For immigrants like Ibi Zoboi, the unnerving process of uprooting and arriving in the United States “feels as though you’ve been transported to a different planet.” With her powerful debut novel for teens, Zoboi’s mission was to write not only about changing cultures, but also about the experience of moving “from one broken place to another.”

American Street starts with a heartbreaking scene: While on her way from Haiti to live with relatives in Detroit, narrator Fabiola Toussaint is separated from her mother while going through Customs at Kennedy Airport in New York. Fabiola, an American citizen by birth, is forced to fly alone to Detroit, while her mother is detained in New Jersey by U.S. Immigration. 

As a child, Zoboi lived through a similar experience. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, she and her mother moved to the Bushwick area of Brooklyn when Zoboi was 4. She recalls the move as a “tragic shift” marked by the shock of leaving a place full of family for an apartment defined by loneliness. “It was winter,” Zoboi says, speaking by phone from her home in Brooklyn, “and my mother [was] gone for long hours to this place called a job. I had TV as my sitter. It defined me as a writer and as a person, that shift.”

Four years later, when she and her mother returned to Haiti for a visit, Zoboi was not allowed to return to America.

“I didn’t know anything about Haitian culture, and I wasn’t allowed to go back home,” Zoboi says. “I was separated for three months and stayed with relatives. My mother worked tirelessly to get me back.”

As the novel unfolds, Fabiola is thrust into the Detroit household of her aunt and three teenage cousins, while the fate of her mother remains unknown. Fabiola experiences her first snowfall and begins classes in a Catholic school that resembles a haunted castle, and it isn’t long before she realizes that she felt safer in Haiti than she does in America.

Since the dangerous, desolate Bushwick neighborhood she knew as a child has been revitalized, Zoboi wanted to place her characters in a modern-day neighborhood that resembles the one she grew up in. She settled on Detroit, and was delighted to discover a road called American Street. Then, in a case of literary serendipity, she located the ideal spot for Fabiola’s relatives to live. 

“I’m kind of—not literally—driving down American Street on Google maps and I come across a Joy Road. . . . Where Joy Road and American Street intersect, I see that there are these little shotgun houses very close together, and it hit me right then and there. It’s real: There is an American Street intersection. It was just perfect.”

Zoboi hopes to travel to Detroit to see the intersection in person. “I’m going to take a picture of me standing at the crossroads,” she says.

Such a photo would be spot-on for a novelist who digs deep into what happens when cultures, nationalities, races and religions collide. Fabiola, who believes in Haitian Vodou and spirit guides, soon has a boyfriend named Kasim, who has grown up Muslim. Zoboi hopes her portrayal of Fabiola’s religion might help dispel the negative stereotypes many Americans have of the Haitian faith. 

“I’m really passionate about faith in young adult literature, whatever the faith is,” Zoboi says. “That’s who I was as a teenager, looking for some sort of faith, or some otherness. I think a lot of teenagers grapple with that, and I don’t see enough in YA.”

Fabiola is drawn to Kasim’s sweet, gentle ways, but worries about his close ties to her cousin’s boyfriend, a reported drug dealer with a violent temper. Eventually, she’s forced to make an impossible and life-changing choice between her loyalty to Kasim and to her family. 

“A reader who doesn’t understand the differences between cultures will see these girls as just black girls. But there is a huge cultural difference.”

Fabiola and Kasim’s relationship was loosely inspired by real-life headlines: When 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in 2012, he had been on the phone with a Haitian girl.

Whether speaking of Trayvon Martin’s girlfriend or Fabiola and her American cousins, Zoboi notes, “A reader who doesn’t understand the differences between cultures will see these girls as just black girls. But there is a huge cultural difference.”

Zoboi grew up living this cultural divide. Her fifth-grade teachers looked at her bright Haitian clothes and wrongly assumed she couldn’t speak English. They placed her in an English as a Second Language course, where she felt “invisible.” After studying investigative journalism in college and working at a weekly paper, Zoboi finally felt “seen” when she took to the stage at poetry slams in New York City, becoming part of the spoken word movement. She quit her newspaper job to work in a bookstore, and began taking creative writing courses, eventually earning an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. 

Zoboi’s transformation from fearful immigrant girl to adult writer with a vivid, resonating voice extends even to her name. As a girl, she was called Pascale Philantrope, but as an adult, she changed her name. She chose “Ibi,” Yoruba for “rebirth,” which she felt was a close translation of Pascale, a name tied to Easter. Her new last name comes from husband Joseph Zoboi, a visual artist and educator with whom she has three children, ages 9, 12 and 14.

Filled with precise, hard-edged descriptions, American Street weaves together elements of faith, family, loyalty, race, violence, trauma, American dreams and failures—all bound together in a riveting, tragic tale.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Icebreaker is a publisher-sponsored interview.

High school senior Hawthorne Creely is stubborn, kind of angry and often rude—but also endlessly imaginative and wholly original. But when a girl disappears in Hawthorne’s small town, she begins to obsess: Why would the beautiful Lizzie Lovett vanish? Did she choose to leave it all behind? Did she become a werewolf? Is she happy somewhere?

Chelsea Sedoti’s debut, The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett, is far from a traditional mystery, as Hawthorne’s coming of age soon eclipses the story of who Lizzie was or wasn’t. In her search for answers, Hawthorne becomes entangled with Enzo, Lizzie’s older boyfriend, risks ruining her friendship with her best friend and starts to open her eyes to the people in her life: the hippies (friends of her mom’s) who are camping in her backyard, including wise Sun Dog; her cool older brother; her cool older brother’s confusing friend; even the old man who spends every day at the diner where Hawthorne works (Lizzie’s old employment, naturally).

Cat: Hawthorne is such a wonderfully frustrating character, but I truly enjoyed her whole experience. But before we even talk about Hawthorne, who I’m very much looking forward to talking about, I do have to ask: Did you always intend to have a title that is a bit of a fake-out? It’s not really about Lizzie, and she never really lies to us, so much as she is a focus of so many fantasies, stories told by the town and the people who think they knew her.

Chelsea: Two things on that. First of all, with having Lizzie’s name in the title, this is actually something that I love, because Hawthorne has become so real to me since I started this book. I just imagine her sitting there, looking at this book cover, thinking, “This book is about me, and I don’t even get my own name on the cover.”

That is amazing.

Everything is always about Lizzie to her. And I feel like she would be so infuriated, and I sort of love that about it. I love that it reflects Hawthorne’s obsessive mind state with Lizzie.

There aren’t a series of lies that Lizzie told, per se, throughout the book, but in a way, everything about her is a lie. Not just lying to other people, but lying to herself about who she is. Lizzie is basically a facade, which Hawthorne comes to find throughout the course of the book. It’s so much about perspective, and so many of the people that we meet, we never really see through them, except for the people that we’re closest to, and even then, who knows. In a way, Lizzie’s whole life is a lie, not necessarily because she was maliciously lying, but because she kept so much of herself secret, and I think that that’s really Hawthorne’s biggest discovery through the book.

Hawthorne’s aversion to high school runs deep, and she’s targeted, but I never felt like she was a victim. She fires back for everything that’s thrown at her, and she’s hyper-aware of every attempt by every other person to fit in. But she doesn’t get Lizzie, and she doesn’t get herself. It’s like a specific blindness to herself and this person that she’s trying to understand.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that Hawthorne likes to think of herself as a victim in so many ways. You know, she’s not as beautiful as someone like Lizzie, she’s not as popular—even her relationship with her brother, she’s thinking, “Oh, he doesn’t like me because I’m different, and he’s one of the cool kids.” Or with Michelle, who Hawthorne considers a bully, but really, when you look at it, Hawthorne is not being very nice to Michelle either. Hawthorne likes to think of herself as the one that’s sort of being persecuted, and “I’m an outsider and I’m a misfit,” but then in her interactions with other people, she’s sometimes not the nicest or the most open-minded.

She’s terrifying, sometimes, yeah.

Yeah! [laughs]

I’ll admit Hawthorne reminded me a bit of myself in high school, and my reviewer related very strongly with her, too. But the thing that maybe most fascinated me about Hawthorne is how far she could take this desire that she’s playing with, stepping into Lizzie’s life, trying to be part of something that matters. She doesn’t go so far as to steal an identity, but she starts to edge past the point of where we’re comfortable for her. Do you think she goes too far?

Oh, absolutely. And that was one of the most fun parts about writing it. One of the things that I love about writing is that I can make these characters do things that I would never do in real life, because at a certain point, most people stop themselves and say, “I need to step back, this has gone too far, this situation is getting inappropriate,” and with Hawthorne, she really doesn’t have that same kind of filter. She just barreled in full force.

At the book’s opening, it seems like she’s given up on people. Do you think she has? I mean, she starts to give people a chance throughout the book here and there. But why do you think she has given up at the beginning? And do you think it was by stepping into Lizzie’s life that she started to open up?

I think that high school is a very difficult time for a lot of people, and you just don’t have that perspective yet to figure out how the world really works, and what it’s going to be like once you get out of this very close-knit environment. Especially with Hawthorne, because she lives in a small town and she’s known these people most of her life, I do feel like she’s probably given up and she’s already made assumptions about people. She’s very stubborn and isn’t really willing to look past those assumptions.

Over the course of the book—which is fully by accident; she certainly didn’t set out to have any kind of revelation—she ends up learning more about people and looking at them in different lights. She understands by the end that the world that she sees around her isn’t necessarily the real world. I think that when she gets out of high school and goes off to college, and when she starts experiencing new things and meeting new people, I’m pretty sure she’s going to go into it with a much more open mind.

Did you go to a high school like this or grow up in a town like this?

I didn’t. My family is originally from Ohio. I based the town that Hawthorne lives in off of the town that my family is from. I go back there and visit all the time, so I’ve seen what life is like there, but I’ve been in Las Vegas since I was 4. So I’m used to being in a city where you’re not going to run into the same people all the time.

You didn’t encounter the same kind of stifling stagnation of living in a tiny little Midwestern town.

Right. I did go to a small elementary and middle school, though, so it was the same 30 kids from kindergarten to eighth grade, and so I did have that sense of these people—I mean, you can’t date or anything, you can’t switch friend groups because these are people that you’ve known since you were 5. It would be too weird, but luckily, by the time I got to high school, I went to a much larger school where there was a lot more diversity, and people were able to find themselves a little bit more and not be stuck in these roles that were decided when they were kids.

How did this story get started for you?

Well, I had a Hawthorne moment of my own. There was an article in the paper about a girl in my area who had gone missing. And for some reason, I just latched onto the story, I have no idea why, because I didn’t know the girl, and it seemed like she’d run away. There wasn’t anything especially weird or mysterious about her disappearance, but I was just really fascinated by it, and started checking for updates all the time and going online and seeing what people were saying on message boards about this disappearance. At one point I had that filter that Hawthorne doesn’t have, and stepped back and said, “OK, why are you so into this? You need to let this go, you’re just getting obsessive about this random stranger.” So I made myself stop being weird about the missing girl, but the story stuck in my head, and I started thinking, “Well, what if there was a character who was in a situation like this, but couldn’t pull herself back? And who just let her obsession grow and grow and she just fed the obsession until it just got incredibly inappropriate?” That’s how Hawthorne was born.

Yeah, I love that. You introduce the concept of the dual nature in all of us through a tattoo on Enzo’s arm, of the Anima/Animus. The book seems to be exploring this push and pull between inventions and reality—Hawthorne’s, Lizzie’s, even the whole town’s.

One of the important things that Hawthorne realizes is that nobody is ever just one thing. Lizzie isn’t just the popular cheerleader, Hawthorne isn’t just the outcast misfit, and people are complex and that’s what makes people so fascinating. Everyone has more than one side of their personality, and every story has more than one side.

Which ties in perfectly with Hawthorne’s theory that perhaps Lizzie is a werewolf. She uses the shapeshifter myth to try and figure out what’s going on with Lizzie and with herself. I also felt like there was real-life shapeshifter in her life: Sun Dog. Talk to me a little bit about Sun Dog, because he’s really blunt about how he left his former life behind.

Sun Dog is one of my favorite characters, and I loved writing him so much. I might have actually stolen some of his lines from some hippie people I have met in real life, because he says some things that are very ridiculous but I have actually heard, which I love. I think what I like about Sun Dog is that, for a good portion of the book, Hawthorne does assume that Lizzie just left and started a new life, and that she’s somewhere being perfect and happy and having this ideal existence. Sun Dog is actually the one who has done that. Not many people can actually do that, wake up one day and say, “I’m unhappy with my life and I don’t like where this is going, and I’m going to start over.” I don’t know if Sun Dog’s choice to do that and to live for himself was noble or if it’s terrible.

Exactly.

He falls into a moral grey area, and I liked being able to give an unexpected character that role, because Sun Dog becomes, in a very strange way, a mentor to Hawthorne. He’s so about acceptance and inner peace, and just walking away from his family is actually horrible and goes against what you would think from his personality.

Was it particularly difficult to write the scene when Enzo gives Hawthorne the painting, and at first she’s so flattered, and then she has that heartbreaking moment where she looks at it again, and suddenly hates how he thinks she views the world. She looks at it and sees it as naive and childish, and suddenly she hates something that she originally was so flattered by. It seemed like it would be particularly heartbreaking to write that scene.

As a whole, writing Hawthorne and Enzo’s relationship was difficult—not just that scene, but the entire thing, because it’s inappropriate for multiple reasons. He’s grieving, he’s not the greatest guy anyway, he’s way too old for Hawthorne. Their friendship and what it turns into was wildly inappropriate from the start, and I don’t particularly love Enzo. He’s kind of a jerk, but at the same time, I had to be in Hawthorne’s head and understand why she would be intrigued by him, and why she would cling to him, and why she would try to push this relationship between them farther. It was very difficult t sort of balance that out, or as I was writing, remember that I needed to see Enzo at all times through the Hawthorne filter.

There are so many things that, as the reader, we can look at Hawthorne’s life and see that they’re wrong (like Enzo), but there are opportunities that she’s oblivious to at first, and they certainly gave me hope for her as I was reading her story. What gave you hope for her as you were writing her story?

Enzo has made lots of bad choices in life probably, and he doesn’t have a lot going for him, and I don’t necessarily know that he cares that he doesn’t have much going for him. I see him 10 years after the story ends being in the same place that he’s in now. Whereas with Hawthorne, she never struck me as that way. I think that there are people who let themselves get stuck, or there are people who become so set in their ways that they won’t allow themselves to change, and with Hawthorne I never felt like she had already developed her forever personalty.

I think that so much of her mindset as the story takes place has to do with her environment, and I think that she always had the capacity to change. She’s very young, and she’s very immature for her age. Her flaws, to me, were things that were largely to do with her youth and her immaturity, and I always knew that once she lives a little more, and had more experiences and started to grow up, that there will be a shift, and that this would be a moment in her life, you know. Hawthorne is always going to be weird, and she’ll be a 40-year-old, and she’ll be strange and she’ll have an overactive imagination. I think that there’s a part of her that’s never ever going to grow up, but I also think that a lot of that selfishness and how self-absorbed she is, how she lets her imagination negatively impact the people around her—I think that’s something that is definitely going to drop off the older she gets, and already has started to for sure.

I certainly hope that we’ll have more novels from you that will feature characters as complex and strange and individual as Hawthorne, because she was a real delight to get to know.

Thank you.

The latest young adult novel from Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, is an outstanding tale of an adopted teen and the friends and family that surround him. We contacted Sáenz to learn more about these unforgettable characters, the ways in which we fail to talk about love with our children, and what a family can look like.

You’ve spent many years in El Paso, Texas, which is but a few miles from the Mexican border, and you currently teach at the university there. How has life as a Mexican American helped you dive deeper into the story you’ve told here? What unique and multiple perspectives did it allow you to breathe life into?
El Paso is not a few miles from the Mexico border, it is on the Mexican border—and my border, on the surface, has nothing to do with this particular novel. And yet, inevitably, place becomes a character in all my work, so much so that a reader cannot imagine that the story could have been told from any other geographical setting. I normalize the border instead of sensationalizing it. The border may be murderous at certain times, but there is a helluva lot of living going on. The border isn’t simply a nightmare, conjured up by the two countries it glues together. The border isn’t simply a metaphor, nor is it simply a place where two countries meet and clash and embrace. The border can be seen as an economic, social and cultural safety valve for both the United States and Mexico. But for those of us who live here, the border is home. It does not stand for apocalypse but for normalcy. Mexican Americans who live here understand that, in some ways, they belong to two countries and yet belong to neither.

For your central characters, you’ve crafted the young, complex and introspective Sal, Sam and Fito. In the face of all their struggles and harsh realities, what is it about them that enables them to retain—and evolve—their individual humanities?
When the novel begins, Sal has never had to face any harsh realities. He has lived his life with his father, who is nurturing and protective, and with his extended family; he is a young man who is clearly adored. All his life, Sal has felt comfortable and safe, and he feels perfectly fine right where he is. His father is affectionate and decent, and Sal has never been confronted with the complexities or inconsistencies of life. And then, all of a sudden, he has to deal with events he is not fully prepared to deal with. But precisely because he is so deeply loved and grounded, and precisely because his identity has been forged by a profound love, he is able to grasp that he is not and has never been alone. With the help of Sam and Fito and his dad, he finds the strength to deal with the changes that life, in its unpredictability, throws at him.

In contrast to Sal, Sam and Fito have always had to deal with some harsh realities. Sam and her mother have always had a difficult relationship, and in essence, she is an absent mother both in the literal and emotional sense that those words imply. Sam’s situation forced her to learn very early on in her life to be tough, to be independent and to make her own way in the world. It is those very gifts that help her not only to survive, but to become the kind of person she wants to become. She does not run away from what she feels, but neither is she in control of her emotional life. In the end, she learns to accept the things that befall her with a kind of dignity and grace without sacrificing the most treasure qualities she possesses.

And then there’s Fito, who has lived his entire life in survival mode. Coming from a family of addicts, he has essentially raised himself, and he uses his intelligence to get by on the streets. But he also uses his intelligence toward more intellectual pursuits. And while Fito can survive on the streets, he has a difficult time accepting why anyone would ever want to love him. He feels unworthy of love, and yet he finds he is up for the fight. Many young men like Fito would run from stable situations, sabotaging all his human relations. But since he has tapped into another kind of world, the world of reading and of writing (he keeps a journal), he has discovered that there is something far more beautiful out there in the world that he has neither seen nor tasted.

“It’s important to me that my readers see my characters as representations of themselves and not just for their Mexicanness or their gayness. I have said this many times in my career: I refuse to perform my own ethnicity on the page. And I have lived by that rule as a writer. Why would that be any different with regards to my characters? They’re men. That is what matters.”

Of all your characters, I found Sal’s father, Vicente, to be the most intriguing. Who did you have in mind when you dreamt up Vicente—one of the most caring and understanding characters I’ve ever encountered? How much of yourself is in this character?
Vicente is a projection of who I have always wanted to be. I am an artist, but I am not a successful one (I am speaking of my paintings here, not my writing). Vicente is a successful painter, and yet he remains unfazed by his success, a truly humble man. I do not share Vicente’s humility. It is one of my regrets that I never had any children of my own and never adopted. I love children and I love teenagers. I adore them. I know very well that it takes a lot of sacrifice and patience to raise a child. I’d like to think that I would endeavor to teach any child of mine to think for himself and be generous with other people. I’d like to believe that I would nurture in him the qualities I thought were the very definition of decency. All I had to do to write this character was ask myself not what I would have actually done, but what would I like to have done in the situations Vicente faced.

As an author who’s out as openly gay, how important is it to discuss and normalize LGBT issues and questions of sexuality your characters are facing? How have the stigma and struggles of being gay changed?
That is exactly what I do in my work: I normalize what it means to be gay. It is normal. It’s normal for me. But I’ve had a lot of practice: I’ve been normalizing on the page what it means to be a Latino for the last 20-some odd years. It’s important to me that my readers see my characters as representations of themselves and not just for their Mexicanness or their gayness. I have said this many times in my career: I refuse to perform my own ethnicity on the page. And I have lived by that rule as a writer. Why would that be any different with regards to my characters? They’re men. That is what matters. I do not deny the importance of the fact that some of them are gay. But they cannot be gay characters if they do not feel like flesh and bone real characters, which is to say real men. In my opinion, novels are supposed to be a reflection of our humanity. I want my readers to think of my characters as real people. If I cannot accomplish this then the novels I write are all failures.

The stigma of being gay has left the spotlight on the stage, but it has not left the theater. Yes, it is easier to come out in this present moment in history, but easier does not mean easy. We romanticize too much about what it means to be young. We too often forget the pain that comes with an awareness of ourselves, an awareness that tells us we are no longer children but have not yet learned how to become an adult. I get emails and letters all of the time, all of the time, from young men and women who tell me their stories and how grateful they are to me for having lightened and enlightened their journeys toward self-acceptance. Adolescence can be very confusing time in life for anyone. It is, and always will be, more difficult for those who are sexually different to come to terms with themselves and see themselves as fitting in to their communities. And we must not and cannot forget that there is still great deal of hatred and animosity towards our community. Our children are very much aware of that fact, and it is part of the reason that gay, lesbian and transgender children often internalize that hatred, and it becomes part of the reason why it is still so difficult for teens to come to terms with such an important part of who they are.

“We do not have frank discussions about love, not because we wish to spare our children but because we wish to spare ourselves from that discussion. If we love our children, then our love demands that we talk to our children about the many facets of love, including the sexual aspect of it.”

As I read your novel, I kept thinking back to the famous line from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, “We accept the love we think we deserve.” Why do all your characters seem to devalue themselves? Why do they (almost) always accept less love than they’re worth?
That’s easy. We’ve communicated that very message to our children on so many levels in our society—that they do not deserve to be loved. We are not the loving, family-oriented culture that we claim to be. We love our children but we have not, as a society, learned how to communicate that love. We too often love on our terms, and this is antithetical to what love is. When we love, we listen, and yet I do not believe we have learned to listen to our children and the things they are saying to us. Even in the best of families, teens are left to figure out who they are, what they deserve and how to go about having healthy relationships.

And by the way, we should teach our children that love has little to do with the word “deserve.” Love is not something we can earn as if we were exchanging our labor for an income. Who is to say what we deserve? And just as love is not an exchange for our labor, love cannot be reduced to a simple emotion. Love is a commitment and a decision that requires forgiveness. I do not believe that the culture created by our political culture teaches our children anything about forgiveness. We do not have frank discussions about love, not because we wish to spare our children but because we wish to spare ourselves from that discussion. If we love our children, then our love demands that we talk to our children about the many facets of love, including the sexual aspect of it. But we have cowered in the face of the bullying from the Christian right. Those voices have hijacked all discussions regarding the nature of love, as if God himself had appointed them to be his sentries. But the offices they hold are mostly self-appointed, and I can say with certitude that Conservative Christians have no copyright on Christianity and we have allowed their voices to take over our political culture, which has damaged our ability to love. Who decides who “deserves” God’s love? It is not only the immediate families of our children that affect their self-image, it is the greater culture around them. Our children cannot have a healthy sense of what love is without communication, affection and honesty. Certainly honesty is in short supply in this county.

Simply put, children often devalue themselves because we devalue them as a society. All of our lip service to children and to families is just that: lip service. Perhaps it’s time to put our money where our mouth is. Whatever we tell ourselves, our values are where we put our money and our time. We don’t really spend a great deal of our wealth on educating our children. Why? Because, whatever we may say, we don’t believe in spending our money in educating our children.

As an author and poet with a long literary career, what other works also influenced your characters and narrative in The Inexplicable Logic of My Life? What other writers and poets did you draw upon for inspiration and direction, and why?
Obviously, To Kill A Mockingbird, though my novel does not have the obvious gravity in so far as the subject matter is concerned. It does, however present the role of a single male parent, which helped me think about that issue as I wrote the book. But that which most influenced me in the writing of this book Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, a novel about the passing of the torch from one generation to the next (along with its attendant religious and social customs) that has greatly influenced me as a writer. We don’t talk about faith in YA novels, or at least we don’t deal with it enough, and this novel, as much as it is about anything else, is about the passing of a holy woman and what she leaves as a legacy, but also the vacuum she leaves in regard to her relationship with God.

Throughout your novel, you use a narrative style that’s a simple prose, almost like a journal form of storytelling. Why choose this particular voice and style to tell this story? What did it enable you to do or say that you couldn’t have otherwise?
I tend not to be as minimal in my adult fiction as I do in my young adult fiction. And this is not entirely so because younger readers tend to have a vocabulary that is not yet fully in bloom. I have become more than a little enamored of a simplicity in language that does not announce its sophistication. I like the simplicity of language that is unadorned and pure and reaches the reader directly, and also conjures and implies and suggests much deeper meanings. The kind of language I employ here is quiet and perhaps its sincerity on its sleeve, and I have been accused of making people cry, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. My novels aren’t cheap dime-store cards, and the sentiment in them is earned, and I have to write in a style appropriate to what I am trying to accomplish.

Other than Sal’s Mima (grandmother), there seems to be an absence of strong, positive and caring female figures throughout your novel. How come? Was this to show that strong, caring, male/father figures can be unique and varied, as well as exhibit softer and more “feminine” characteristics?
I think you’ve partially answered your own question in the way you asked it. I suppose I wanted to turn the idea of absent fathers on its head. I don’t believe that all women are nurturing and loving, just as I don’t believe that all men are incapable of expressing affection. Perhaps women are conditioned to be more nurturing and men are conditioned to be more emotionally aloof. In any case, I firmly believe that gay men are perfectly capable of raising a family as heterosexual men and women. Children’s courts are teeming with children who were raised by their straight parents in conditions no child should have to endure. I suppose there are those who suspect that there is predatory aspect to a gay man who adopts a male child despite the fact that we know that it is most often heterosexual males who are pederasts and a danger to children. The myth that a gay man should be sexually suspicious is a lie that society often perpetrates, if only under its breath. Yes, I wanted to write a novel where the nurturing parental figure was a man (though in this regard, his own mother could not be out-nurtured).

With so many YA novels seemingly determined to have their characters fall in love, I genuinely appreciated that Sam and Sal’s sibling-like relationship never became anything more than platonic. What led you to make this narrative choice?
Because it felt right. Sam, is in fact, a tribute to my sister, Gloria. My younger sister has always been fully and beautifully alive, and she doesn’t know how to be anybody but herself. Sam and Sal met in kindergarten, and they formed a special bond not often found between members of the other sex (I don’t want to use the term “opposite sex” because it makes it seem that women and men are destined to be on opposing sides). I didn’t want sexual tension to be at the center of this novel. I wanted this novel to be around family and the ways we create and expand on our notions of family. And also, with their relationship, I also wanted to open up a space for them to think about a greater emotional intimacy between their siblings of the other sex. I treasure the relationship I have with my sisters. My oldest sister died of cancer almost two years ago. But I still have my sister, Gloria, my Sam. And I would also like to add that we don’t nurture or encourage friend relationships between young men and young women, preventing perhaps a greater understanding between the sexes.

With Sal being adopted, and Sam and Fito coming from “broken” homes, what’s the modern meaning of a “normal” family? Does it really only matter that you have an adult who loves you and builds you up in life, no matter who they are?
In a perfect world, we would always be born into families where our parents had the capacity to love and care for us. But this is not the case, and it is incredibly important to have a parental figure in one’s life. Supportive adults are necessary if our children are to reach their full potential. Unfortunately, some families are absolutely toxic, making it impossible for a young person to turn to their parents for any kind of help, whether that help be emotional or financial. Many children in this nation, in this world, are forced to create some sort of support system. And really, we all create alternative families—isn’t that what friends are? Aren’t friends the family that we choose? It is terribly important for all of us to create some kind of community where we feel we truly belong. If we do not create spaces of belonging then we are condemned to live in exile. Fito, in the novel, survives mostly on his own, and he represents too many children in this nation. Fito is tough and he is a survivor. But there is a heavy price to be paid for living your life in survival mode. He only begins to thrive when Sal and Sam become his family. Through the great miracle of friendship, he moves from exile to belonging.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Inexplicable Logic of My Life.

Author photo credit Cybele Knowles.

Justin Barisich is a freelancer, satirist, poet and performer living in Atlanta. More of his writing can be found at littlewritingman.com.

BookPage Icebreaker is a publisher-sponsored interview.

Three things to know about high school junior Jessie, the protagonist of Julie Buxbaum’s debut young adult novel, Tell Me Three Things:

1) It’s been barely two years since her mother’s death.
2) She doesn’t fit in at her fancy new Los Angeles private school, which she must attend since her father has eloped with a woman he met online.
3) She’s lost and confused—but from page one, she’s oh-so-wry and funny.

The list of things Jessie doesn’t know is far longer: Who is the person emailing her as “Somebody/Nobody” (SN for short), who claims to be a male student at her school and offers kindness and advice? Why would her father uproot her like this? What’s the deal with her new study partner, who recites “The Waste Land” from heart, wears the same shirt every day and always seems so tired?

Readers discover the answers in this heartfelt, tender novel about love and loss. Like Jessie, Buxbaum (whose next YA novel, What to Say Next, comes out in July) lost her mother when she was much too young. She’s written about grief in her previous adult novels, but her first book for teens is the most vulnerable story she’s ever told.

Cat: I wish, more than any other interview I’ve probably ever done over the phone, that we could be doing this face-to-face. It’s such a personal story, and I feel like the only way to talk about it is as friends or at least as someone who has met you! Have you found that readers are comfortable talking to you about Tell Me Three Things?

Julie: Yeah. I feel like the author-reader relationship has changed in recent years. Readers are super comfortable, actually. People think they get a glimpse into your brain when they read your book, and so they’re more comfortable asking questions.

I also think that your voice for Jessie is so frank, right off the bat talking about zits and sex and being comfortable with awkwardness and weirdness. That helps strip away any distance between you and your reader.

Thank you! It’s funny: My husband calls me Full-Disclosure Buxbaum, FDB [laughs]. Maybe I should change what I said earlier—I don’t know if that author-reader relationship has changed. I know that I am a full-disclosure person. I’m an open book in my personal life and out in the world, and maybe that comes through in my writing. Maybe it makes people comfortable asking me questions. I don’t know.

I definitely think that you’re probably onto something, considering the wonderful interactions between authors and readers we see everyday online. An author’s popularity can have as much to do with their book’s ability to connect with readers as the actual author’s ability to connect.

We have all these different ways for people to get in touch with us, and they get glimpses of our lives. I’m on Instagram, and you see pictures of my kids and how I blew up an egg in my microwave [laughs].

You blew up an egg?

I blew up two eggs, recently! It’s sort of a funny story. We’re going way off topic, but yeah, I’ve been eating a lot of hardboiled eggs, which I hate, but I eat them anyway. I recently blew one up in the microwave when I heated it. So the next day, I put one in the microwave—it was already cooked—but I put it in the microwave for less time, thinking, if I put it for less time, it won’t blow up. But then I took a bite and it blew up in my face.

Oh my gosh!

[Laughing] It was like a bomb. I had yolk shrapnel burning my lips. It was ridiculous. My son screamed. It was literally an explosion. I looked it up later. Apparently this is a thing, that ophthalmologists think should be [included on] warnings on microwaves. The heat gets trapped in the spaces of the egg, so if you don’t pierce it like a potato, they explode. PSA: Be careful if you microwave your hardboiled eggs.

I am totally derailing this interview. See? There you go! Full-Disclosure Buxbaum.

There it is.

Strikes again!

“I was writing to that version of me that didn’t get to go to the bookstore and see myself reflected on the page.”

To move back to a more sobering subject, you’ve written about loss before in your two adult novels, but this, your first YA novel, is clearly your most vulnerable. How did writing this story begin, and did you always know that you would tell this story—about first loss and first grief and its aftermath—from the perspective of a young person?

As sort of an aside, I’ll tell you, yeah, I have written a lot about loss. I wrote my first book [The Opposite of Love], which is about a girl who loses her mother. In my second book [After You], I killed a mom, which is when you’re like, Julie, go to a therapist. [chuckles] My third book, Tell Me Three Things, again, all about mother-loss. And so when I sat down to write What to Say Next [coming July 11 from Delacorte Press], I told myself I was not going to kill any more moms. It was getting embarrassing. And then of course, on page two, I killed the dad [laughs]. So clearly, I am working through some grief issues with my fiction.

Tell Me Three Things, to get more sober for a moment, was the first time I felt comfortable actually going back to the time when I had lost my mom. Everything else is sort of from a distance. All of my other writing was from the perspective of an adult looking back and having some emotional space from the loss. I think I wrote Tell Me Three Things when my mom had been gone 22 or 23 years. So it took me a good 20 years, at least, to feel comfortable to go back and revisit that particular time, which I think was a different experience for me. There’s comfort in writing from a distance. When I had to go back and unpack the feeling of being 16 and my mom had just died, and I was living the life of a teenager and feeling all those fresh feelings—that was much tougher. I think it took me a really long time to feel comfortable to go back.

You’re obviously addressing your teenage self through this story, but at what point did the story become about your readers? When did you realize Jessie’s story wasn’t just about you, but about sharing yourself with your reader?

When I was creating Jessie, I purposefully didn’t write a character who was 16-year-old me. I wrote the character that 16-year-old me would want to see in a book, which is a really important distinction. If I wrote a character like 16-year-old me, she’d be definitely more of a disaster [laughs]. I didn’t experience half of what Jessie did. My dad didn’t quickly remarry a woman he met on the internet. We didn’t move halfway across the country. I did not have to start over with a new stepfamily. I had a brother who’s a great support system. I had totally different circumstances.

Jessie deals with her loss with such grace that I definitely did not have, and I thought it was important to see that modeled. When I was 16, there wasn’t this huge YA section where you could easily pick up a book about this stuff. I was writing to that version of me that didn’t get to go to the bookstore and see myself reflected on the page.

“When something that weird and wonderful and magical happens in real life and you’re a fiction writer, you use it.”

You’ve said you were also inspired by an anonymous email you received. What was that?

I’ve been talking about this book for a year, and I get asked this question all the time, and I never have a short, easy way of answering it. It’s a long, complicated story. But the gist of it is, I once received a secret admirer-type email, and it came at the time I needed it the most. I had just graduated from law school and started working at a law firm. I was working 80 hours a week. I had put on a ton of weight. I felt disgusting, not because I had put on weight, but because it was my first dose of real adult life. I felt completely overwhelmed and depressed. It just wasn’t a great period in my life, and out of nowhere, an anonymous email showed up in my inbox.

It wasn’t asking for anything. The person said that they lived in a different city, but we had gone to law school together. It was just a sweet email in which they mentioned that they always noticed me across the room. I had never, ever, ever thought of myself as someone that someone would notice across a room. It was so beyond the bounds of what I imagined my existence in the world to be like, that it completely changed my perception of myself. It was this great gift that was given to me, and when something that weird and wonderful and magical happens in real life and you’re a fiction writer, you use it.

Speaking of feeling noticed and being noticed, this is absolutely a book about grief and change, but it’s also about family and first love and, my personal favorite, navigating friendships with other young women—and when all these different pieces come together, it really is about being noticed. It’s about finding hope and sanctuary where you least expect it. SN is the obvious example of that, but there are others, like Jessie’s stepbrother, Theo, who’s this totally surprising character who she can confess really dark things to, like wishing that the living parent was the one who had actually died. And then Mrs. Pollack, the teacher, who’s just this wonderful person who pops up. Talk to me about being noticed as a young person.

That’s the seed of the idea. When I sat down to write this book, I was thinking, what would 16-year-old me want more than anything else? And it wasn’t just circumstances. Obviously I didn’t want my mom to have gotten sick. [It wasn’t that I wanted] a boy to notice me. It’s more about, at the core, I wanted someone to see me and recognize me. I think that’s a universal feeling of adolescence, or even adulthood. We all want to be recognized. We all want to feel that we’re not invisible in this world. It’s a huge theme in my first book as well, which is sort of a late coming-of-age story, set during her late 20s. It’s always something that I’m fascinated by, the ways in which other people see us and whether they recognize what makes us, us.

So I love the idea, first of all, of an anonymous email noticing her, but also all those opportunities for connection where we recognize shared feelings or emotion. Like that scene with Theo [you mentioned], they both have in common the loss of a parent, and they’re able to get past this sort of awkward, weird, artificial family dynamic to talk about that, and recognize their own grief in someone else.

“We all want to be recognized. We all want to feel that we’re not invisible in this world.”

There are a couple turning points for Jessie, but one of my favorites involves Ethan. We don’t, as a reader, necessarily trust him. We don’t understand him because we don’t have the access to him that we have with Jessie. We can’t see him. But there’s a moment during one of their “Waste Land” discussions, when he pushes through any potential awkwardness, is straightforward about her mom and apologizes for Jessie’s loss. And it’s a moment when he goes from being a crushable character to being an actual human. But even before and after that, you don’t make their connection easy. Why not?

I don’t love stories of insta-love, where two characters who look at each other across the room, and that’s it. Done. I mean, Ethan recognizes something in her, which is why he reaches out, but I think true connection takes time and it takes sharing. It’s funny—whenever I write a book, I don’t always know what it’s about until later. I mean, I knew what it was about in the sense that I wanted her to feel noticed and to satisfy that need of 16-year-old me. But my husband and I, when we first started dating, he got the flu. So for the whole first month we were dating, our conversation were all on the phone or online. We had met already, but that initial growth period was all over the phone, where we didn’t have to look at each other. I think it really helped to build our relationship. I don’t even know if we’d married now if that hadn’t happened.

You know, you mentioned that you would prefer to have this conversation in person, but I’m one of these people who is so much more comfortable writing than anything else, and then secondarily on the phone and third in person. When you’re in person, you have to figure out how to hold your body and how to make eye contact. There are all these other distractions, but when you’re on the phone or writing, it’s just pared down to the basics.

Why did you frame their friendship through “The Waste Land”? Why was that their project?

I love the poem, first of all. I think it was the perfect opportunity for them to dig in and talk about some of the grief. The language lends itself to that. Also, I love a good English project [laughs]. Obviously there are a million poems to choose from, but that’s the one that stuck for me.

My grandma was an English teacher. She used to quote “The Waste Land” to me all the time.

That’s intense.

And so I’m assuming, it stuck that way. It’s funny how things just come up in your fiction that mean something to you, but you don’t know why or how. In fact, it didn’t even occur to me until just now how much my grandmother love “The Waste Land” until you asked.

I imagine it’s always really surprising and maybe a little unsettling when someone, some reader, connects strongly with something that seems very personal to you, like “The Waste Land.”

When you write a book and put it out into the world, at least I’m of the belief that it’s no longer yours. It belongs to the reader, and so they bring whatever feelings and emotions and experiences to your book that they carry with them. That’s what’s so magical about the process. I don’t want to dictate how anyone feels about anything when they read my book.

You did mention your next book coming out, What to Say Next, which is the perfect title for a next book. What are you saying next?

The book is about two people who don’t know what to say next, and that’s why it’s called What to Say Next. It’s about two people who unexpectedly connect and find the person they need the most in the person they least expect.

And I have to ask the obvious question last: Tell me three things your readers might not know about you.

You know what’s so funny? Every time I get asked this question, something different comes up and I always fear what’s going to come out of my mouth. Full-Disclosure Buxbaum! It’s an embarrassing affliction I have [laughs]!

OK, things people might not know about me: I spent 12 hours yesterday fighting a pantry moth infestation. So that was fun.

Bummer.

It really was. It’s disgusting and horrible. So that’s number one. Number two, I have the world’s worst handwriting. I never learned to hold the pencil properly, so my handwriting is atrocious. And number three, I married my first love.

What could be dreamier than a post-graduation trip to Europe filled with art, mouth-watering pastries and boys with accents? Seventeen-year-old Nora Parker-Holmes just wants to become an artist like her world-renowned grandfather. She can’t wait for her summer of freedom at a prestigious artists’ colony in Ireland and the whirlwind Euro-tour beforehand. But her ideal solo adventure veers off course when her overbearing mother, Alice, spontaneously decides to tag along. 

Although Alice claims she wants to fit in a mother-daughter bonding experience before Nora heads off to college, their jaunts through Paris, Amesterdam and Brussels are filled with bickering and awkward silences. When the pair finally set foot in Ireland, Nora finally gets a little taste of the summer she dreamed of, as she makes fast friends with the other teens in her art program. And when a charismatic Irish boy named Callum asks her out at a pub, it seems like her trip might not be ruined after all. But expectations almost never match reality, and eventually Nora comes to be (mostly) glad to have Alice by her side.  

Writer Dana Schwartz has crafted a laugh-out-loud, winning summer read with her debut novel, And We’re Off. We asked Schwartz a few questions about her own globetrotting adventures, her hilarious Twitter accounts, her best advice for teens and more.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A teenage girl who wants to become an artist gets to go on a whirlwind trip through Europe, which sounds like a dream, until it turns out her high-strung, Type-A mother is planning on tagging along.

You’ve written for quite a few high-profile publications. Was it difficult to make the jump to writing a novel?
It was definitely a challenge writing a novel. The vast majority of my writing had been personal, from my own perspective, and so the first challenge was keeping my writing in the brain of my protagonist, Nora. This was also the longest thing I’ve ever written, and it took far more discipline and focus than writing a 140-character tweet.

Your Twitter handle @DystopianYA points out some pretty hilarious themes in YA. What makes And We’re Off unique?
I think the biggest constant with the dystopian YA I’m lovingly mocking is that the main character is just a generic placeholder for the reader to project herself onto: YOU are the most important person in the universe, and you have two handsome boys fighting over you, and even though you’re ordinary, everyone is always in love with you. I tried to make my main character distinct and imperfect—she’s bitter and awkward sometimes, hopefully funny and frequently crabby. Also, there’s no world that needs to be saved; there’s just one girl, hoping to figure out what she’s meant to do, and trying to become confident enough to pursue her dream.

Have you ever been to Europe? How did your expectations and experience compare to Nora’s?
I have! I’ve been lucky enough to get to go over to Europe a few times. I didn’t study abroad when I was in college, and so after I graduated, I made the decision to go away for as long as I possibly could before I had to come back and get a job. I was a little bit older, and I went with a friend from high school, not my mom, and I also didn’t get to go to an awesome arts colony, but I definitely took the texture of the cities and a few experiences directly from my trip.

The mother-daughter relationship between Nora and Alice isn’t very pretty (there’s lots of yelling, resentment and exasperation), but it feels honest. Why was it important for you to focus on their journey as a team instead of letting Nora run off to Europe by herself?
I think if this had just been a story about Nora in Europe, it would have been more about wish-fulfillment than an actual honest, difficult journey. Alice’s frustration with Nora, and her doubts about whether Nora can actually make it as an artist, is an externalization of something that Nora also thinks about herself: Alice externalizes the kernel of Nora’s self-doubt and insecurities. Nora is also 17, and before a kid leaves for college, tensions between parent and child are always at a high. The kid is nervous and beginning to feel independent and pushing against a parent who’s feeling sad that their baby has grown up. I wanted to capture that dynamic in a way that felt honest and relatable. Teenagers do have to deal with parents; this isn’t one of those kids’ books where the main character gets to be a hapless orphan on an adventure.

Nora’s fantasies about meeting a gorgeous guy and having a European fling actually come true, but it doesn’t end the way some readers might expect. Why was it important for you to break the typical YA romance formula?
I don’t think I was consciously breaking the formula—I think I was just trying to write the experience of a young crush in an honest way. I’ve fallen in love with boys I’ve only just met and imagined entire futures with them, and then had to move on. Sometimes love works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. It always struck me as strange and artificial when books and movies acted like a person you meet when you’re a teenager is automatically the love of your life.

You’ve got a large Twitter following and are super active on the platform. Who’s your favorite person on Twitter that you’d like to meet in real life?
Oh gosh, this is a really good question. I adore @jonnysun but haven’t met him in person yet. In terms of just super famous people—Michelle Obama is on Twitter, right?

Dream cast for a TV or movie adaptation of And We’re Off?
Kiernan Shipka for Nora, and Kathryn Hahn for her mother, Alice. Kiernan Shipka totally has the sarcastic-teen bit down, and the world always needs more Kathryn Hahn.

Best advice for surviving your teenage years?
Nothing is as big of a deal as you think it is. Really. Nothing. It will all work out. Chances are, 75 percent of things you’re stressed about will not matter in five years.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on a second book, a memoir, about moving to New York. And hopefully I’ll keep writing after that. In the long term, I plan on moving to the cottage Kate Winslet lives in in the movie The Holiday and falling in love with Jude Law.

BookPage Icebreaker is a publisher-sponsored interview.

Bestselling, award-winning Christian romance author Melanie Dickerson returns once again to medieval Germany for the latest installment of her Medieval Fairy Tales series, The Noble Servant. In this retelling of the classic Grimms’ tale “The Goose Girl” (with a bit of “The Prince and the Pauper” mixed in), Lady Magdalen travels to Wolfberg Castle to marry Steffan, the Duke of Wolfberg. But her own maidservant turns on her and forces her to trade places—and meanwhile at Wolfberg Castle, Steffan’s uncle has gone to great lengths to replace the rightful duke with his own son. By working together, Steffan and Magdalen may be able to restore themselves to their rightful places.

Cat: Before we talk about fairy tales and fairy-tale adaptations, I’d love to hear about your fascination with the medieval era. It’s a time when marriage is at the forefront of young women’s lives, and learning to read isn’t always allowed, and violence is commonplace. Why do you love this setting?

Melanie: I think it was the castles and the knights, just the clothing and everything about it. I’ve always loved the medieval times. I spent one summer in Germany in a town, and I modeled my fictional town after that town. Hagenheim is in several of my books in my first series. When I was there, I fell in love with the architecture, because they still have all these medieval buildings, churches. It was really exciting to me to see a part of history that was, you know, from medieval times! When I decided to do a fairy-tale retelling, I knew that I wanted to set it in the same sort of setting as that town that I spent that summer in.

Also, I’m fascinated with the idea of growing up in a time when most people don’t know how to read and don’t have access to the things that we do. Everyone during that time, pretty much everyone believed in God and had a fear of God and a reverence. It was just a different time than now, when people see science as competing with religion, and you know, people take sides. Back then, it was just very different. I wanted to explore just the thought of not knowing how to read or being one of the few people who knows how to read, and how that would affect your life and your views and your faith. Growing up in a time when everyone did believe in God, what would that do to your spiritual life and your faith?

With Magdalen, she does know how to read, which seems to bolster her faith as well as her independence as a young woman. How do you balance an independent female character with the realities of a medieval setting?

It is a challenge to make them independent and self-confident in a time when women were, I guess you could say, [had] a different role than women do now. With Magadalen, she is the daughter of a baron, so she had the benefit of an education. She knows how to read. She’s probably very well read for her time. And I like to bring out the fact that she is interested in things that maybe other people aren’t interested in. She loves rocks and collects rocks, and she’s interested in her dad’s mines, the mining that her people need to make a living. She cares about her people. I tried to bring out different things in her personality that make her strong and show the ways that she is strong.

And that historical setting works really well for a fairy-tale retelling because there are always so many misunderstandings and mistaken identities in Grimms’ tales. It works well when people can’t read. There’s no evidence of who you are.

It does make it more fun! They can’t put your picture on the 5 o’clock news because they didn’t have pictures of most people back then. How does anyone know who you are? How do you prove who you are? You don’t have a driver’s license! That part was really fun. I did try to stay very true to the time period as much as I could, and to the historical setting and the way the characters would have been brought up. But I feel like, even in medieval times, there were plenty of strong women—people who were confident or who asserted themselves for what they believed in. I don’t think that ever changes completely. So I really try to stay true to the time period but also try to make my heroine believably strong.

This is the latest in your Thornbeck series, which are all blendings of fairy tales, not just standard retellings. This is obviously mostly “The Goose Girl,” but there’s an element of “The Prince and the Pauper.” Why did you mix these two tales?

I wanted both the hero and the heroine to have their identities taken away, and they’re having to become servants. For her, it’s “The Goose Girl” retelling. She’s the Goose Girl. But for him, I thought, I could do a play on “The Prince and the Pauper” because he gets his place, his identity taken away, too. I wanted to do something a little different with this series, and so I did take two different fairy tales or legends or popular stories and mix them together.

I read a version of the original “Goose Girl” story, and it’s as strange as any Grimms’ tale you might read. There’s a talking, severed horse head that helps reveal the princess’ identity—it’s bizarre! Obviously that’s not included in your story, but I would love to hear about your process of transforming that totally wacky tale into a Christian romance. What elements did you feel most passionate about keeping? Which areas did you feel most free to veer away from?

I always try to think, if this really happened, what could take the place of, for example, the horse’s head? To take the place of that, I used Lenhart, a secondary character, and he’s mute so he can’t speak. He ends up helping save her at the end because he was able to write down what happened. He was the only eyewitness, and just like the horse at the end tells the truth and tells what really happened, Lenhart ends up doing that. And the only reason he knows how to write is because of Magadalen. She taught him. So in a way she saves herself, but he is a part of what helps them get out of their mess. There were a lot of other things, too, but I thought that was fun. I like to take those outlandish parts of the fairy tales and change them, use something else to represent that.

With the original Grimms’ tale, it’s like the truth can’t be told by one of the real human characters who are wrapped up in the conflict. The truth had to be told by something mythical, above them, outside the realm of understanding. With your story, the truth can be told through the ability to read. The human characters have more agency in your story.

Yeah. I like making it realistic. What would this story have been like if it had actually happened? I try to tell a story that maybe would have morphed into the weird Grimms’ tale.

Yeah, I see that. It could come full circle. Now, in this story, you have two wealthy teens, and they’ve been reduced to servitude. Another question of balance—how did you balance the resentment that would come from losing their status along with their identity? They are very humble, all considering that they were raised in wealth.

With Magdalen, I think, she had been treated badly by her mother all her life, and so even though she is a privileged kind of person and always had everything she needed, she had never been prideful. She had this mother who was constantly pointing out her shortcomings and things like that, so in a way she was already a very humble person. I think she did—there was some anger. In her dialogue, she was talking about how unfair it was.

And Steffan, he had more anger about the situation because he was an independent guy, and he had always been able to deal with whatever problems came up to him. He had always lived a very privileged life and had servants who took care of him and who he could boss around. He naturally had more anger, but essentially, even he felt a lot of responsibility toward his people. He had been taught they were his responsibility, and he should care for them and make sure he made their lives better if he could.

Both are in positions of power, but neither one is interested in squandering or abusing that power. It’s so often that power corrupts, and these two characters are totally good to the bottom of their hearts.

Yeah. I felt like I made the contrast with Lord Hazen. He was the one who was corrupted by the power and the greed for more power, while Steffan was more focused on helping his people. And I think that’s realistic [laughs].

I have to ask, have you spent a lot of time working with geese?

No! I didn’t know anything about geese, and so I started trying to look things up on the internet. This may sound silly, but if I want to know something and I’m not finding it on the internet, I can just ask my Facebook friends! There’s always a bunch of them. There were several who came back and told me things about geese, experiences they’d had because they’d raised geese or were around geese. I learned a lot that way. And also, I called my uncle who had been around geese. He had worked on a farm, and he’d had a chance to observe geese year-round. So I asked him some of my questions, too. I don’t know anything about geese, other than that!

And lastly, are you someone who believes in happily-ever-after?

Yeah, of course! I’m a big romantic person [laughs]. Romance is fun and exciting, and it’s something that I enjoy. I feel like, as a Christian, we get a happily-ever-after, no matter what!

Kiersten White kicked off her And I Darken series with her eponymous 2016 novel, and now she’s back with the second installment, Now I Rise. Drawing from the real-life story of Vlad the Impaler, White’s alternative history follows Lada—a headstrong, bloodthirsty teen—on her quest to rule Wallachia as its rightful prince (since a princess has little power). Perfect for fans of “Game of Thrones,” White’s reimagining of the infamous Transylvanian ruler shows a tough and sometimes tyrannical young woman who must fight for gender equality, power, love and loyalty during the 1400s.

We asked White a few questions about her inspiration for the series, the importance of antiheroines and more.

What inspired you to take on the quite brutal history of Vlad the Impaler as the focus for your series?
Whenever I embark on a new story, I start with a central question. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “Can I write a paranormal romance series that is also funny?” And sometimes it’s as complicated as, “How do normal people get to the point where they can justify atrocities in the pursuit of their goals?” Because history is cyclical and we do the same things over and over, examining the life of brutal and brilliant Vlad the Impaler through a different lens felt quite timely.

Many people have asked you if it was challenging to swap Vlad’s gender and create the female Lada, but it seems like it would almost be more freeing! Did you feel like it was easier to connect with Lada than the historical Vlad?
It definitely gave me more fictional freedom. Because this isn’t straight historical fiction—it’s alternate history—I was able to fudge timelines and change events to better suit a narrative. History is sprawling and incredibly complex. It’s fascinating to study but not so easy to condense into novels, even when they’re 500 pages long, ha! Also, when I was considering how Vlad Dracula was ruthlessly brutal and refused to ever give an inch, even when it would have made more sense to do so, it just felt . . . right for him to be a girl. A girl trying to rule would have to work harder, be smarter, be the absolute most brutal and never, ever back down, because the day she did would be the day she died.

Your first novel in this series, And I Darken, was widely praised for Lada’s incredible strength, ferocity and even her ruthlessness. Was it important for you to create an antiheroine in the current YA fantasy landscape?
I never really thought of her in relation to other books being published right now. The best thing writers can do is just tell the story they’re desperate to tell, and tell it as well as they can. I love all the ways female characters can be strong. I happened to need a story where the antiheroine is strong in traditionally masculine ways, but there’s tremendous power in feminine strength as well. I’m just grateful people have responded to her as they have!

Although this is historical fiction, Lada, Mehmed and Radu must deal with some of the same issues today’s teens face. What lessons do you wish you could have learned from them back when you were a teen?
I do wish I could have seen positive portrayals of LGBTQIA+ characters in genre fiction (or any fiction, really) when I was a teen. I also wish I could have taken some cues from Lada earlier on in my life: to be myself on my own terms, and not let society dictate how I felt I should look and behave and even think.

What were some of the challenges that came with writing feminist and queer characters in a story set during a very oppressive time period?
I didn’t have access to the same vocabulary and social awareness that we have now. So I couldn’t have Radu have an “Oh, I’m gay!” moment. There was no one he could turn to to discuss it and try to figure out what it meant in his life. So exploring that self-discovery and those realizations without a modern context was definitely something I worked at very hard, to make it as authentic as possible both to the characters and also to the restrictions of the time. But it was not so much a challenge as a personal determination to bring these characters—queer characters and powerful women who carved out spaces of safety and control for themselves—to the forefront. I took a lot of inspiration from other histories and filled in where I had to.

Have you been surprised by how fervently teen readers have embraced a historical fiction series set in the Ottoman empire and Wallachia during the 1400s?
Yes. Like, that’s my whole answer. Yes! I really thought I was going to have to fight for this book—fight to get a publisher, fight to find an audience. Gender swapping a relatively obscure 15th-century Romanian prince doesn’t really scream bestseller!  I continue to be amazed and delighted at both the support of my publisher, Delacorte at Penguin Random House, and how much readers have embraced the series.

Are there any other historical figures that you’d love to write a series about?
I frequently run across amazing women in history and think, maybe I should—and then I remember the thousands and thousands of pages of research I had to do and think, maybe I should nap instead.

Can you tell us anything about the last book in the trilogy? We’re so excited!
It will come out next year. It was a surprising book for me—both because it was emotionally difficult to face some of the real-life historical events I had to write, and because I ended up changing the ending I had planned from day one! That has never happened to me before. What can I say—Lada is impossible to argue with!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Now I Rise.

Since Kwame Alexander won the 2015 Newbery Medal for The Crossover, he’s been traveling far and wide in a whirl of evangelism for reading, poetry, friendship, self-expression, sports, music and love.

During a call to his Virginia home (where he was resting before lighting out for Ohio, Texas and beyond), Alexander says, “When I won the Newbery, I committed myself to being an ambassador of poetry and literature. Nobody asked me to. I just decided I’d give it two years and go everywhere.”

And so he has, from schools to TED talks, connecting with kids, teachers and librarians. He also continued writing, and his latest YA novel-in-verse, Solo, co-written with Mary Rand Hess, weaves poetry, music and text conversations into a coming-of-age tale.

Seventeen-year-old Blade is a talented musician in Hollywood and the son of a former rock star who’s a longtime addict. His teasingly sarcastic sister, Storm, and secret girlfriend, Chapel (her parents don’t approve), help make life fun sometimes, despite persistently cruel tabloid stories and long-simmering anger at his dad, who’s been emotionally checked out since Blade’s mom died 10 years earlier.

Blade’s mentor, Robert, “a magician / who turns worries / into songs,” is a haven for the teen. Their conversations are a call-and-response rhythm of wisdom and calm that culminates in music. But Blade’s still having a hard time finding serenity, and just as family conflict reaches yet another crescendo, a secret is revealed that has him questioning his very identity.

Thanks to Blade’s songwriting, Storm’s efforts to become a singer and Robert’s improvising, plus name-checks of musicians as varied as Meghan Trainor, Lenny Kravitz and Metallica, there’s plenty of music sounding through Solo.

Alexander says a mutual love of music helped him and Hess find their way from disparate tastes to their own perfectly tailored collection of influences. “Mary’s a hard rock fan, and I’m the 1980s Lloyd Dobler type, the Genesis guy. . . . But there were no arguments, just a frustration and sadness when we had to leave certain people out.”

He jokes, “Whenever it got to a point where there was gonna be a disagreement, I brought out my Newbery Medal,” then says, “No—there were certain things I knew that were not up for discussion, and certain things I trusted that she knew that weren’t up for discussion. You need that level of trust when you’re writing together. And it’s poetry! You’ve got to follow the rules, rhythm, emotion, metaphors, and distill powerful moments into very few words.”

Some of Solo’s most powerful moments take place in Africa, where Blade flees in pursuit of more information about that shocking family secret. Alexander says he chose Ghana for the book because of his own feelings for the place: “In 2012, a friend was becoming a queen in a village, and she wanted me to document it. I went to Konko and fell in love with the people and the children, the possibilities and hope and history.”

Since then, he’s founded LEAP for Ghana, which has provided books, literacy training and more. Last year, when Hess asked if he wanted to team up on a book, he knew the time was right: “I’d always wanted to write about Ghana but hadn’t figured out the story. Mary’s novel-in-progress was set in Kenya, but she’d never been there. I said, let’s put my ideas with yours, and a year later, we were finished.”

In Solo, when Blade goes to Konko, he falls for the place and the people, too, even though he’s nervous about what it might mean for his future. And of course, there’s the culture shock: It’s quite different from what he’s used to in Hollywood.

“I was excited by the concise, rhythmic. . . language that captured the emotional woes and wonders of my world in a few words.”

“This is a kid who has everything, and that’s juxtaposed with the complete opposite, with people and a country that have very little materially,” Alexander says. “Would it be realistic, would people care? That was a challenge, and I think we met it. The readers will tell us.”

They really will, too; for Alexander, an important part of his writing and his travels is the back-and-forth with his enthusiastic and vocal young readers.

“I’ve heard way too many times that boys don’t read,” he says. “I never believed that. You’ve just got to give boys a book they’re interested in reading.”

Alexander’s parents were avid readers and educators, so books were big in his home. But “in middle school, I wasn’t interested in books. . . . I was well-read, intelligent . . . but nobody made the connection that I should be given books I was interested in reading.”

In college, “I found my way back to reading through love poems. . . . I began to write poetry as a way to communicate with girls. I was excited by the concise, rhythmic, figurative, sparse language that captured the emotional woes and wonders of my world in a few words. I knew from college on [that poetry] can transform your life. It transformed mine, and I thought, I’ve got to find a way to share it with the world.”

And now he does, through Solo and his other books, his speaking engagements and his work in Ghana, where this summer LEAP for Ghana will finish building a library. There will be plenty more Alexander books, too, including novels-in-verse Swing (about baseball and jazz, written with Hess) and Rebound, the prequel to The Crossover.

“Most of us have forgotten that we love poetry, but it’s how we learn to communicate as children, in rhythm and rhyme and verse,” Alexander says. “It’s my job to remind us how powerful it is, to help us become more confident, find and raise our voices, become more human. . . . I want everyone to know words are cool, books are cool. They’re the most transformative things.”

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

After his 2012 novel—the hugely popular, critically acclaimed YA hit The Fault in Our Stars—grew into a global phenomenon, Green discovered that returning to writing was not an easy task. But with Turtles All the Way Down, he found a subject very close to his heart—and brain.

The Fault in Our Stars sold 45 million copies worldwide, was translated into 50-plus languages and was made into a movie. In 2014, the year the movie debuted, Green was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world by Time magazine. Thrilling stuff—but not surprisingly, it became a hard act for Green to follow.

“For a long time after The Fault in Our Stars came out, I wasn’t able to find pleasure in writing, to find an escape from my brain,” Green says in a call to his Indianapolis home, where he lives with his wife and two children. “When I was writing . . . it was hard not to feel the audience looking over my shoulder.”

But Green kept creating and communicating with fans (affectionately called nerdfighters) in other ways, like the two popular video blog series (“VlogBrothers” and “Crash Course”) he hosts with his brother, Hank, and VidCon, a conference for online video creators and aficionados.

And eventually, writing “did start to feel like the release it had always been,” and soon he was crafting what would become Turtles All the Way Down. “When I started working on the book intensely, it was almost impossible for me to write about anything else,” Green says.

Perhaps most importantly, Green felt like he “didn’t have a choice” in the subject matter. The main character, 16-year-old Aza Holmes, struggles daily with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)—which has affected Green’s life since childhood.

“As Aza says in the book, illness is supposed to be story told in past tense—you’re supposed to share your story of how you conquered your demons. That’s not my story,” Green says. “It’s more something I’ve lived with for a long time. It can be so hard to reconcile that, in part because there are such strong cultural voices saying [that] any kind of chronic illness is a weakness, a failure. And that’s just not true.”

It absolutely isn’t, but it’s something Aza contends with, despite having a caring mom and best friend, Daisy. Aza usually tries to handle everything by herself, so it’s hard to pull herself out of spirals of intrusive thoughts—which cause her to turn her focus inward and to feel anxious, which leads to feeling bad about herself. It’s exhausting and seemingly endless.

The spiral motif that’s central to Aza’s story is first referenced in the book’s title, which refers to the philosophical paradox that the Earth is flat and balanced on the back of a giant turtle, which is atop another turtle, and so on and so on. That notion of a never-ending stack of turtles provides an artful, memorable way to envision a line of reasoning that goes on and on without end, spiraling down with no relief or escape—and nicely parallels Aza’s OCD-induced thought spirals that make her feel powerless, out of control and disconnected from her own sense of self.

“You’re supposed to share your story of how you conquered your demons. That’s not my story.”

“OCD can be super isolating, in part because it’s happening within you, so it’s almost impossible to express it in a way to help other people understand,” Green says. “[OCD] can be so consuming that it’s really difficult to even understand there’s a world outside of yourself.”

And sometimes, finding the right treatment can feel impossible, especially if there’s shame and secretiveness involved. “I always felt tremendously embarrassed about my obsessive thought spirals,” Green says. “It’s really difficult to feel something weird about [yourself] that’s sort of disgusting or reprehensible, that you can’t shake.” He adds, “Aza hates being like this, and for much of the book, she really cannot see that she’s not alone.”

In Turtles All the Way Down, Green comes as close as anyone to capturing the thought-spiral experience for readers. Masterfully crafted, skillfully paced, sometimes heartbreaking streams of consciousness draw readers into Aza’s relentless brain and whisk them along as the story ebbs and flows and grows. Will Aza realize that sharing with others what it’s like to be her can help? Or will she retreat from that possibility and return to more familiar territory, courtesy of a mind that seems determined to play the trickster?

That’s not all Turtles All the Way Down has to offer. At the heart of Aza’s story is a weird, entertaining tale of what appears to be your typical find-the-missing-billionaire-and-get-the-$100,000-reward treasure hunt. But the adventure unspools in delightfully unexpected ways, with revelations funny and romantic and bizarre, plus a dose of practicality when it comes to the notion that mental illness is a huge boon to an investigator.

Green has a bone to pick with that. “That’s one thing I’ve always found so strange about the narrative of the obsessive detective,” Green says, referring to a popular trope in literature, film and TV. “In my experience, OCD comes with no superpowers and has made me a terrible detective! When I’m sick, I have no awareness of the world outside myself at all. How could I possibly look at someone’s shirt and figure out what they do for a living? I know that’s not everyone’s experience, but it doesn’t make sense to me at all. I’m just not a very good detective.”

Is Aza? We won’t spoil it, but Green definitely has great fun with the sleuthing aspects of his story. In his trademark style, he also includes lots of fascinating things readers will be inspired to learn more about—from facts about the tuatara (a New Zealand reptile) to hilariously deep dives into Star Wars lore.

There’s also plenty of poetry to learn about and enjoy. Green has always had a knack for crafting phrases that inspire and beg to be shared. Here, he goes a step further, with characters who write poetry and share their favorite poems.

Green says that in writing about OCD, “I really wanted to try to give form or structure to this thing I have trouble accessing via my senses, and one of my favorite ways writers have done this over the centuries is [through] poetry. It’s a way of sense-ifying the ineffable.”

But Green acknowledges that this is only one experience and only one way of representing mental illness. “I don’t want to project Aza’s or my experience on everyone,” Green says. “When you talk about mental health problems, there’s a huge diversity of experiences. . . . I do know the vast majority is treatable, and that there’s real, legitimate cause for hope—that despair is a lie your brain is telling you.” Of course, he adds, “Not any one treatment works for everyone.”

This push and pull, this engaging with the outside world while trying to manage the tempest within—it’s all part of living with OCD. But in that outside world, Green says, there are people who want to understand, learn and help. This is one of the main points he wanted to make with Aza’s story: that she doesn’t have to shoulder this burden in isolation. The effects of OCD touch all of Aza’s relationships, and with the release of Turtles All the Way Down, Green’s relationship with his audience will shift and change anew.

“For the last several years, the book’s been only in my mind, to a large degree, and [now] it isn’t,” Green says. “There’s a bit of a sense of loss in that, and also excitement and nervousness now that it belongs to its readers.”

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by Marina Waters.)