Phil Stamper’s debut YA novel, The Gravity of Us, is the story of two teens, Cal and Leon, who are brought together when their parents are both selected for a new NASA mission to Mars. Stamper magnificently balances the boys’ burgeoning relationship against a backdrop that brings the space race into the 21st century. We spoke to Stamper about his day job in book publishing and writing characters that feel real—and, of course, geeked out about space.

You work in book publishing, so this is a bit of a “chicken or the egg” question: Which came first, working in publishing or writing? Was it ever challenging to balance your knowledge of publishing as an industry with your own creative needs and process?
Writing came first! After college, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do for a job, but I eventually worked my way into nonprofit PR and marketing. I loved writing for a living, but the press releases got old fast, so I started writing fiction to recharge my creative energy. Through the exhaustive process of writing, revising, researching and querying, I really fell in love with book publishing. So much so that I got my M.A. in publishing from a school in London and now I work for one of the Big Five in New York City. (Ed. note: The “Big Five” is a publishing industry term for the five largest American book publishers: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and Hachette.)

I’m in a lucky spot in publishing. I get to help authors every day but not work on specific titles or marketing campaigns, which gives me plenty of energy to work on my own edits/marketing on my downtime. I’m not sure where this career will lead, but I’m happy with the balance I’ve struck. Even if it can be a little stressful when edits are due!

I think it’s important for authors to understand the publishing industry, and especially their role in it. But the more familiar you are with the industry, the more you realize that “what works” is all pretty random. Stories that don’t fit the mold can get book deals and find success, while stories that tick every single box can get lost in the stacks. At the end of the day, it’s taught me that writing things I’m passionate about is the only thing I can do. If you put that energy into your work, readers will feel it. And that’s about all you can control in this process.

Do you see The Gravity of Us as being in conversation with or descended from other YA titles? Which ones, and how?
This is a really interesting question! I think it’s hard to write YA without reading YA and knowing what’s out there. I do see The Gravity of Us as being “in conversation” with plenty of books. I’ve always felt that we need all sorts of queer stories and experiences out there. I built this book in a world where homophobia is just not acknowledged, and I wanted this story to be a safe space for queer teens who always feel like they have to keep their guards up when reading a book.

In that way, I feel like my book is descended from books like Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli or You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan. But it’s also out there in conversation with heavier (but still hopeful!) stories like Ziggy, Stardust & Me by James Brandon and Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Gravity of Us.

Can we talk about space for a bit? Have you always been into space, or was it an interest you cultivated when you began writing this book? What kind of research did you do to write accurately and convincingly about this aspect of the book?
Oh, yes! We can always talk about space. I’ve been a space nerd for decades now, especially when it comes to the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions. I’ve read dozens of astronaut/engineer memoirs, watched documentaries, and I’ve got a growing collection of LIFE magazines from the era.

While reading The Astronaut Wives Club, actually, I realized that one thing in the background of every astronaut story kept calling out to me. The astronaut families essentially became the celebrities of this era, frequently gracing the covers of magazines and giving interviews for national news outlets. This meant the astronauts’ spouses and children had to be immaculately dressed, polished and ready to entertain, all while not knowing if their husbands or fathers would come home alive that night. In The Gravity of Us, I wanted to capture this brilliant tension while also showcasing a contemporary queer love story.

What do you love about the idea of space exploration?
There’s so much to love about space exploration, but for me, that love is tricky and complicated. I often hear that those at NASA were so focused on this exploration that they missed the many important movements of the 60s. But I don’t fully buy that. They saw the world changing around them and refused to change with it. Women and people of color were excluded at every turn, even though NASA had the influence to actually make a change. Too often, I think we focus on that starry-eyed joy and power of the space race and not the realities of it, and I am glad I got to deconstruct that some in my story.

Do you have a favorite constellation, nebula, planet or other celestial body?
Cassiopeia has always been my favorite constellation! It’s easy to pick out, and it’s shaped vaguely like a crown. In high school, my best friend liked it, so we’d always keep an eye out for it. I mention that one in the book, and I also talk about the constellation Lyra, which isn’t one I was very familiar with before researching the book. When naming the Orpheus missions, I was curious to see if there was a constellation representing the myth, and Orpheus’s lyre is represented in the tiny constellation, so that was a fun discovery.

How about a favorite astronaut or other real-life figure from the history of space exploration?
Oh I could go on for days about this, really. I loved learning about all of the astronauts, even the ones that weren’t exactly good people, because they were fascinating. But I guess you’d have to be pretty interesting to willingly take the kind of risks they had to take every day. But to answer your question, my favorite real-life figure from this era is probably Poppy Northcutt. I think she had one of the most interesting experiences of the space race. She was the first female engineer to work in NASA’s control room, and she dealt with a lot of sexism during her time there and because of that experience she later became a lawyer to fight for women’s issues.

She was such an inspiration for her brilliance and tenacity, but she was also incredibly ambitious. She knew exactly how she was being treated and portrayed, and she found a way to turn the media’s sexist coverage of her into her own platform, making space for more women on the team and getting a chance to speak out about these issues on the national stage, in front of a fully captive audience. Her interviews from back then are phenomenal. If you’re interested in learning more about her, this Fast Company piece is a great place to start.

"Too often, I think we focus on that starry-eyed joy and power of the space race and not the realities of it, and I am glad I got to deconstruct that some in my story."

The characters of Cal and Leon feel constructed with a great deal of thoughtful intentionality (which also reads effortlessly and invisibly, making the reading experience an absolute joy). Can you talk about some of the choices you made as you crafted their characters?
Early on, I had sort of figured out the astronaut families. I knew what role I wanted the Tuckers (Leon’s mom, especially) to play in the story, and I also knew how Cal’s family was going to fit into that world. Then I wanted to create characters that really stood out against that. Leon’s mom is at times the voice of NASA, polished and concise and thoughtful. Leon doesn’t have it together, and doesn’t really want to have it together. He’s living in a spotlight he never asked for, and it makes him withdraw a bit. I gave him his own passions, and took a lot of inspiration from my own experience of pursuing things you really care about while depression makes you want to pull back. In this way, he became an earnest, authentic character. When Cal’s thrown into this fake, stressful new environment, he is automatically drawn to the authenticity of Leon and his sister, Kat.

Cal, however, was a foil to everything the media world is inundated with today: clickbait, sensationalism, “fake news.” Cal doesn’t buy any of that, and he will make it his life’s mission to show you that being real is what makes you stand out. I’m a pretty nostalgic person, sitting here with my LIFE magazines and my rose-colored glasses, so I had to put the cynic at the lead of this novel. I wanted this book to be a love letter to NASA in many ways, but I needed it to be relevant. I think there’s a natural urge to romanticize things from the past as well as things that are happening now. And Cal? He’s not having it.

Of course, Cal’s a bit of a hypocrite because he has his own ironic cassette collection. But I liked showing that not all our connections to the past are inherently bad, they just sometimes blind us.

I think readers are going to fall for the romance that unfolds between Cal and Leon in a big way, and I loved the way it was paced and incorporated into the book’s other narrative threads. What part of their relationship was the most fun for you to write? The most difficult?
I’m really happy with how the romance in this book turned out. I think so often in m/m fiction there’s the pressure to write characters who are sweet and devoid of flaws to please a broader audience. In this, I wanted to show two flawed teens who were trying. Cal is a little selfish, Leon’s a little guarded, but I had such a good time bringing these two together and letting them talk it out. From the beginning, they found an ally in each other, and I think they were able to hold onto that feeling of “I’m not alone in this” that got them through the many highs and lows that were thrown at them along the way. It was fun to create that bond from nothing, almost the moment Cal is dropped in on Houston.

The Gravity of Us is populated with a fantastic supporting cast. It’s something of a cliché to say that secondary characters feel as though an entirely new novel could be written about them, but in this case, I think it’s true. From Deb, Cal’s best friend back in Brooklyn, to Kat, Leon’s sister, to Cal’s parents and the other members of the Orpheus team, the crew of StarWatch — you’re balancing a huge cast of characters with lots of conflicting motives and desires that shift realistically over the course of the book. Who was your favorite of these characters to create and write? Who was the most challenging? Who kept trying to steal whatever scene they were in?

I hope that isn’t too cliché, because I love that comment! In all of my stories, I want my secondary characters to be fully fleshed out, have stories of their own and make you feel like you could just as easily be entertained if the book was from their perspective. Though I’m not a rigid plotter, I work off of beat sheets and I put all my characters through the same test. Even if things are happening in the background, their story should progress in a similar way to the main character’s. There are no cardboard cut-outs here, and my editor is great at helping me pull out the emotional arcs for these side characters.

I have a soft spot for Deb, who was certainly the most fun to write. I made sure to give her a full arc, but I also got to talk more broadly about how hard it is to keep a best friend when you move away from them and start to change as a person. Cal and Deb have a messy friendship, but that’s what makes it so real, to me at least. I see the comment “Where’s Deb?” from time to time as people are reading, and though I make sure we check in with her throughout, I want you to miss her. (Sorry!)

As for the others, I really enjoyed building out StarWatch producer Kiara’s story. Without giving spoilers away, she does some great and awful things, and she has her own motivations and frustrations. Leon’s sister, Kat, stole every scene and moment she was in, and I loved how she was so fiercely supportive of her brother the whole time. Cal’s mom, Becca, experiences anxiety, and how she and Cal support each other throughout was really authentic and sweet. And we got to see some of the astronauts’ lives in the interstitial chapters, which were really fun to play with. I just love all of these characters!

“I want my secondary characters to be fully fleshed out, have stories of their own and make you feel like you could just as easily be entertained if the book was from their perspective.”

Since you’ve worked in publishing, you know that authors typically aren’t heavily involved in the process of designing book covers. I’d love to hear a little bit about what (if any) input you had on The Gravity of Us jacket, and how you felt the first time you saw it.

From what I can tell, publishers seem to be involving authors more and more into the process. This isn’t the case for everyone, and many authors don’t want to take part at all, but I think it’s great that authors are at least being consulted or involved in early stages. For The Gravity of Us, I ended up sending over a mood board, had a miniature brainstorm about options with my editor, and they ran one illustrator by me (who was my secret top choice to begin with!) and got him signed up right away.

I will truly never have an easier cover design process. From the very first moment, my editor and I had the same scene in mind for the cover. I wanted the boys to be on the ground, holding hands, watching the satellite launch. Even in the rough sketch, the illustrator, Patrick Leger, captured the perfect emotion and mood of the book, with the warped perspective of the shot and the sunrise gradient, stars and the satellite in the sky. It came together quickly, and Danielle Ceccolini designed the full cover, and everything just clicked perfectly.

I was emotional when I first showed it and when I got to reveal it on Teen Vogue last May, but seeing the finished copy with the embossed text and the full jacket for the first time? There’s nothing like that feeling of seeing your book finished for the first time, especially when that book has such a beautifully queer cover.

What’s something you love about your book? Something you’re really proud of?
I really like that I was able to create a love story between two people who are fully functioning on their own—they have their own stories, struggles, dreams, and they’re both on their own paths when we meet them and when the story ends. I’m also really proud I was able to make this story a love letter to NASA and a nod to the amazing people involved in the 60s space race, while still allowing myself to critique that era and keep the story relevant for a teen audience in 2020.

What’s something you learned from writing this book that you’ve been able to use as you’re writing your next book?
I’ve always been great at plotting and pacing, and I always like my contemporaries to move quickly through beats. My YA origins are in 2010-era dystopian books, and I love action. So no, there are no sword fights in this book, but that urgency and tension can still be built into contemporary stories in a meaningful way. But as for what I learned, while working with my editor, I was able to pull out a lot of emotional moments throughout. She’s great at highlighting points where it’s nice to pause and take a breath, where we can dig into characterization and also just show the aspirational aspects of teens having fun.

I’ve brought that into my next book, a lot, and I think that’ll be the case for the other books I write as well. I will never abandon my beat sheets, but I will fight that urge to push forward and let the readers sit in important emotional moments a bit more.

“I was able to create a love story between two people who are fully functioning on their own—they have their own stories, struggles, dreams, and they’re both on their own paths when we meet them and when the story ends.”

Someone finishes reading The Gravity of Us and they love it. Recommend some things for them to read or watch next (while they wait for your next book).
Ooh, I love giving book recommendations. If you like fast-paced and unique YA contemporary, you’ll love Sadie by Courtney Summers and The Grief Keeper by Alexandra Villasante. If you love unapologetically queer YA, you have to check out Ryan La Sala’s Reverie and Abdi Nazemian’s Like a Love Story. If you love space, but want another book that’s set on the ground, check out The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum and, of course, The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel. 

And if you liked The Gravity of Us, I hope you’ll come back in early 2021 when my second book is on shelves!

Journalist and author Monica Hesse’s first YA book, The Girl in the Blue Coat, a work of historical fiction set in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, won the 2017 Edgar Award for the best young adult mystery novel. Hesse returns to a lesser known moment in the same era—the end of the war, as Europe struggled to begin piecing itself back together—for They Went Left. We spoke with Hesse about what draws her to write about World War II, the true stories behind her fictional characters and how she finds light in the darkness of the past.

What do you love about writing historical fiction?
I can’t say this without sounding like a total dork, but you learn so much. So much of history is hidden or papered over. Uncovering it again feels like solving a mystery: You find a document, which leads to another document, which leads to an old map, which leads to yellowed census records in a language you barely speak. I like being able to unspool those mysteries for readers.    

All three of your YA novels deal, in some way, with World War II. What is it about this moment in history that you find compelling?
Every day, in every corner of the world, this war revealed the absolute best and the absolute worst of humanity. On the same city block, in the same minute, you had people working to either save their neighbors or to have their neighbors murdered. And in between the best and worst, you had millions of regular people trying to figure out how they would react and who they would become. Do you try to get on the last boat to Sweden, even though it might mean you never see your family again? Do you agree to hide a Jewish friend, when you know refusing means her death, but hiding her could mean yours? Those are the stories I’m always interested in: When the world around you has gone mad, who do you become?   

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of They Went Left.

Tell us a little bit about the mechanics of your writing process for They Went Left. Did you begin with a story and research as you drafted? Do all your research up front, then start writing? Since the book, like all your YA books, has the framework of a mystery, did you work from an outline? Did you know how the story would end when you began?
I always knew how the mystery would solve itself, because that’s how I tend to write all of my books: backwards. The first chapter I wrote in They Went Left ended up being the second-to-last chapter in the finished book. I have to meet my characters at their most raw and vulnerable and confused and angry, and then figure out what would have happened that could have caused them to end up that way.    

They Went Left takes place during the aftermath of the war in Europe, a period often overlooked in both history and fiction. Was researching this book any more difficult or challenging than your two other works of historical fiction? As you researched, what surprised you about what you learned?
It was more difficult because, as you say, a lot of literature just stops in 1945. There aren’t as many books, especially in English, and record-keeping around this period of time was often really messy. One of my favorite research tools are oral histories—regular people talking about what happened to them in the war, and not only where they were during what battle, but what it felt like to run out of toothpaste, for example, or the song playing on the radio when they heard Germany had invaded their country. I found myself listening to a lot of really long oral histories through the United States Holocaust Museum, and it was astonishing to realize that for many of the speakers, the end of the war was really the beginning or middle of their story. The war had broken everything apart; now they had to figure out how to put it back together.  

A lot of these stories involved people searching for their families. It’s so hard to imagine today, where you can use Instagram or Facebook to find anyone in a matter of minutes, what it would be like to try to find one person who could now be living anywhere on the continent. You probably wouldn’t even have had a reliable telephone. You probably wouldn’t even have had reliable mail!

I read a heartbreaking story of two Polish siblings who spent years looking for one another, until they each gave up, assuming the other had died. It was only after their deaths that a descendant, though an ancestry site, learned the brother and sister had, for decades, been living just a few miles from each other in Argentina.  

The reader is immediately swept up in your main character Zofia’s journey—both her geographic journey and her emotional journey. You captured the way Zofia’s mind works after what she’s experienced masterfully. Tell us about the work you did and the choices you made as you crafted her character.
Zofia is the scraps of memory and experiences of a hundred different survivors. I read a testimony of a survivor who, while recovering in the hospital, kept wishing for someone to bring her lipstick so she could feel feminine again, and that became part of Zofia’s story. I read about a survivor dreaming of kissing boys day and night after liberation because she longed so much for human connection—and the reawakening of desire became part of Zofia’s story. Creating real characters is hard, often the hardest part of writing a novel. But in many ways, it felt like Zofia came to me fully formed, carrying all of these stories inside her.   

“We can’t choose the hate the unfolds around us, but we can choose how we love. We can choose our family. We can choose our community. We can be almost broken by the horrors of life and we can still, impossibly, manage to find moments of beauty and grace.”

Embroidery plays an important role in Zofia’s life and in the narrative itself. Do you sew or do other needle arts or crafts?
I can’t do much more than replace a button, but my mother is really accomplished. When I was growing up, she made all of our Halloween costumes, and special pajamas on our birthdays, in fabrics we got to pick out. The whir of a sewing machine was regularly a part of my childhood, and it’s a sound full of love and security. When I picture the Lederman household, no matter what else is going on, someone is always using a sewing machine in the background.  

Zofia and her brother Abek’s story is surrounded by the stories of many other compelling characters. Which secondary character was your favorite to write?
Partway through the book, Breine tells Zofia that she never got to marry her first fiancé, so she’s seizing the opportunity to marry her second fiancé—a kind, decent man she’s known for only a few weeks. She tells Zofia that we can “choose to love,” and now she’s choosing to love Chaim so that another chance at happiness doesn’t pass her by.

In a way, that’s the motto of the whole book. We can’t choose the hate the unfolds around us, but we can choose how we love. We can choose our family. We can choose our community. We can be almost broken by the horrors of life and we can still, impossibly, manage to find moments of beauty and grace. I loved writing Breine. I love her practical optimism, her reflexive kindness, everything about her.  

They Went Left is an incredible depiction of the toll that trauma takes, as well as a story set in the aftermath of one of humanity’s darkest moments. As you were writing, how did you find a balance between darkness and light—in the story, and also in yourself?
I get asked a lot about how I find hope while writing stories like They Went Left. But the truth is, in real historical accounts, the hope is always there. It doesn’t look like you’d expect it to; sometimes it doesn’t even look like hope at first. But it’s there in prisoners giving each other their bread, or passing a message to the other side of camp. It’s there in someone managing to bury a stack of letters inside ghetto walls, counting on the belief that there will be an “after,” and that when after comes, someone will want to tell their story. The fact that we can even write novels set in this time is a hopeful act. Because it means the stories weren’t silenced. Very bad people tried for a very long time to silence those stories, and as long as we keep telling them, we’re committing acts of defiance and hope.   

Author photo © Cassidy DuHon.

Scholastic editor David Levithan reflects on working with Suzanne Collins on her hotly anticipated Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

How did you balance the way The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes would speak to adults who grew up reading the Hunger Games, as well as to a new generation of teen readers?
I think what’s so exciting about the book is that it will appeal both to fans and to a new generation of readers. As to how we maintained this, we were lucky to have two editors on this project: my colleague Kate Egan and me. Kate reread the trilogy right before we started work, so it was fresh in her mind. I did not—so I represented all the readers who loved the books but who might not have stopped by Panem since the last book (or movie) was released. We had to make sure it worked for both of us—and it did. 

Collins has explained that The Hunger Games was inspired by her experience of channel-­surfing between a reality TV show and news footage of the war in Iraq. Have contemporary realities similarly informed this new book?
I can’t speak for Suzanne about specific inspirations. But I will say that the book engages larger philosophical issues about power and personhood. It’s striking that they are as relevant now as they were a decade ago . . . or hundreds of years ago.

“The book engages larger philosophical issues about power and personhood. It’s striking that they are as relevant now as they were a decade ago . . . or hundreds of years ago.”

What was it like when you read The Hunger Games for the first time?
Just when I think I know where Suzanne is going with a book, she always manages to drop the floor out from beneath me. With many of the authors I edit, you get to know their writing well enough that you can see into their bag of tricks. Suzanne’s bag of tricks is still a complete mystery to me.

Editors shape books in subtle, invisible ways; other times, their involvement can be more straightforward. Will you share with us something in any of Collins’ books that’s there because of you?
During the writing of the trilogy, when the first drafts came in, it was a little clear who Suzanne felt had the greater claim on Katniss’ heart. So to make it more of a fair fight, I argued a lot for Gale, which I believe in Suzanne’s head made me very Team Gale. (I believe this because at some point she told me, “You’re Team Gale.”) But honestly? If Katniss were going to choose either of them, I’m glad she made the choice she did.

What is one of Collins’ unique strengths as a writer or as a storyteller?
Not many of us manage to write books that effectively challenge readers to question how they see the world and how they see their role within it. But that’s exactly what Suzanne does.

Writers often mention things they learn from their editors. What’s something you’ve learned from Collins?
Rarely have I seen someone structure a story as deliberately and as well as Suzanne. Editorially, I am by nature a tinkerer. But I know not to try to tinker with Suzanne’s structure, because its calibrations are vital to the storytelling.

What’s something about Collins that might surprise readers, who only know her from her words on the page?
I think the natural thing for readers to do is conflate authors with their most famous characters. So I’d understand if people assume Suzanne loves to forage through the wilderness in her free time. But really, she likes the feel of a good recliner as much as the rest of us.

Sydney Reilly, nearly 16, is reluctantly spending the summer in a San Francisco beach-side mansion with her mother, Lila, a once famous actress whose star has dimmed, and Lila’s latest boyfriend, Jake, a realtor-turned-art dealer who is both charismatic and controlling. Each chapter of Girl, Unframed opens with an excerpt from an evidence list, suggesting criminal stakes to the story, but Caletti keeps tensions high and readers guessing as to the crime, the victim and the perpetrator until the very end.

Can you talk about the unique structure of Girl, Unframed?
The format of the book is, very literally, Sydney speaking to someone else. I thought her story would be most powerfully told using her own voice, confessional and intimate. The first person limits you to what a character has observed or overheard, but that sense of being a witness felt right. Keeping each line as conversational as possible meant reading a lot of it aloud as I went along. 

I loved the pieces of evidence included at the beginning of each chapter. Was that element always a part of the book?
I’ve used chapter headings in other books—facts about the heart in A Heart in a Body in the World, quotes from a fictional research book in The Nature of Jade, true stories about seeds in The Last Forever. I love the interplay between the “real” world and what’s happening in the book—the way the bits of information add layers of meaning, as well as suspense and humor. With Girl, Unframed, I was maybe three or so chapters in when I decided to add the evidence. This time, it was less about metaphors and meaning and more about adding unease and questions, mostly the biggest question: What happened that night?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Girl, Unframed.

Did any real-life events inform the story? 
This book was the biggest, strangest, most uneasy merging of truth and my subconscious—more so than anything I’ve written. Girl, Unframed is loosely based on a true story: the murder of Johnny Stompanato, the husband of actress Lana Turner, by Lana’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, in 1958. What actually happened that night is still a mystery. Lana’s daughter was a teen at the time, and Lana, who was one of the biggest Hollywood stars back then, was a sex symbol/femme fatale. I’d kept an article about it in my “book ideas” file for years, and finally, the need to write it rose to the surface. 

But it was only after I started writing that I realized why Lana’s news clip had been in my file all those years, and why I made the creative choices I did. The story of Girl, Unframed has connections to my own family history I hadn’t been consciously aware of when I began. Both sides of my family have ties to San Francisco, but on my mother’s side, right during Lana’s time, there was criminal activity, dangerous relationships—and intergenerational trauma and narcissistic beauty, too. Writing can be weirdly and uncomfortably insistent like that.

The relationship between Sydney and Lila is central to Girl, Unframed. How does it change over the course of the book, and why? What drew you to explore a relationship like theirs? 
I wanted to explore familial trauma, internalized misogyny and the way that people who are objectified can go on to treat others like objects. And as with all of my books, I was drawn to those themes out of a need to understand how they have played out in my own life. In my family history, going back many generations, ideas of beauty as currency, beauty as power, beauty as the only thing you had to wield in the world led to a nest of complications with sometimes dark ramifications. Many women and their daughters (and sons!) deal with the effects of this legacy. I hope readers will understand that objectification can come from many—and sometimes unexpected—people, and for very complicated reasons. Sydney eventually has to set her own firm boundary. 

Your last book, A Heart in a Body in the World, was about a young woman who was literally and figuratively running away from a tragedy in her past. Girl, Unframed is, in many ways, about a girl who’s increasingly afraid of what her future might hold. How did you work to make what Sydney eventually experiences feel both inevitable and surprising?
I like to write from a place of emotional truth, and I also try to be as accurate as possible about the psychology of my characters, in terms of how different personality types commonly relate to the world and other people. The truth is, when you’re in a relationship with someone like Sydney’s mom in real life, their actions do feel both inevitable and surprising. I think everyone has encountered this—that certain person who does something shocking, and, because of your history with them, you think, “Of course she would do that!” but also, “Wow, how could she do that?” I tried to give the reader their own history with Sydney’s mom, so they’d experience this, too.

I wanted Sydney, especially as a young woman, to recognize that she was already large, and larger still after the things she survives.

Sydney imagines some life-changing “IT” that’s going to mark the beginning of her adult life. Do you remember feeling this way as a teen?
Oh, I definitely remember feeling that way. It’s such a great feeling—expansive and hopeful, the knowledge that your whole life is stretched in front of you, and that maybe something is about to magically arrive to make you different and somehow larger. I wanted to show the evolution of that feeling, how the world can bang it up and bruise it, but the best “IT,” your own personal power, is there all along. I wanted Sydney, especially as a young woman, to recognize that she was already large, and larger still after the things she survives.

Something Sydney begins to navigate and confront in this book is the tension between the shame and pride she feels when others sexualize or objectify her. What advice would you give someone who is navigating these complicated emotions?
This is so hard. I’m not sure if I have even resolved those feelings myself. But I would want to tell them that their body and the decisions they make about their body are theirs. Whole, and beautiful, and theirs. 

I loved the way the novel uses real works of art to prompt Sydney’s evolving perspective on how women are both objectified and commodified. Did writing Girl, Unframed change the way you look at or think about art, or about particular works of art?
I love art and art history, and so I was already familiar with many of the paintings and the backgrounds of the artists I mention. I did learn new details, though. I often still think about a fact about Willem de Kooning that I mention in the book: When he was painting women, he’d often start with the mouth. He’d cut a woman’s lips from a cigarette ad in a magazine, and then paste them on a canvas and paint around them. He didn’t know why he did it. But it’s haunting to me, the way the mouth was such a problem for him.  

Girl, Unframed name-drops so many well-known artists. Who are some of your favorite visual artists? Did you uncover any new favorites as you worked on the book?
I have a longtime fondness for the dream-like stories of Marc Chagall and a weakness for any of David Hockney’s modern art swimming pools. I also really love architecture, as well as huge, bold installation-type art like Yayoi Kusama’s, or especially, the moment-in-time experiences, like Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosion events, or Agnès Varda’s and JR’s huge documentary photos, or Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped landmarks. I did discover Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party while researching the book. It’s considered to be the first epic feminist artwork.

Good dogs deserve a place in my books, even if they’re not the greatest readers.

I enjoyed the novel’s San Francisco setting, and I think readers will enjoy the opportunity to discover its quirks and beauty spots through Sydney’s eyes. Did you visit there to research the book? Were you familiar with the city before you began writing? What are some of your favorite things to do, see or experience there?
San Francisco is deep in my DNA, as I mentioned. My dad’s grandparents actually fled the 1906 fire that came after the earthquake, carrying only their wedding photo, similar to the wedding photo in Girl, Unframed. My parents both grew up in the city, and later, the Bay Area, where I also spent my early childhood until we moved to Seattle. We took many, many trips back, too, so, yes, I was already familiar with it. From the criminal history of my relatives on the waterfront, to my mother’s childhood memories of the Sutro Baths, there are family stories everywhere in and around the city.

I love many of the places in the book: the beaches, the Cliff House, Camera Obscura, the waterfront. As a kid, I was fascinated with Alcatraz. Also, some favorite places not in the book: The Palace of Fine Arts, Little Italy (lots of dinners there), and Fort Point, a fort from the 1800s, basically right under the bridge, where you can still climb around the old creepy structures and get all windblown and feel the force of the sea smashing against rocks.

One of the funniest—and most emotional—aspects of the novel is Sydney’s growing relationship with Max, Jake’s long-suffering dog. Does Max have any real-life inspirations?
I just love dogs, and I’m grateful for them. They’re so real and funny and understanding and tolerant. They are never bothered by our bad singing, horrible fashion choices, mistakes and failings. They stand by. I think pets often get forgotten in fiction, when they’re such important “people” in our lives. Max in Girl, Unframed gets his name from my beloved, sweet, “I do everything 100%, including love you” grand-dog, Max. But he gets his largeness and wildness and steadiness from our now-gone beloved beast, Tucker. He was the big guy I would rest my head on. Good dogs deserve a place in my books, even if they’re not the greatest readers.  

The canine inspirations for Max: Deb Caletti’s dogs, Max (on the left) and Tucker.

Author photo © Susan Doupe.

Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight Saga and Midnight Sun, offers BookPage readers glimpses into a life of loving books.

Midnight Sun is the Twilight story narrated through Edward Cullen’s perspective. What book would you like to read from a different character’s perspective?
Right now I want Jennifer and Mitch’s love story from Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments. We get pieces of it, but I want their whole lives.

Did you have a favorite library or bookstore as a child?
My first library was a tiny place in Phoenix, Arizona, that no longer exists. My favorite book to get again and again was The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright. The city built a bigger library when I was 9, and it was my favorite place in the world. That was where I first got my hands on books by L.M. Montgomery, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Paula Danziger and so many more. My mom took me and my siblings there every two weeks; I was the one who had to be dragged out. I would check out the maximum number of books allowed and read them twice. If I could have lived in that library, I would have.

As a teen, did you ever feel a strong connection to a fictional character?
Jo March was my idol. I wanted to be brave and buck convention and follow my own path, like she did. Anne Shirley had so much imagination and sweetness. I wanted to see the best in the world, too, and make magic out of ordinary things. Jane Eyre was another hero; she had an iron will and an unshakable commitment to choosing the right. I didn’t respond to her love story so much as to her self-discipline. I wished I could be that strong.

In addition to your work as an author, you also produced the film adaptation of Shannon Hale’s Austenland. Who do you think is the most underrated of Jane Austen’s heroines?
Fanny Price. For many, she is too much of a doormat, a weakling. But to me, she seems so real and understandable. After years of being told she was less than, it seems natural that she would be quiet and self-effacing. Not everyone can be brave all the time, and bravery can mean different things besides standing up to your abusers. It can mean enduring, surviving. It can mean holding on to your principles under pressure, even when you’ve been conditioned to give in.

What books or authors have you enjoyed lately?
I recently binged my way—twice—through the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, which was just pure enjoyment. Everyone should check out Laini Taylor, Leigh Bardugo and Holly Black. I read a ton of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances recently. I don’t know how I’d missed them until now. The next thing on my to-read list is Deathless Divide, the sequel to Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation, which I loved.

Author photo by Jake Abel.

In Punching the Air, National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi and activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five create an intimate and moving portrait of the realities and consequences of the school-to-prison pipeline through the story of 16-year-old Amal, who is wrongfully convicted and incarcerated after a false accusation. In spite of his surroundings, Amal clings to hope and saves himself by finding his truth through art and creativity. BookPage spoke with Zoboi and Salaam about the power of poetry, their book's origin story and the message they hope it sends to young readers.

How did you two meet? How did Punching the Air come about? What was it like to work with one another on this book?

Yusef Salaam: Ibi and I met over two decades ago while we were both students at Hunter College taking a class in African Studies by one of the most foremost scholars of that time, the late Dr. John Henrik Clarke’s protege.

This project was a desire of mine to tell the story of injustice in America, a story that often isn't told, and to tell it through the eyes of a modern-day version of myself. This was important and necessary.

Working on this book with Ibi was liberating and amazing because of our shared experience of being close in age and also having known what it was like to be a New Yorker as youngsters. This gave us an advantage of being able to tap into a certain shared experience to tell this story.

Ibi Zoboi: I met Yusef in college in 1999. I was an editor for my college’s newspaper, and when he walked into one of my classes and I was reminded of who he was, I immediately wanted to interview him. I grew up in New York City and had seen all about the racial violence incident that had taken place on the news. This is why I wanted to become a journalist.

I never got that interview, but I ran into Yusef in 2017 while I was promoting my debut novel, American Street. He was selling his self-published book of poems, and I wondered why more people had not heard about his story as a member of the Central Park Five. (This was before I knew about the Netflix series).

My work with Yusef was simply a continuation of the work I had set out to do as an aspiring journalist in college. I wanted to tell stories that resonated with me and my experiences growing up in New York City, and the experiences of the young people I care about.

Ibi, tell us about the choice to write Punching the Air in verse. What did writing in verse allow you to do that you wouldn’t have been able to in prose?

Zoboi: Yusef’s book of poems served as a foundation for Punching the Air. While only about five of his poems made into the book, I was able to get a sense of his voice and his worldview as a wrongfully convicted incarcerated teen.

I was a poet before I was a novelist. My novels American Street and Pride feature some poetry, so writing a novel-in-verse came naturally to me. There is such power in being able to capture a certain emotion with only a few words. I really loved being able to use metaphor to describe how Amal saw the world and his place in it. He is a deeply wise young man in the same way that Yusef was very introspective as a teen. The best way I could capture that strong sense of self was through poetry.

Of the book’s many poems, is there one that you’re the most proud of?

Zoboi: I love “The Scream." Many of the poems share titles with famous classical art pieces, and this one is based on Edvard Munch’s famous painting. That’s intentional. I really wanted to capture what rage feels like and what it does to the body. I could only imagine what Yusef must’ve felt while experiencing that tragedy, and he tried to tell me in so many ways. So I thought of the act of ingesting something that is harmful to the body—swallowing something that could potentially kill you.

Salaam: I love how Ibi was able to include my poetry in the story so seamlessly. For example, “Microphone” is more than a poem. It’s a message. It’s a speech that Amal is trying to convey while incarcerated. He is referencing Kunta from the movie Roots being in captivity. He was once free in Africa, but slavery has stripped him of all his identity. There is pride in that poem, pride in his history and in his dark skin color. It’s about liberation while in captivity.

Yusef, what were some of the challenges of creating a character whose experiences have much in common with your own, but who is not merely a fictionalized version of you? What was rewarding about it?

Salaam: The challenge was to make it unique, even though there were similarities and things that overlapped, and to make a character that readers could identify with. The challenge in my story is that not everyone can identify with being falsely labeled a rapist or a sex offender. That part of my story is very unique. But a fight is something that lots of boys can relate to. They can see themselves in that position. The reward was in telling the story and giving it life so that we can begin to talk about it and see it without blinders on.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Punching the Air.

Ibi, what kinds of research went into creating the character of Amal and representing his emotional landscape as well as his experiences?

Zoboi: Aside from having extensive conversations with Yusef, I watched Time, the documentary about Kaleif Browder’s time on Rikers Island. I also read Liza Jessie Peterson’s nonfiction book, All Day, about her experiences teaching incarcerated boys. I also pulled from my relationships with teen boys from when I was a teen and as an educator and a mother of a teen boy. My husband is a high school art teacher, and he was very helpful in offering some insight into some of his students’ experiences.

What other works of art and literature, especially for young people, do you see Punching the Air as engaging in dialogue with, drawing inspiration from, contributing to a larger conversation alongside? What do you hope Punching the Air adds to that conversation?

Zoboi: I truly think pairing music with books is a good way to get young readers to meaningfully engage with a text. Young readers can create their own playlists. Of course, the life and work of Jean-Michel Basquiat is a perfect pairing. While Walter Dean Myers’ Monster focuses on the events of a crime, Punching the Air narrows the lens on the experiences of an incarcerated boy. In fact, the lens is within him, inside his heart, mind and soul. Ava DuVernay’s 13th as well as When They See Us should be required supplemental material alongside Punching the Air. Before that, the Ken Burns documentary on the Central Park Five is instrumental as well.

Punching the Air focuses on the inner life of a child caught up in the system. I hope readers will sink into Amal’s skin not only to empathize with his story but also to begin to see themselves in that situation. What would you do to make it through to the next day?

Yusef, can you share how you see the role of arts and creativity in Amal’s life and in your own life?

Salaam: The importance of art is to tap into the creative force of God. There is beauty in everything. With the power of art, Amal does not have to conform. His creativity is not put into a box. In my life, art has been a key to unlock the mystery of what it means to be free.

What would you say to a young person who feels discouraged or disheartened right now, or who feels like the ability to impact the world and make positive change is too far out of their reach?

Salaam: I would say to young people that you are the answer to the question. You have been gifted with unique abilities that only you can give to the world.

Zoboi: Your very presence in the world is enough change for now. You are here, and you matter. Don’t be ashamed of being silent and being still. This is where art and creativity are born. As long as you are present, observing, witnessing and taking notes. Create something new. That is change, too. Whatever it is that you created did not exist before you made it come alive. There is power in that. It could be a drawing, a funny meme, a TikTok post, a beautiful sentence. Even asking questions is art. I don’t want young people to feel defeated and discouraged. This is when we begin to lose hope. 


Photo of Ibi Zoboi courtesy of Joseph Zoboi. Photo of Yusef Salaam courtesy of Staci Nurse (Staci Marie Studio).

In his new novel in verse, critically acclaimed author Allan Wolf revisits a grisly chapter of westward expansion with a fresh and thought-provoking look at the doomed travelers of the Donner Party, a group of 89 pioneers who became trapped in the Sierra Nevada and infamously resorted to eating their dead to survive. We spoke to Wolf about the unique narrator of The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep, some of the unexpected ways he researched the book and why cannibalism wasn't the hardest part of the book to write.

Tell us about the choice you made to have Hunger play the role of the book’s Greek chorus. Did you consider other emotions or ideas for the role Hunger occupies? Was the choice inspired by any other works of art or literature?
As I recall, I had “cast” Hunger for the part from the very beginning. Sometimes an idea just resonates. Hunger, as you shrewdly note, is a de facto Greek chorus, in that Hunger adds narrative glue to the varied voices of the other characters. Hunger gives the reader context, much as a sports commentator does, or like a knowledgeable docent escorting you through a historic home.

My choice of Hunger was not inspired by any one work but many. I’m a huge fan of allegory, from 15th-century morality plays to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. But I suspect I was also inspired by mythology. There’s a god or goddess of just about everything, from Limos (Hunger) to Lethe (Forgetfulness). Life, Death, Love, Lust, Hope, Hunger, Good and Evil—capitalize these words, and they take on a sentient presence, maybe even flesh and bone. They become incarnations of the incarnate.

I was definitely encouraged by Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, which is narrated by Death. Zusak’s Death and my Hunger share a common impotence. Neither is the engine of the story’s action. They are primarily passive narrative devices who relate the facts and add a bit of historically informed commentary. The human subjects of the stories must still make their own choices. Otherwise there would be no tension.

The majority of the book's scenes have a singular narrator, but a few take the form of conversations. Why? How did you decide which scenes would take this form?
Conversations are compelling because they aren’t constrained by the author’s narrative gobbledygook. The reader stops reading and just listens. Maybe there are two opposing groups facing off in an argument. Or maybe two loved ones, separated by physical distance, can carry on a conversation of the heart. Or maybe it’s a single character having a “conversation” with God. How do I decide when a conversation is in order? Instinct maybe. During a long story, you need a little o’ this and a little o’ that.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep.

Of all the animals in the group, Buck and Bright, two of the oxen, are the only ones who have voices. Why them?
Buck and Bright (generic oxen names—think Fido and Spot) are the symbolic voice of the thousands of working animals that made westward expansion possible. The sturdy oxen were the engines that made wagon travel possible. They were beasts of burden. At home, they helped us plow our fields. On the road, they got us where we were going. And as an added bonus, they were “rations on the hoof,” meaning that, in a pinch, we could eat them.

Oxen typically work in pairs, side by side, connected by a wooden yoke. So it easily followed to treat them as a duet. I call this two-voice character a “pair-acter.” (Think Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Fred and George Weasley, Adam and Eve). Careful readers might note my comparison of Buck and Bright to the book’s other pair-acter, Salvador and Luis, the two Miwok guides who, in the end, are treated as “rations on the hoof” themselves.

Was there one loss or death that was especially difficult for you to write?
Oh, yes. The murder of Luis and Salvador was as difficult to depict as it was necessary. It was upsetting on a personal level, of course, because I had come to love them. But well beyond my personal feelings, their violent murders are a very real taste of the enslavement and genocide systematically inflicted upon all native inhabitants of the American continent. The callous injustice of these white pioneers, who murdered the very men who had come to rescue them, offends me to my core. No matter how you rationalize this double murder, in the end it was a vile act of blatant white supremacy.

Which brings me to my second difficulty. How can I, as a white man, depict these two Miwok men at all, without stealing their humanity? Is it even possible to tell their story without usurping it? I did not want Luis and Salvador to be superficial caricatures, so I tried to give them emotional depth. Yet that sort of intimate depiction required that I give voice to someone outside of my culture. Writers of historical fiction must walk this dialectic balance beam.

"How do I include a character’s opinion if I find it abhorrent? And how can I expose my young readers to these abhorrent ideals and attitudes without endorsing or glorifying them?"

I felt it was vital to include the voices of Luis and Salvador because the white voices of the Donner Party story have so often been prominent—both because of historic racism and because of an imbalance in written materials (stemming from that racism). Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America should be required reading for all, especially in light of the present-day Black Lives Matter movement and discussions of reparations.

In popular culture, the story of the Donner Party is a story of cannibalism. To survive, they chose to eat their own dead. Repulsive perhaps, but understandable. But once these white pioneers chose to murder Luis and Salvador (as well as an unnamed Washoe boy, shot in the back near Truckee Meadows) in order to survive, the Donner Party story became a metaphor for the cannibalism of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. The Indigenous people who had been inhabiting the land for thousands of years were treated as an obstacle to be removed or a resource to be exploited and devoured.

As you wrote, how did you balance the characters’ beliefs and attitudes about westward expansion and Manifest Destiny with our contemporary perspectives on these events and ideas?
Historical truth emerges through the inclusion of many points of view. Until all points of view have been given the honor of inclusion, you cannot know the full truth. But as an author of historical fiction, how do I include a character’s opinion if I find it abhorrent? And how can I expose my young readers to these abhorrent ideals and attitudes without endorsing or glorifying them?

For starters, I can speak my mind and counter repugnant opinions through the words and deeds of my characters. And I can be mindful of my language and depictions, listening with care to flag my own microaggressions and prejudices. I have also included extensive backmatter, to add more historical facts, context and nuance. For example, I’ve included a segment titled “Native Americans and the Donner Party.” I’ve also included a biography of Luis and Salvador that shines a light on the abusive, coercive and exploitative environment in and around Sutter’s Fort in 1846. Throughout the novel, as well as in my short biography of him, I’ve tried to depict John Sutter as the despot and slaver that he certainly was in real life.

I imagine that researching certain aspects of this book were quite challenging, both logistically and emotionally. How did the historical research process compare to the work you’ve done for other historical books (for example, on the Titanic disaster for The Watch That Ends the Night, or the Lewis and Clark expedition for New Found Land)? What kinds of nonhistorical research did you do to be able to tell this story?
As I mentioned, Andrés Reséndez’s book The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America helped me to see the story of the Donner Party in the greater context of Native American exploitation. And the mind-blowing book Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion by Robert Morgan is a wonderfully exhaustive look at the ins and outs of how the West was really won.

"To my way of thinking, empathy is the key to compassion. And compassion changes a person. Imagine if we all had that sort of connectedness to history and humanity."

But the nonhistorical research for Three Graves Deep was also fascinating. During winter months, I forced myself to go coatless to better experience the cold. I built a lot of campfires. I read about the physical effects of hunger and starvation. I interviewed a man about his experience of near self-starvation. I researched many facets of cannibalism. And I had to get up to speed on the sacraments, wafers and wine.

To date, The Watch That Ends the Night was my most difficult book to research because I began that project knowing nothing about the Titanic disaster or the Edwardian era or anything nautical. Three Graves Deep took much less time to research. There was simply less material to consider. Plus I had an enormous head start due to my research for New Found Land (about Lewis and Clark), Zane’s Trace (about the Ohio frontier wars) and another novel (never published) about the Mormon Battalion and the Mexican-American War.

At one point, Hunger asks, “What separates the survivors from the quitters?” How would you answer Hunger’s question?
Hunger poses many questions that have no pat answers. I’m not even sure which one, survivor or quitter, I am myself. Sometimes even quitters survive. Sometimes we receive clarity only after we give up. Consider those pioneers who did not quit yet perished anyway. Consider the ones who did quit and yet survived. Whether they survive or perish, it is the people with hope who usually hold the advantage, even in death. So maybe Hope is the thing that separates the survivors from the quitters.

When the time comes for the members of the party to consider eating the dead, Hunger implores readers, “Do not judge them.” When did you know Hunger was going to make this request of readers? Do you feel you were able to accomplish this as you wrote—not judging these characters, who, after all, were real people?
From the very beginning, I knew that Hunger would make this (impossible) request. Hunger is asking readers not to pass judgment before considering what they might do if given the same hard choice. Since my characters were, as you say, real people, I have to judge them to some extent. But Hunger is a trickster. Whenever Hunger asks a question, you can pretty much guarantee the search for an answer will lead you in circles.

In your author’s note, you urge readers who “cannot sympathize” with the members of the Donner Party to “try to empathize” with them. What do you hope readers who are able to empathize will gain from doing so?
Compared to sympathy, empathy requires more direct connection and active engagement. I want readers to imagine themselves in the shoes of my characters, experiencing all the heroism, cowardice, even villainy. I want my readers to discover common connections. To my way of thinking, empathy is the key to compassion. And compassion changes a person. Imagine if we all had that sort of connectedness to history and humanity. Imagine transforming a world of “us and them” into a world of just “us.” See what I did there?

YA author Traci Chee shifts from the fantasy genre of her first three books to tell a historical fiction story in We Are Not Free, which follows 14 Japanese American teenagers during World War II. BookPage spoke to Chee about her personal connection to the story, how she managed her large cast of characters and what can be gained by a deeper understanding of history.

Is this a story you’ve always wanted to tell? Why did you decide to tell it now?
I think my journey toward We Are Not Free started the day I first learned about the Japanese American incarceration. It was 1997, and the San Francisco Unified School District was awarding honorary diplomas to Japanese Americans, like my grandfather, who would have graduated from their schools if not for the mass incarcerations of WWII. I don’t remember much about the ceremony, but I do remember my grandfather being quoted in the local newspaper, and what he said was this: “Where were the bleeding hearts in 1942?”

That stuck with me. At age 12, I didn’t fully grasp the nuances of the term “bleeding hearts,” but I couldn’t miss that hard edge of anger and bitterness, that deep, decades-old well of memory and resentment.

I couldn’t forget it. Seventeen years later, when I began to pursue publication in earnest, I knew that I had to tackle the incarceration at some point. I began interviewing relatives in 2016—an experience that was both totally inspiring and totally confounding, because their stories were all so different and so good. For years, I tried to figure out how to combine all those rich historical details and varied, sometimes conflicting, experiences into a single novel with a single main character . . . until I realized I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to write a single story. I could write 14 stories. I could create this kaleidoscope of experiences and reactions and contradictions, all linked by friendship and love. I could write a novel-in-stories. And once I realized that, I could really begin.

“Part of the gift of researching We Are Not Free was that it gave me this new perspective on history—how long and deep and wide it is, connecting all of us—and that helped me to see the present more clearly, too.”

Your author's note in the book mentions that your research included interviewing your relatives. Had your relatives shared their experiences with you before? What did you gain from them that you might not have been able to discover from other sources? If you feel comfortable sharing, what was the experience of those interviews like for you?
I suspect this is common for many Japanese Americans, but my family never talked much about the incarceration. There were a few anecdotes that got told and retold, of course—like the story of my great-uncle being shouted out of an ice cream parlor when he was 8 years old—but for the most part, I think a lot of these stories were buried for a very long time. So it wasn’t until I began sitting down with my relatives and asking questions that I began to understand the depth and breadth of what had happened to them.

In these conversations, what came through most clearly for me was the fact that my grandparents and their siblings were just kids in 1942, when they were uprooted from their homes and forced into detention centers. My grandmother was 13, for example, and rather than quietly submitting to the oppressiveness of her situation, she came at the incarceration with the blazing, powerful energy of youth. She did so many things while she was imprisoned! She joined the Girl Reserves. She went to dances. She played basketball and organized socials and fought with her dad. She listened to the radio and snuck out at night and, in general, went at her teenage years determined to wring the most out of them, no matter the circumstances. To me, hearing these stories so many years later, that felt like a kind of resilience. Yes, there was a war going on. Yes, there were people in this country who not only wanted to imprison citizens like my grandmother but also deport them and, in many cases, kill them. And still she insisted on living her life like any other American teenager.

I didn’t know any of this when I started interviewing my relatives. Both my grandparents had died long before I began asking questions about camp. But listening to my great-aunts and great-uncles, I feel like I got to know them—maybe not as we would have known each other as grandparents and grandchild, but as they were when they were young and strong and foolish and falling in love. Doing the research for this book, from the interviews to the visits to camp to my grandparents’ letters, brought me closer to my family in a way I never expected and a way I will treasure forever.

As you researched this book, what did you learn that surprised you—and what didn’t surprise you at all?
It’s strange, because so much of my research was both surprising and unsurprising, shocking and, at the same time, totally expected. I’d known some of the facts of the incarceration before I started—community leaders swept up by the FBI right after Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 people evicted from the West Coast and imprisoned behind barbed wire—but I think it’s one thing to know the facts and another to understand them.

One of the most striking moments for me was in an interview with my Auntie Mary in 2016. It was incredible, and it was moving, and it actually gave me the title of the book, but it wasn’t until a couple years later, as I listened to the conversation again, that I realized I’d completely glossed over one part of the story. When Auntie Mary was a teenager, there’d been a family in her neighborhood—two parents, both teachers, and their two daughters—and after Pearl Harbor, both parents, who were cultural leaders in their community, were picked up by the FBI and shipped off to prison camps, leaving their daughters totally alone.

Initially, I’d blown right past this detail, but by the time I was relistening to the interview, a lot of things had changed. We were well into the Trump presidency by then, and family separation was in all the headlines. Parents being deported. Children being imprisoned. Infants taken from their guardians without any process for reuniting them. So many people were shocked, saying this wasn’t their America. This wasn’t us.

I didn’t have this reaction. Because at the same time, I was also listening to this story about family separation in the 1940s, and I knew it was us. Family separation wasn’t new. In fact, it’s been around since before the founding of this country.

I already knew this though, right? We already knew this. We knew that the children of enslaved people were separated from their parents and sold off by their enslavers. We knew about Native American boarding schools. I don’t want to directly compare these experiences, but I think they can be interpreted as part of a pattern of racism and oppression in this country, and I think they demonstrate that you can know a thing without really knowing it. You can see an injustice without really seeing it. Part of the gift of researching We Are Not Free was that it gave me this new perspective on history—how long and deep and wide it is, connecting all of us—and that helped me to see the present more clearly, too.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of We Are Not Free.

Your first three books were a fantasy trilogy. What was it like to shift to historical fiction? Do you think you’ll continue to explore new genres and categories of writing in the future?
For a long time, I assumed I was a speculative writer because I couldn’t help it. Whenever I tried writing contemporary fiction, the magic just sort of crept in without my even knowing it! So initially, I thought if I was going to write a story about the Japanese American incarceration, it had to be historical fantasy. The problem was that the more research I did, the more I realized that the real, lived experiences of the incarcerees were so rich and so beautiful and so poignant that they were already so much better than any magic I could hope to conjure up.

I realized that the magic was in those details, those pockets of history, those slices of life, and my job wasn’t to wave a wand over it and summon something out of thin air but to weave those details into a narrative that felt both authentic and respectful to the people who’d lived them. It was such a challenge, and I embraced it wholeheartedly, because as a writer, I always want to be challenging myself. So even though I’ll always return to speculative fiction, I’ll also always be tackling new genres and categories and combinations and finding new ways to tell a good story.

“The narratives of that time can be complicated and contradictory, and I hope we continue to tell them, because telling them will only enrich our understanding of this history and its impacts on us today.”

I’m so excited to ask you about the structure and characters in this book. How did you arrive at it? Was the structure inspired by any other works of fiction or art? What did you do to ensure each narrator was distinct? What do you hope the multiplicity of perspectives adds to the reader’s experience of the book?
Thank you! I am so excited to talk about the structure and characters in this book! Once I realized We Are Not Free had to be a novel-in-stories, I had to figure out how to make it work—in essence, how to tell many smaller stories that ultimately come together to tell one big story. As with most of this book, I found the answer in the actual history.

In order to create this kaleidoscope of characters with all their varied perspectives, I used each chapter to focus on a different aspect of the history. For example, in the first few chapters we have the anti-Japanese racism following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the mass eviction and the temporary detention centers. Then later we see things like the loyalty questionnaire that divided the community, the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the return to the West Coast in 1945.

Once I’d chosen these focal points, I found characters who could give us a nuanced perspective on what living through these times might have been like. Often that meant they were unexpected choices. Bette, for example, is our window into the dreary early days at the incarceration camp in Topaz, but like my grandmother, she’s a bon vivant, determined to make her high desert barrack lifestyle as glamorous as any Hollywood movie. There's Mas, who details his experiences in basic training with the 442nd and grows more and more uncertain that he’s made the right choice in volunteering to fight for his country.

These are just a handful of the many thousands of stories about the incarceration, but I hope they demonstrate that there is no single Japanese American experience from WWII, no reductive reading of this community and what happened to them, because Japanese Americans are not a monolith. I hope this book demonstrates, in part, that the narratives of that time can be complicated and contradictory, and I hope we continue to tell them, because telling them will only enrich our understanding of this history and its impacts on us today.

What do you think readers can gain from historical fiction that they might not by reading a work of nonfiction? What’s the power of telling (this) history through the lens of fiction?
I’d like to celebrate both fiction and nonfiction here, because I think they complement each other! I mean, there’s power in a narrative. A story can pull us in and keep us captivated and help us make sense of the world. It can evoke empathy and create understanding in a way that’s sometimes more difficult for facts alone. But the facts are powerful, too. When a work of fiction favors narrative over edification, nonfiction can fill in the gaps to create a more complete history.

I used both fiction and nonfiction in my research for We Are Not Free. I read novels. I read poetry. I studied the art of incarcerees like Miné Okubo and Chiura Obata, who, like my grandparents, were imprisoned at Topaz. I also combed through newspapers, letters, diaries, government documents and various books of nonfiction. Every text and every work of art gave me a different perspective, a different approach, and I think it was the combination that filled out my understanding and gave me the resources to tackle writing about the incarceration.

In short, I think we need both, and I hope we read both! I hope readers find their ways into history, whether they are fiction or nonfiction, that compel them and pique their curiosity, and I hope that leads to more reading, more learning, more connections made and more connections deepened. Although I didn’t know it when I was in school, history is fascinating. It’s full of details and full of stories, and it’s with us right now, in the present. I think the more we understand who we are and where we’ve come from, the more clearly we can choose who we want to be and where we want to go from here.

In Watch Over Me, Nina LaCour’s first novel since her 2018 Michael L. Printz Medal-winning We Are Okay, 18-year-old Mila is placed as an intern on an idyllic farm after aging out of the foster care system. Mila becomes unsettled when she discovers that the farm is haunted by ghostly figures and tokens from her old life begin to appear. BookPage spoke with LaCour about haunting, healing and feeling at home in ourselves.

Mila’s story stands in stark contrast to tropes about the foster care system as neglectful or abusive. Why did you choose to tell a different story?
I wanted to write a loose retelling of The Turn of the Screw with Mila as the character of the governess. I ended up straying far from that original idea, but at the time I asked myself what it would look like to move Henry James’ novella into a contemporary setting and to add more expansiveness to the story—more characters, a wider range of emotion and more context.

As I explored these ideas, I remembered reading a San Francisco Chronicle article about a couple who had adopted a large number of children out of the foster system over a period of many years; it sparked the inspiration for that part of the story. I wanted a lot of love in the story because there was a lot of darkness, too. My aim was to write the story of people who had endured horrible things but who had arrived at a place where they would be cared for while they worked through their individual traumas.

Mila’s growing confidence during her life on the farm is interwoven with increasingly intense memories of why she was placed in foster care in the first place. How did you arrive at this structure? 
The structure was very difficult to get right. I wanted to write a frame novel. I've always loved that structure; some of my favorite Gothic novels are written this way. Frankenstein is a frame novel, and The Turn of the Screw is, too. I thought we'd start with Mila's life as it is now, then we'd enter her past and stay there for the duration of that part of her story, then we’d finally return to the farm for the rest of her journey.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Watch Over Me.

But as hard as I tried, I just couldn't make it work that way. While I loved the concept of the tidy frame, I think the messier, more tangled version is better suited to Mila's story. Memory is messy, trauma is messy. So it makes sense that they didn't fit neatly into the center of the story and would instead need to rise up over and over, surprising Mila, challenging her, making her take notice even when she'd rather forget.

I don't write chronologically—I write all over the place, working on whatever scene is calling to me when I sit down to work—and then I fit everything together, so there was quite a bit of moving those past scenes around from draft to draft. 


I loved the appearance of the book’s very mysterious, ambiguous ghosts. Were they inspired by any particular ghost stories?
The moments in ghost stories I always like best are when the ghosts first appear and cause a reaction in the character. I rarely care as much about what they do next. The 2017 film A Ghost Story was really powerful in that way for me. It was a movie about grief in which a ghost in a white sheet—borderline comical—shows up as a visual representation of Rooney Mara's character's grief.

I wanted Watch Over Me's ghosts to be very real, but I also knew they'd be metaphorical as well. It was tricky to get them right, but I feel like we're all surrounded by ghosts all the time, whether or not we want to look at them. Ghosts of who we once were, ghosts of the people we've lost or lost touch with, ghosts of what might have been if our lives had moved in different directions . . . I was drawn to the idea of these ghosts swarming around, living their own ghost-lives, and what impact they would have on the living residents of the farm. Who would be afraid of them, who would be at peace with them. What all of it might mean. 


The farm’s setting is so atmospheric—idyllic, isolated, tucked between the hills and the ocean. Was this setting inspired by any real place(s) that you read about or visited or have lived in?
Oh yes, absolutely. I've always lived in Northern California and it's my favorite place in the world. For a while, my wife, Kristyn, photographed weddings and I'd assist her. We'd drive a few hours north from San Francisco to photograph at all these lovely little tucked-away farms that you'd never even know were there. Then when I was doing research for the novel I visited Nye Ranch, a beautiful produce and flower farm in the Mendocino area. It's right against the coastline—one of the most hauntingly beautiful places I've been to—and I was glad when the flower farmer there told me that lots of the area farms are haunted and that she'd seen a ghost at her own farm!

You often write deeply introspective protagonists, and Mila is no exception. What draws you to write about characters with such rich and self-reflective inner lives? Has your approach to these characters changed over time?
I live quite a bit in my own head, I guess! This has always been true for me, so it's the way most of my characters have turned out as well. I had the privilege of working with Yiyun Li when I was in grad school at Mills College in Oakland, California, and she was a visiting professor there. She told our workshop group that she always loved it when she had a chatty narrator, and I have had the pleasure of one of those—Emi from Everything Leads to You. But apart from Emi, my narrators tend to be the quiet, thoughtful, reserved type.

"I think growing up is really beautiful and really hard, and we do it over and over again all our lives."

Mila is maybe my most reserved narrator of all. She is concealing so much of her life and wants so badly to do the right thing, to be good, to be easy and useful and pleasant. In order to be these things for her new family, she has to suppress the more difficult parts of herself. She does a lot of internal navigating in order to be who she thinks they want her to be.

In terms of how my approach has changed, over time I've allowed my characters to be a little messier. I've gotten them into situations that don't have clear answers, because I'm learning that life is full of uncertainty and many shades of gray. 

Mila is at a pivotal moment in her life. She’s just aged out of the foster care system, but she’s also not quite ready for all the responsibilities of being an adult. You depict moments where she poignantly longs to either be older or younger than she is. What do you hope readers take away from Mila’s feelings in these moments?
I think growing up is really beautiful and really hard, and we do it over and over again all our lives. It can be painful, and it's only natural to wish for a time when things felt simple or to look into the future and imagine how it will be when this particular phase of growth is over. Mila longs for both, and seeing herself in contrast to the younger residents of the farm makes the fact that she isn't a child anymore—that she's responsible for healing herself—starker. But what a gift it is to have people by your side, loving you and caring about you while you do that hard work with yourself. Discovering who these people are and growing to trust them is part of Mila’s journey, too. 


Having Mila serve as a teacher and start to recognize her own talents as a budding educator was such a great way to illustrate how she’s straddling this border between childhood and adulthood. Your own background is full of teachers and teaching, in your own personal history as well as in your family. How did your personal relationship to/experience with teaching impact this part of Mila’s story? 
I used to be a reading tutor for kids at a public elementary school in Oakland. I met one-on-one with the same students over the course of the school year. The character of Lee was inspired by the kids I worked with. They were so young and so eager to please, and their emotional wounds felt very close to the surface—and I felt deeply unsure of myself and terribly unequipped to help. I cared, and I tried my best, and I got some things right and many other things wrong. Teaching is fraught that way, for me. I love it, but sometimes I look back at some of my teaching decisions and wish I could do them over.

"We all have wounds. We all carry damage. It makes us fully human."

Another incredible teacher I studied under at Mills College was Ruth Saxton. She taught a class on pedagogy with a teaching practicum that went along with it. She brought so much wisdom to her classes but she gave us so few answers. I used to wish she'd give us more, but in retrospect I realize that she was modeling how to teach. Teaching is so often an act of meeting the student where she is and offering her the resources and encouragement she needs in order to get to the next step. It's more about asking questions than it is about delivering knowledge. Mila inherently understands some of that, which is why Terry, the father figure of the family, considers her a gifted teacher. 

At one point, Mila says, “Maybe the fear doesn’t ever actually go away. Maybe we have to keep on working.” What advice or encouragement would you give to teens doing that kind of work?
I would say that as much as I'd like to tell them otherwise, for most of us our wounds won't ever heal completely. But also, that it's OK. That we own it—whatever it is—and we can use it in all sorts of ways. We can use it for art. It can be a source of empathy and strength. We all have wounds. We all carry damage. It makes us fully human. The sooner we realize that we're responsible for ourselves, that we're strong enough to look at the things we've lost, the things we've done or that have been done to us, the mistakes or missteps we've made, the sooner we'll begin feel at home in ourselves. 

Let’s end on a lighter note: I found the scenes at the farmers market, where the atmosphere is such a contrast to the world of the farm, so appealing. Do you shop at farmers’ markets? If so, what do you love about them? What’s your favorite fruit and vegetable? Is there something you especially love to make or cook with the produce you purchase?
I do! I love the pleasures of seasonal produce and the way farmers markets show the progression of a year, especially because here in San Francisco where the climate is mild year-round, we don't have the stark changes of season that other places do.

I love the pomegranates and squashes and citrus and bitter greens of winter; the persimmons and pears of fall; the berries and artichokes of spring; and, best of all, the tomatoes and eggplants and basil and stone fruit of summer. I love arriving at a farmers market and finding that strawberries have arrived.

Meeting friends at the market and lugging our big bags of produce around, chatting over coffee about how we are and what we'll be cooking later—that’s one of the simple pleasures of life that I miss so much right now, in the time of COVID-19 and as wildfires rage across my home state. But I know we'll get to do it again, and it will be even sweeter when it happens.

A recently orphaned young woman newly hired as a personal assistant. Her charge, a feisty, elderly German woman. A Scottish Traveler concealing her heritage behind her respectable job as a military driver. A pilot from a privileged family just hoping his men survive their next mission. Printz Honor author Elizabeth Wein’s latest World War II thriller, The Enigma Game, follows four protagonists whose lives intersect when they discover an Enigma machine left behind in a Scottish pub by a rogue German pilot. Wein spoke with BookPage about the very personal inspiration behind one of her book’s characters, her surprising literary superpower and her aviation bucket list.

In your author’s note (which I love that you’ve titled “Author’s Declaration of Accountability”), you sketch out some of the origins of this story—movingly, that you began by wanting to write a story about a mysterious old woman having a bond with a young person because of your experience of losing your grandmother, Betty Flocken. I’d like to ask you two questions inspired by this note. First, when and how did the Enigma machine enter the story you were devising? And second, will you tell us more about your grandmother? 

I confess that the Enigma machine was my husband’s suggestion. I was already working out the plot, and I had the idea of a German pilot defecting to Britain. I wanted him to bring some game-changing information or technology with him. I asked my husband to help me brainstorm ideas, and he instantly suggested an Enigma machine.

As for my grandmother, you will have to stop me once I get started! She is my mother’s mother and my namesake and my soulmate. My mother died when I was 14 and my grandmother raised me after that—she lived to be 98. She was my biggest fan and supporter as a writer. She visited me in Scotland every year until she was 95, so my own children knew and loved her too, and we spent every single summer with her in Pennsylvania while they were growing up. It was always a wrench to have to say goodbye at the end of the summer. One of my favorite images of her is from the year the manuscript for Code Name Verity was being shopped around to publishers: standing on the porch of her woodland cottage, fist-pumping as we drove away to go back to Scotland, yelling after us, “GO VERITY! GO CODE NAME VERITY!”

Born in 1916, she had a master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania, which she got in the 1930s, and she worked with children and foster families all her life. The children that she placed kept in touch with her even after they were grown up and had children of their own. She had a way of making every single person who met her feel like the most special person in the world.

Like Jane Warner in The Enigma Game, my grandmother stayed youthful because she stayed interested and engaged in the world. She absolutely lit up whenever anyone started talking politics. Another of my wonderful images of her is sitting on the railway platform at the train station in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, thrilled to be the oldest audience member on that leg of Barack Obama’s whistle-stop tour in 2008. She told me once: “I’m not afraid of dying—I just don’t want to miss anything.” 


The Enigma Game alternates between three distinct narrative voices. How did you arrive at this structure? Was one voice more challenging or more enjoyable to write than the others? 

My original draft of The Enigma Game was all voiced by the same character, and it really limited the viewpoint. Adding in the other two narrators, particularly Jamie, the pilot, gave me much more of an opportunity to give a firsthand account of some of the most exciting action in the book.

I never really stop thinking about the characters I fall in love with.

An unexpected advantage to having three narrators was that when two or more of them were involved in the action, I found that I could use rapid-fire shifts in the narration to simulate three people trying urgently to tell a story together. It was a new narrative effect for me, almost like writing a play, which I found challenging and exciting.

Ellen’s voice—the young Royal Air Force driver and a native Scot—was definitely the hardest for me to write. I didn’t want her to sound like she was talking in dialect, but I wanted her to sound colloquial. Also, of the three characters, Ellen is the one who doesn’t come from a literary background, and I always have to rein myself in a bit when I’m writing a character who hasn’t read the same things I’ve read! 


Several of The Enigma Game’s characters are people of color or from marginalized backgrounds. For some of them, blending into the majority-white British society is easy; for others, it's an ongoing struggle. What kind of research and work did you do to be able to represent their experiences with authenticity? Did you learn anything that surprised you or that you found particularly striking or memorable?


I mostly read and listened to memoirs and interviews. Because I was learning about an Indigenous nomadic population in Scotland and imprisoned Germans on the Isle of Man and Caribbean men and women who lived and served in World War II in the United Kingdom (not to mention the background for the Royal Air Force squadron I was setting up), my subject matter felt really scattered and not as comprehensive as I would have liked. Among other things, I found out about Caribbean soldiers in Scottish logging units, and the horrific voyage of a group of British residents who happened to be German as they were deported to Australia, and a government report on a Black population in Wales in the 1940s. I also read contemporary wartime fiction by Nevil Shute, and a book of Una Marson’s poems (she was a Black Jamaican who produced a wartime radio program for the BBC, “Calling the West Indies,” later called “Caribbean Voices”)—and none of these things actually made it into the book! But details from these many different lives leaped out at me, and it is in combining and weaving them together that I have tried to give authenticity to my imaginary characters.

I should add that my young narrator Louisa’s experience of leaving behind a childhood in Jamaica to come of age in a colder climate, and of losing both her parents at a young age, are based on my own experiences. Like Jane Warner and Louisa, I, too, am an immigrant to the United Kingdom.

The one thing in all this background research that really sticks out in my mind in its shocking ignorance and unfairness—truly, above everything else—is how Lilian Bader, a Black British woman serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the war, found herself being taunted as a Nazi by a group of evacuee children who had never seen a Nazi or a Black woman.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Enigma Game.

Though The Enigma Game stands perfectly on its own, fans of your previous books Code Name Verity and The Pearl Thief will notice familiar characters appearing here, including one character whose previously vague backstory is explored in much greater detail. What is it like for you to revisit familiar characters in new circumstances like this? Can readers hope that this isn’t our last experience with them?

I never really stop thinking about the characters I fall in love with. Their backstories keep spinning in my head—how they grew up and what they’ll do next, and in some cases, how they’ll die—and although I encourage readers to bring their own interpretations and ideas to my texts, I do tend to have a “canon” idea of what happens to everybody. So the chance to explore these characters in new circumstances is never anything short of a pleasure for me. Although I feel the need to make up new worlds, I am sure I will revisit some of these characters in years to come. 


The coded messages that Louisa deciphers from the Enigma machine are often ambiguous, which gives readers a chance to figure out their meanings along with the characters. How did you design messages that struck the right balance between clarity and ambiguity?

I think that designing literary coded messages might be one of my superpowers! (It’s certainly a wonderful way to pretend that you are “working” when you are actually fooling around with puzzles.) I really enjoy doing it. In my book, The Empty Kingdom, I wrote a sonnet constructed entirely of lines from The Odyssey which was also a secret message from one character to another!

The hard part about the messages included in The Enigma Game was trying to avoid making assumptions about language. Here in the U.K., the Big Dipper is called the Plough. But what is it called in German? Trying to hit that balance between clarity and ambiguity is an art—but not really any different than a mystery writer leaving a trail of clues for the reader. I suppose you could think of them as clues! 


Classical music plays a significant role in the way characters communicate in The Enigma Game, including everything from social bonding to secret communication. Was music ever actually used in this way during the war? What are some musical pieces would you want to hear if you travel back in time and space to a World War II-era pub like the Limehouse?

I haven’t come across a specific story of music being used to hide code during the war (though poems were used), but music was certainly a powerful weapon. The example that leaps to mind is Dmitri Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, the “Leningrad” Symphony, which he wrote and performed during the siege of Leningrad as an open statement of defiance, and which was distributed and performed throughout the world in solidarity against the Nazis. Think also of the scene in Casablanca where everybody starts to sing the French national anthem!

Jazz was so hated by the Nazi propaganda machine, and so loved by the general population who listened to it, that the Third Reich had to come up with an allowed and watered-down version to stop people using it as a political weapon. It turned political anyway, and hundreds of German young people—the “Swing Youth”—were imprisoned and killed just for listening to music.

The appeal of writing about the past for me is very simple: I just want to create a history for the abandoned and disused things around me.

The classic wartime example of Morse code as a musical message is Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, whose dramatic opening beats spell out the Morse letter “V” (dit-dit-dit-DAH, short-short-short-long), which was the Allied victory symbol. The symphony was used as a symbol of resistance throughout the war, and with French words added to it, it was broadcast on the BBC’s secret radio station just before the invasion of Normandy. German classical music was also often embraced as a wartime symbol of defiance; the story of an English violinist refusing to take shelter in an air raid during a concert, her Bach concerto soaring above the noise of the bombs, really sticks with me.

My idea of the off-duty airmen's informal music sessions in The Enigma Game was inspired by the author Lucy Boston’s wartime concerts for a local flight squadron between missions. Living alone and approaching middle age, Boston wanted to do something for the war effort, so she opened her home to the young soldiers stationed nearby to give them a brief respite of comfort and culture when they weren’t risking their lives in combat.

What would my own wartime concert include? I would have to struggle to narrow it down. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and “Ode to Joy” from his 9th, Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides Overture,” “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “White Cliffs of Dover,” “In the Mood”—honestly I’d just listen to whatever they were playing! 


You’ve become renowned for your World War II thrillers and iconic female protagonists. Could you talk a little bit about the appeal of writing about the past, particularly about World War II? What keeps you returning to this moment in history?
The appeal of writing about the past for me is very simple: I just want to create a history for the abandoned and disused things around me. Living in Europe, we are absolutely surrounded by the detritus of World War II. Every North Sea beach in England and Scotland is littered with anti-aircraft bunkers and miles and miles of concrete defensive tank traps. Unexploded bombs turn up on a regular basis in farmers’ fields and building sites. Civil defense warnings are still visible in faded paint on city walls; the iron railings of my own front garden were chopped down as wartime surplus and the stumps still remain.

The war always fascinated me. My high school French teacher, Annette Berman, was a courier and translator in the French Resistance when she was a teenager. For three years in her French class, she told us breathtaking stories of her wartime heartbreak and triumph. My husband’s parents were both teenagers in England during the Blitz, and their stories, too, feel immediate. Yes, I am writing about the past, but I feel that I have a living connection to it. Given Madame Berman’s wartime experience, it seems perfectly natural to me to write about heroic young women!


What makes me keep returning is that I keep finding out more, and it’s all so interesting. The research for Code Name Verity led me to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, which led me to write Rose Under Fire; the research for Rose Under Fire led me to a British interception of a Luftwaffe bomber, which led me to write The Enigma Game; the research for The Enigma Game led me to that horrific British prison ship bound for Australia, full of German civilians. What about the teens on that ship? THAT would make a story. There is always more!

Your love of aviation and especially for the aircraft of World War II is evident in many of your books, including in The Enigma Game, and you hold a private pilot's license. Do you have a bucket list either of planes you’d love to fly or of places or routes you’d love to fly?
You’d be surprised at how doggedly I have gone about checking items off this bucket list!

I have actually managed to get flights in an Avro Lancaster bomber and a Westland Lysander (the star aircraft of Code Name Verity), though not at the controls! And I have my name on a notification list for flights in the world’s only airworthy Bristol Blenheim, the star aircraft of The Enigma Game, when they allow passengers. In fact, I’d paid for a flight in a Dragon Rapide (a 1930s-era passenger plane) alongside that Blenheim, which was supposed to take place in May 2020. Not surprisingly, that flight has been indefinitely postponed.

I have a separate bank account that I’ve been saving in for a Spitfire flight—the iconic British fighter plane from the Battle of Britain in 1940. You can get a flight in a specially made “two-seater” training Spitfire over the cliffs of Dover, where much of that battle was fought, and you CAN take the controls. So watch this space.

I’ve also kind of doggedly set about flying the routes that my characters take. I have flown on several occasions along the east coast of Scotland and the North Sea there, the airborne setting for The Enigma Game. I have flown over Holy Island and Bamburgh Castle, as Maddie does in Code Name Verity at the beginning of the war.

Originally, I got my pilot’s license because I wanted to fly across North America. Nothing to do with the war! That hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it’s on the list for a retirement project.

Author photo by David Ho.

Set in a walled, quarantined city made of a thousand towers, Lynne Bertrand's City of the Uncommon Thief is the story of three teenagers who find themselves drawn into a tangled web of lies and magic after one of them steals a pair of “uncommon” knitting needles, or “knotting spikes,” as they’re called in the book’s unique parlance. Bertrand reveals how she created the world of the novel, which is one of the most unusual fantasy settings you'll ever read.

Your previous books were picture books. Why did you begin writing young adult?
My initial idea was a picture book about a mob of urban waifs living in a gone city and their discovery of a cellar full of knitted animals that were alive. That story was too much to be contained in a picture book’s short form, so over the years, I took it apart and reworked elements of it.

In YA fiction, you can go anywhere, use all the words, consider with honesty any thought. To be 13, 15, 17 is to be human times 10. It’s a time of unprotected freedom, death, work, love. That’s a good place for a writer.

One of the questions in the book is what or who is “common” or “uncommon.” What drew you to this idea?
I think of City as a reluctant fantasy. I didn’t intend to include anything magical, but I felt about the knotting spikes the way Bilbo feels about his ring: I had to have them.

At the same time, I was determined to keep it under control, to understate that magic. I felt the whole city’s agreement with me on that. Nobody wants any trouble in the city. Nobody wants anything out of the ordinary to happen, because this is already a disastrous, walled-in non-place, and everyone is hanging on by their fingernails. So I called the spikes “uncommon” as a way of saying “nothing to see here,” nothing magical or rare or stupendous or otherworldly. As soon as that word, uncommon, was on the page, it became a way of exploring the things we dismiss. It’s easier to sort and discard in some binary way (common versus rare) than to look twice and see what a rare thing some piece of art, some story, some idea, some person, some animal, some tool, really is.

Stories can change the world, carry you through hell, bring levity, remind you of what’s possible.

How did you go about creating the setting of the city?
What would it be like to stay inside forever? How would you get food if you couldn’t go out? What if something scared you so much you locked the doors and, for centuries, never unlocked them? What if you didn’t know where you were in place or time? Those questions were on my mind.

And then I let the city manifest those questions. Buildings too high. Locks too permanent. Food once a year. Work that had to save you. Holidays celebrating the sunless passing of time. Social constructs that kept everyone just sane enough. And then I thought about what the children would do and what the teenagers would do in such a construct.

What works inspired this book?
The biggest influences were the epics and myths I read in school, especially tales of the Greeks and Romans, and most of all The Odyssey. I didn’t even realize what I was writing with this book until I recognized fragments of an invocation to the muse, of a beginning in medias res, of a hero story, of wisdom characters. My efforts then became more intentional—to write on a grander scale, to add a representative from some sort of pantheon that had been lacking, to get comfortable with a vast map. I love the nostalgia, the big genealogies, the journey, the question of heroism and the clash of good versus evil in epics and legends. In such stories, or in a city the size of this city, once you let go and face the things that frighten you, you’re as gone as Odysseus. You have to tie yourself to the mast or outsmart the Cyclops in the cave, because how else are you going to get home?

Storytelling is a key cultural practice in your book. Why?
My father is a preacher. Like anyone who’s grown up in a temple, mosque, church or synagogue, I was a child of “The Book.” Narrative is the treasure, the currency of sacred cultures. If the house is on fire, you grab the Book on your way out.

In college when I studied the Bible as literary narrative, it was like discovering secret passages in a house I grew up in. Of course, I was also reading other books all my life. What began as faith through narrative extended to become another kind of faith in narrative. Stories can change the world, carry you through hell, bring levity, remind you of what’s possible.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of City of the Uncommon Thief.

I was fascinated by the way you subverted notions of heroism—what a hero looks like, what they’re called, where they come from. What do you think makes someone a hero?
At 2 a.m. when I can’t sleep, I watch Instagram videos—of a cop saving a street dog off the high truss of a suspension bridge; of some powerful 20-year-old athlete hiking through the wasteland that was southeastern Australia in 2020 to save one kangaroo. I watch videos about people who choose, as their life’s work, to organize food, security patrols, showers and extra blankets for people who live in the tunnels and underpasses of a city. Generally speaking, a lot of people euthanize street dogs. Poachers jack kangaroos. A lot of us fear the disenfranchised humans who live under bridges.

I’ve never been asked this question before, but I think heroism could be described as the high-risk leveraging of your own power on behalf of someone else who doesn’t matter to plenty of other people. It involves sacrifice and has the potential to look foolish. We mainly tell the stories of heroes who succeed, but success isn’t a requisite for heroism, and there are other stories that shouldn’t be forgotten.

Photo of Lynne Bertrand courtesy of Jo Chattman.