, she noticed, “There are no female characters in the book,” so the potential was there for a new story to unfold.

While the characters and story will remain consistent throughout the trilogy, the second book draws inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the third from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “It’s a challenge to do,” says Shepherd, “and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it would feel organic, but now that I’m deep into books two and three, it just works. It works perfectly to do it that way.” The three Gothic novels have much in common “in terms of the dangers of science, arrogance versus science, man versus self, man versus animal and that kind of thing.”

There are big questions raised by The Madman’s Daughter, which contains some harrowing scenes of experiments done on animals (Dr. Moreau’s work centers on surgically combining animals to create an “improved” almost-human being). For Shepherd, an avid horseback rider and co-parent with her husband to two terribly spoiled cats, the scenes were hard to get through. “I’m a huge animal lover, which made this book tough to write,” she says. “I get a little shaky even thinking about it because I scared myself writing those scenes. It was a challenge.”

Although the island is chock full of animals and manimals, Juliet still manages to round up two hot love interests: Montgomery, her childhood friend, now employed as the doctor’s right-hand man, and the mysterious Edward Prince. “My first draft didn’t have as much romance in it,” Shepherd allows, “but my editor and I both enjoy that, so I decided to put a little more in. A book can have romance in it and still have lots of other elements because people are just as complex as books can be.” There’s an advantage to the historical setting, too. “[In] the Victorian time period you could just mention a wrist or an ankle and it was so sexy. There doesn’t have to be gratuitous sex in the book. It can be subtle but still very sexy.”

The book is so assured for a first-time effort, I asked Shepherd if her time working in a bookstore gave her literary chops via osmosis, or influenced her decision to start writing. She says that’s nearly the opposite of what happened. “I had such reverence for books that until just a few years ago I never even dreamed that normal people could be authors! Books were these sacred things, and the idea of the people that wrote them? I thought they must be somehow special.” She says, “It never occurred to me to be a writer until about five years ago. I decided to give it a try, and my husband and my parents were just super-­supportive, and I pretty much instantly became obsessed with it and fell in love, and ever since then it’s been my absolute passion.”

That’s a good thing, since she’ll be at it for a while. When asked what she does when she’s not writing, she reminds me, “Right now because I have six books under contract, I’m pretty much only writing” for the foreseeable future. When things settle down she’ll likely travel and make time for some hiking, and she says, “I’d love to be able to read more for pleasure than for work.”

For now, bringing The Madman’s Daughter and its sequels into the world is priority number one. I asked if Juliet would be returning to the island in later books and was surprised to hear it’s unlikely. “I will say that she is probably going to find herself in similar situations in other really cool locations. The second book takes place in London in wintertime. It’s almost the opposite of the island, but there are quite a few scenes that take place in the Royal Botanical greenhouse, so that captures that steamy jungle atmos­phere in these little pockets within the city.”

While marketers have labeled The Madman’s Daughter Gothic horror, Victorian romance and a host of other labels, Shepherd has always thought of the book as historical science fiction. “I wanted to try to write a book that would be both entertaining and that . . . would let [readers] think about complicated questions.” At the end of the day, she says, “I hope that readers get swept away into the world [of the book] and escape from their own lives for a while. If they come away having learned something or having felt something new, that’s even better.”

In The Madman’s Daughter, Megan Shepherd revisits the H.G. Wells classic The Island of Dr. Moreau from the point of view of Juliet, the doctor’s daughter. Forced to leave her London home, she travels to the island where the father she thought had died is…

NonfictionTrue Crime

Skip Hollandsworth

Interview by Heather Seggel

Once sleepy Austin, Texas, was beginning to boom in the late 19th-century when a series of brutal murders rocked the town. The crimes were so vicious that when Jack the Ripper started his notorious murder spree in London, some in Austin wondered whether the Texas killer had moved abroad.

Skip Hollandsworth, executive editor of Texas Monthly and an award-winning crime writer, became fascinated by the still-unsolved Austin case and reveals the details of his research in The Midnight Assassin. We contacted the author at his home in Texas to find out more about this intriguing true-crime narrative.

This story is not widely known. How did you come across it?
Actually, there have been a handful of amateur historians who have been researching the case, hoping to find the killer. Eighteen years ago, one of those researchers, an Austin schoolteacher hoping to write a novel about the killings, generously shared with me a couple of newspaper articles she had come across, and it wasn’t long before I was on the hunt, too.

Austin was in full flower when these killings began. How big a part did the desire to avoid bad publicity play in slowing the investigations?
A lot. Austin’s mayor prided himself on its “booming”—exuberant civic promotion in order to draw in more residents. And Austin at the time was changing, in the words of one newspaper reporter, “as quickly as the turn of a a kaleidoscope.” It was transforming itself from a frontier town into a modern, Gilded-Age city, complete with telephone and electric lights. The last thing Austin civic leaders wanted were headlines about mysterious murders.

What surprised you most in your research?
What didn’t surprise me? Let’s start with the diabolical way the murders were carried out, the ingenuity of the killer in escaping detection time after time, and the fact that for nearly a year, none of the authorities could wrap their arms around the idea that one man was behind it all. The killings also set off a huge political scandal that probably changed the outcome of the governor’s race. There was one criminal trial of a suspect—the prominent husband of one of the white victims—that became the O.J. Simpson trial of its day, complete with a dream team of Austin defense attorneys.

Did writing this book leave you with any impressions about what inspires serial killers?
I think the reason the Midnight Assassin is so fascinating is because we have no idea what inspired him, just as we usually have no idea what inspires serial killers today. Why did the Midnight Assassin want to attack women in a ritualistic way, leaving their mutilated bodies on display like works of art, and then disappearing into the night? It’s a haunting question.

It’s unusual to find humor in a book about a serial killer, but the “detectives” trading on the Pinkerton name were funny. Were you concerned about including levity in the story?
Not at all—and talk about surprises. At the height of the citywide panic, the great Pinkerton detectives arrive from Chicago to solve the murders, and it turns out they are frauds. It was such an unexpected twist in the story that I couldn’t help but laugh.

The press was breathless in its coverage of the crimes but seemed to support the view that a gang of black men (or Frankenstein) were committing the murders. Does the media do any better today in its coverage of sensational crimes?
I’m not sure. I do know that if this happened today, the media would be all over this story after the second murder had taken place. Reporters would be coming into Austin from around the country. And their reports would probably be more breathless, setting off public fear by proclaiming that a serial killer was running amok.

Can you point out some of the differences in how these crimes were investigated versus today’s procedures?
In 1885, there was no such thing as a CSI unit. The science of criminology did not exist. Fingerprinting had not been invented. Neither had blood typing. Of course, there was no such thing as DNA evidence. And cops did not yet understand that hairs found on a victim might provide clues to the identity of the killer. Outside of an eyewitness, the best tool the cops had was bloodhounds. They were brought to a murder scene, where they sniffed around, hoping to find a scent to follow. But in the Austin killings, the bloodhounds found nothing.

Did you ever feel close to a viable suspect while writing? Do you think the book might bring the case to a conclusion?
Throughout the writing of the book, I would wonder, Could it be this man? Or that man? Is the killer a barefoot chicken thief? Or is he a famous politician? Is he a Malaysian cook who disappeared suddenly just after the last set of killings? Or is he well-known young doctor who worked at the state lunatic asylum? The answer has got to be out there somewhere—in an old musty record in a police department filing cabinet, or in a letter hidden away in someone’s attic. Maybe this book will lead to the answer. But then again, maybe not. After all, this killer was unlike anyone ever before seen—a brilliant, cunning monster who set off a citywide panic, and then disappeared forever.

Author photo by Laura Wilson.
 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Midnight Assassin.

Skip Hollandsworth, executive editor of Texas Monthly and an award-winning crime writer, became fascinated by a still-unsolved Austin case and reveals the details of his research in The Midnight Assassin. We contacted the author at his home in Texas to find out more about this intriguing true-crime narrative.
NonfictionAnimals

Bronwen Dickey

Interview by Heather Seggel

Essayist and journalist Bronwen Dickey investigates how one of America’s most popular dog breeds became one of its most maligned in her illuminating and thoroughly researched new book, Pit Bull: The Battle over An American Icon.

What was your goal in writing this book? 
I hope the book will be a case study in critical thinking, especially when it comes to stereotypes. During the seven years I spent doing research on pit bulls, I met thousands of people who had strong beliefs about the dogs, but when I asked them what their views were based on, many didn't really know. They were just repeating things they heard from friends or had read on the Internet. After tracing the most common claims about pit bulls back to their original sources, I found that the vast majority of these "facts" were based on nothing but air. 

How would you describe the qualities that made pit bulls “American icons” and popular family pets in earlier eras?
By far, the qualities most associated with pit bulls in the 19th and early 20th centuries were courage, tenacity and loyalty. Because they originated as fighting dogs, they were seen as the type of dogs who can fall down nine times and get up 10. In reality, though, some were like that and many were not, but the symbolism overtook the flesh-and-bone animals. Pit bulls also fit nicely into the bootstrapping vision of the American dream that writers like Horatio Alger made famous because they traditionally belonged to working-class people. Contrary to popular belief, however, the dogs were not universally adored, even back then. There were always a number of folks who looked down their noses at pit bulls and considered them "savage." That had more to do with disliking their owners than anything else. 

I always believed that pit bulls had stronger jaws than other dogs because of the frequently cited "pounds of pressure" statistic. Not only is the statistic bogus, each new person to cite it adds a few hundred psi just for fun! How did this idea take root?
That's one of the most common truth-claims circulated about pit bulls, and it is absolutely not true. According to the available science, the biggest determinant of a dog's bite strength is body size, not breed. There's folklore about the strength of "bulldog jaws" that goes back over a hundred years, but the PSI figures didn't become popular until 1969, when a couple of researchers claimed that German shepherd military working dogs could be trained to exert a jaw strength of between  400 and 450 pounds-per-square-inch (PSI). The researchers never cited a source for this claim (and they probably did not even have equipment to measure it), but it became a common motif in stories about guard dogs, which lots of people were buying in the 1960s and 1970s in response to rising crime rates. The numbers simply spiraled out of control from there, like a game of telephone.

You have a dog that's at least fractionally a pit bull. How is she? Did you look at her differently while researching this book?
She's doing great; thank you! 

I learned so much about the power of perception while researching and writing this book. One of the women I interviewed said that the idea of "pit bull" now looms so large that it has become "unmoored" from the actual animals, and I think that's absolutely right. When we first brought Nola home, I interpreted everything she did as a possible "pit bull trait." She and I were playing a game of keep-away in the yard once, for example, and she accidentally nipped my arm while jumping up for the ball. Even though I was not hurt in the slightest (she only left a tiny bruise you had to squint to see), the fact that her teeth made contact with my skin caused me to panic because, oh my God, she was a "pit bull"! What if she was turning on me?! 

It went the other way, too. When I steeped myself in gung-ho pit bull history, I imagined that she was much more courageous than she actually is. For awhile, I worshipped at the altar of "breed traits." The more I learned about the extraordinarily complex science of behavior, however, the more I realized how unfair all that baggage was to her. It was also scientifically inaccurate. I wasn't appreciating her as an individual who has preferences and quirks just like I do. Nola is not an abstraction or a poorly-defined category; she's just Nola. 

I perhaps foolishly didn't expect a story about pit bulls to be so tied to class and race. Had you made the connection before you started writing or did it surprise you?
I began to see some disturbing patterns in the way people talked about pit bulls fairly early on, specifically after I began volunteering with a non-profit that provides free veterinary resources to people living in poverty so that their pets can stay in the homes they already have. Most of the families I met were incredibly warm and welcoming to me, and most owned dogs they described as pit bulls, whom they loved very much. Yet people who had never been to these communities insisted that pit bulls were only owned by "thugs" who kept the dogs to be "macho," and that urban dogfighting was "everywhere." Once again, that simply was not true in my home state of North Carolina, nor was it true in New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Oakland, or any of the other places I visited, but comments about "those people" and their "vicious animals" abound.

The landscape has changed so much over the years, but the story we tell ourselves about these dogs and their people hasn't, and that's a big problem. I wish the tendency to use dogs as proxies for human groups was a new trend, but that, too, goes back a very long time.

What does our treatment of pit bulls say more broadly about our relationship with dogs?
More than anything, I think it reveals how invested we are in the idea of breed, which is pretty historically recent. For many thousands of years, dogs were grouped according to their working function, not their appearance. In the mid-19th century, the Victorians wedded a dog's breed to its moral character, and by extension, the moral character of the person who owned it. Yet all dogs share 99.8 percent of their DNA, and "pit bulls" are not even one breed! That label is a messy, subjective category inside which at least four breeds are contained. While certain traits may be seen in greater or lesser degrees in specific working lines of some dog breeds, most pit bulls, like most American dogs, simply live as pets, and each one is different. That's what is so wonderful, surprising, and instructive about dogs in general.  

Many aspects of this story were hard to read. How did you keep at a job that must have been overwhelming at times?
It was incredibly difficult emotionally, psychologically, and at times, even physically. I lost a lot of sleep. The history of dogfighting was profoundly upsetting. Also, pit bull enthusiasts are extremely passionate, and several of my sources strongly disagreed with each other. They each wanted me to see things his or her way. But this story is so big and so complex that I wanted to introduce readers to many different perspectives. I have great respect for everyone I met, but I didn't accept anyone's views wholesale. Sometimes they didn't like that, but I hope when they see the finished product they will understand why I approached it the way I did. 

Terrible reporting about pit bulls has been nearly impossible to debunk. Do you see any signs that the tide is turning, in the media or in public opinion?
Without a doubt. I traveled through 15 states doing interviews for the book, and one of the biggest surprises was not how many people harbored negative feelings about pit bulls, but how few. Overwhelmingly, the people I encountered (even perfect strangers I chatted up at restaurants and whatnot) were looking for any reason at all not to be afraid. They were sick of the sensational fearmongering. Even the ones who were wary of pit bulls because of everything they had read in the media were open to changing their minds. The idea that "people hate pit bulls" is simply not true. We'll never know definitively, but if I had to guess, I'd say the dogs are more popular now than they ever have been. 

Even fans can’t agree about what’s best for pit bulls—if one simply wants to erase the stigma attached to the breed, another worries that pit mixes are watering down the breed’s integrity. Where do you see the hope for their future?
If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that what goes up very quickly comes down. Pit bulls were built up to an impossible height only to crash to an unforeseen low in the space of a hundred years. It's such a fascinating story of myth-making and re-invention. What's more American than that? But, as I like to remind people, the dogs themselves were never consulted about the story we wrote them into! They simply got swept up in our human drama. 

Today, anything you can say about a large, diverse group of people—say, "Americans"—you can say about pit bulls. Some are outstanding and some are unsound, but most fall in the vast, utterly normal space in between.

I'd love to see us loosen our grip on the symbolism of breed. We'll never let it go, of course, but I hope we can come to appreciate all dogs for the unique individuals they are. They would really benefit from that. So would we.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Pit Bull.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Essayist and journalist Bronwen Dickey investigates how one of America’s most popular dog breeds became one of its most maligned in her illuminating and thoroughly researched new book, Pit Bull: The Battle over An American Icon.
YA FictionYA

Liz Kessler

Interview by Heather Seggel

Ashleigh Walker has a great best friend and a cute new boyfriend, but the rest of her life is a mess. Falling behind in school and dealing with her parents’ messy divorce leave her feeling stranded—until she’s unexpectedly rescued by a cool new English teacher. Miss Murray is young, smart, reads aloud poems with dirty words in them and seems to really see Ash at a time when she’s feeling especially isolated. In Read Me Like a Book, things get complicated when Ash’s admiration turns into head-over-heels first love, forcing her to reconsider who she is and what she really wants.

British author Liz Kessler, best known for her Emily Windsnap series for middle grade readers, first wrote Read Me Like a Book more than 10 years ago. At that time, U.K. law Section 28 prohibited the distribution of books that promoted a homosexual lifestyle, particularly in a school setting, and so Kessler set the manuscript aside. Years later, Kessler's first YA book is finally being published. We asked the author a few questions about love, coming out and literature.

What does it mean to you that this book is finally being published?
It’s almost hard to put into words. It means kind of everything. It means that the world has moved on; it means that people are more accepting of difference; it means the YA book world is FANTASTIC; it means celebration, communication and openness; it means I am talking to young people directly from my heart and telling them that they can be happy to be who they are. Like I said, pretty much everything!

I like that you make it very clear this story isn’t about you. That being the case, why did you want to write a teen coming-out story?
Well, it was the first book that I wrote, and whilst it isn’t any more my story than any of my other books, it was strongly influenced by my thoughts about coming out myself. I wanted to write something that told a story I wanted to tell. I wanted to put a story about coming out into the world. I guess underneath that, I am sharing themes and messages that are in pretty much all of my books: be true to yourself; be good to your friends and your family; be brave; accept difference. I suppose these are the things that are in my heart, and whether I’m writing about mermaids or fairies or emerging lesbians, they seem to be the messages that my heart keeps wanting to share!

While it’s not without a bittersweet moment or two, I love that Ash’s coming out is generally a happy occasion; the few YA novels available in my youth were not that way at all. Was it a deliberate choice to keep things gentle? If so, why?
Sort of. I’m not a writer who sets out to shock or upset. In my books (and in my life) I like resolution, I like endings that feel at least full of hope and promise. In my youth, I remember that in the few books with LGBT characters that were around, many of them were quite depressing or negative in some way—and I very much wanted to go against that. I wanted this book to be as much a celebration of identity and difference as anything else. 

As Ash moves closer to being honest about who she is, she moves away from an old friend who’s a bit wild toward a new one who is slightly nerdy (no disrespect, Robyn!). Do you think some people still equate a coming-out journey with movement in the opposite direction—moving toward wildness? Did you intentionally subvert that model?
Gosh. Interesting question. I’d like to act all intellectual and say, “Oh yes, sure I intentionally did that.” But I didn’t! If anything, I think what I was doing was showing that Ash was moving towards a deeper understanding of herself instead of always acting out the stuff on the outside. And that when she did this, as well as uncovering her sexuality, what she also found inside was someone who had more honest dreams and ambitions than she’d let herself admit to previously.

Ash is adjusting to a lot of new normals: preparing for university and also dealing with her parents’ break-up. Does that tension heighten her attraction to Miss Murray?
In some ways, yes, these things heighten her attraction because Miss Murray becomes almost like a beacon of positive light in Ash’s life, when everything else seems to be falling apart. It’s not that she wouldn’t feel the attraction without the other issues that are going on in her life—but because of them, the contrast between the bad and good sides of her life is made stronger, and so this does intensify her feelings.

Miss Murray gets the class’ attention when she reads a poem with the F-word in it; I had a substitute in elementary school who did the same thing with a history lesson, and it’s such a big deal when it happens! Why does that make such a strong impression on kids?
I think we all like things that feel a bit naughty, especially if they come from someone in authority who we think shouldn’t say those words. It can be like a bridge between the world of the grown-ups and the world of the young people. Sometimes, though, it can backfire. Young people are not stupid and can quite often spot the adult who uses this kind of thing as a clumsy attempt to say, “Hi kids, I’m just like you and I’m cool,” when it’s not genuine. But as well as this, it’s about breaking down barriers—and this is part of why Miss Murray caught Ash’s attention more than any other teacher had done before.

There’s a very awkward sex scene between Ash and Dylan in the book, after which their relationship gradually falls apart. But they manage to maintain a friendship. How important was that to the story?
It was very important to me that Dylan wasn’t seen as a bad guy, so keeping a decent line of communication between them was enormously important. I didn’t want to run the risk of it looking like I was saying that Ash had a bad experience with a boy so she chose girls instead. It was very important to me to make it clear that this wasn’t a choice to reject boys; it was a positive choice and realization that she actively wanted girls!

I’m a grown woman who found herself a bit intimidated by these girls going out to the pub and knocking back a few, which only adds to my lifelong suspicion that the English are just cooler and I’d better get used to it. Can you confirm this? 🙂
Ha! I don’t know if we’re cooler, but yes, social drinking amongst older teenagers seems to be a much more common part of life over here than it is across your side of the pond!

What’s next?
I’ve just finished working on my second YA novel, Haunt Me. It’s out in October in the U.K. and I think 2017 in the States. It’s a ghostly love triangle, and I’m really excited about it!

British author Liz Kessler, best known for her Emily Windsnap series for middle grade readers, first wrote Read Me Like a Book more than 10 years ago. At that time, a U.K. law called Section 28 prohibited the distribution of books that promoted a homosexual lifestyle, particularly in a school setting, and so Kessler set the manuscript aside. Years later, Kessler's first YA book is finally being published. We asked the author a few questions about love, coming out and literature.

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