Kelly Loy Gilbert is the author of two acclaimed YA novels, including Conviction, a finalist for the William C. Morris Award, which honors the first book written by an author for teen readers. When We Were Infinite is the story of a close group of friends, including protagonist Beth and her crush, Jason, whose plans for the future are radically changed when they discover that Jason has been keeping a terrible secret.

Your acknowledgements mention that you’ve been working on When We Were Infinite since 2006. You’ve published two other novels in that time, beginning with your debut in 2015, Conviction. How do you feel now that When We Were Infinite is going to be published?
It’s absolutely surreal to be finally seeing this book enter the world. It has seen me through literally all the major transitions in my life, and I like to think that it’s richer for all the new layers of myself that I’ve woven into it through the years. In retrospect, I’m grateful it got all those extra years to percolate.

This was the book I first signed with my agent many, many years ago, but the timing was just never right. I think one of the biggest stories behind why it’s coming out now is that so many in the book world have laid the groundwork that made it possible for me to publish a story about a group of Asian American friends. When I first started querying this story in 2007, the publishing landscape was just entirely different.

The book’s protagonist, Beth, is a high-achieving high school senior, a talented musician who is deeply invested in her incredibly close group of friends. What did you find most compelling about writing Beth’s character, and what was most challenging? Are there any pieces of yourself inside her?
At an event at Parnassus Books a few years ago, a bookseller asked something that’s stayed with me since: What’s the question at the core of everything you write? For me, it’s always going to be about what we owe one another and how you give it without losing yourself. When I was Beth’s age, that was the driving question of my life. The ways Beth grapples with that question are both deeply compelling and also deeply challenging to me. I remember what it felt like to want to totally lose yourself in another person, but I also know enough to recognize the way that spirals.

Something I think people forget or underestimate about high school life is how incredibly little agency you have over your world, and that’s one of the challenges of writing about it: Whatever happens, chemistry is still third period.

At her core there’s an aloneness to Beth that I haven’t personally faced, but so much of what we write is driven by our deep fears, and I think Beth might be someone I could’ve been if I hadn’t been protected from that loneliness. As I wrote Beth’s story, I always wanted better for her than what she was able to want for herself.

There are occasional hints that Beth’s narration comes from some point in the future. Where did this lens come from, and why did you choose it?
One thing I remember about being in high school was a sense that the world was dismissive of whatever relationships we were forming with each other at the time—like, oh, these are just teenage friendships, this isn’t real life. But I think there’s something shatteringly meaningful about the kind of friends who’ve known you over a long span of time, so it was important to me to validate that and give a sense of that truth in Beth’s future. It was also important to me to give Beth a chance to be more tender toward her younger self and to hold all those mistakes she made and those ways she was broken.

Beth is a classical musician, and music plays a huge role in her life. How much of what Beth knows, thinks and feels about music did you know before you started writing? Do you play an instrument? What kind of work did you do to be able to capture this part of Beth’s life?
I used to play the flute–not particularly well!–so I have, like, a high school band-level musical background. But prestigious orchestras were really big where I grew up, and they were always a source of fascination to me. I immersed myself in classical music on and off as I wrote, especially violin. I watched online performances and read music theory for hours.

Beth has a complicated relationship to music; it alternately haunts and frustrates, fulfills and consumes her. And I would say that’s because in everything I’ve ever written about craft, whether it’s baseball or art or music, the deeper truth is that I’m always writing about writing.

When you’re a teenager, how you spend your time—and with whom you spend it—is determined by classes, schoolwork, teachers and extracurriculars. As we see through Beth’s story, these demands also construct and articulate a person’s identity. What was challenging about capturing this aspect of teenage life? Why was including it important to you?
Something I think people forget or underestimate about high school life is how incredibly little agency you have over your world, and that’s one of the challenges of writing about it: Whatever happens, chemistry is still third period. So much is preordained for you. That’s one reason why I always give my characters a world within a world (like sports or music), because it’s a place they can exert some control.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of When We Were Infinite.

A lot of my work is about resisting the notion that schools are somehow separate from our wider cultural moment rather than a reflection of it, the pervasive sense that anything happening against a backdrop of recess or gym class or TikTok doesn’t matter all that much. The pressures Beth and her friends face are their inheritance from us—the trickling down of adult pressures and pathologies. That’s one reason I think adults should read YA: It reflects our world back at us from a different dimension.

The final chapter of the novel continues Beth’s story after high school. Do you see this chapter as stretching the concept of what a YA novel can contain, or as stepping outside of that boundary to transform the novel into something else entirely?
I love writing YA, and it feels like a calling in a way that my adult projects never do, but the one constraint I kind of chafe against is the span of time you’re given. For the most part, a story has to wrap up by graduation, but so much of this story is about how what happens to Beth and her friends when they’re 17 reverberates through the rest of their lives. I think ultimately what distinguishes YA, though, is that it contains a sense of firsts, and so to me it still feels like there’s a fidelity to the YA designation there.

What kinds of teenagers do you hope find their way to this book? What kinds of thoughts or questions are inside them?
Teens who feel things deeply and who long for connection. Teens who find this yearning of Beth’s resonating with them: “And I hoped too that you could build something vital and lasting even if all you’d had to offer was the damaged parts of yourself, even if you weren’t yet whole.”

What’s something you’re proud of in this book?
I grew up in a very Asian American community in the San Francisco Bay area, and back then pretty much all the Asian American representation in books was either fish-out-of-water stories, in which it was a single Asian American family in a predominantly white town, or it was about another generation, like The Joy Luck Club—all of which are vital and necessary, but I was always so hungry to read and write stories that felt like they could’ve been about people I knew. I thought our experiences were worthy of literature, too. So I’m really proud of having written a story I needed when I was young. This one is for all the Asian American Bay Area teens who’ve told me they feel seen by my stories.

Author photo courtesy of Dayna Falls.

Charlie Jane Anders, the Nebula and Locus Award-winning author of two novels for adults, All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, turns to YA with Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new trilogy. It’s the story of Tina, a seemingly ordinary girl who is actually the clone of a legendary alien war hero, Captain Thaoh Argentian, whose troops hid her on Earth until she grew old enough to rejoin the epic intergalactic battle between good and evil. When Tina’s heroic destiny finally comes calling, it turns out to be nothing like she imagined.

Why did you decide to make the switch to YA? 
I've loved young adult fiction for as long as I can remember. Young adult books have been some of my most vivid and inspiring reading experiences. I often find that YA can deal with political themes and issues like queer identity in a smarter and more forthright way than adult novels can, because teens aren't as scared of these topics. What made me want to write YA myself was seeing so many fun, adventure-oriented YA books come out recently, like Marie Lu’s Warcross, Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy’s Once & Future, Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea and all of Leigh Bardugo's stuff. YA felt like a place where you could tell a fun, exciting story about teens having an adventure and being there for each other.

Tina spends the first part of the book dreaming of the day she’ll be transported into a life where she’s the hero. I think her desire—to escape, to be swept up by a grand destiny, to have a defined purpose and to know what that purpose is—is something a lot of teen readers are going to find really relatable. Did you ever feel this way when you were a teenager?
Oh yeah, that was pretty much the only thing I felt when I was a teenager. All I wanted was to have a spaceship swoop down and take me away. I used to fantasize that the TARDIS from “Doctor Who” would appear and I'd get invited to come along on a tour of the universe. I wrote Victories Greater Than Death for my teen self, who would have loved this story about leaving behind this whole ridiculous planet (and who also really needed to see positive depictions of LGBTQ+ kids in fiction).

Tina often feels like she’s failing to live up to the expectations set by her past life as Captain Argentian, which is basically an impossible standard. What advice would you give to teen readers who identify with how Tina feels in these moments?
I feel this so deeply. As a kid, I was “dual-exceptional”: I had a learning disability, but I also was labeled as a gifted child. In junior high, I went back and forth between remedial classes and gifted programs. I was constantly getting the message that I wasn't living up to my potential, and I felt like tons of pressure were coming down on me all the time. I wish I could go back in time and tell my past self that there are many ways to be smart or capable and that nobody gets to tell you if you're living up to your potential.

"The future is nothing but the product of the past."

At one point, someone tells Tina, “Being a superhero is easy. Being a real person? That’s hard.” Which parts of being a “real person” does Tina struggle with? 
I think this is the core idea of the book. Tina is obsessed with living up to the legacy she's inherited and fulfilling her heroic destiny, and she doesn't want to think about what that might cost her. She wants to be able to save everybody and protect the helpless all on her own—and she doesn't realize that she's stronger and better if she leans on other people. There's a scene halfway through the book in which Tina really confronts the downside, the cost, of being a hero and saving people, and it's a huge shock to her. That scene wasn't in my outline and I hadn't planned on it at all, but as soon as I wrote it, I knew it had to be a huge turning point.

Can you tell us a bit about the romantic dynamic between Tina and Elza, the crew’s hacker? What did you want to explore through their relationship?
Elza challenges Tina a lot. I always like writing relationships between people who have different viewpoints and ideals, because that's how you get the fun sparks. Elza is more cynical and questioning than Tina, because of some of the bad experiences she had back on Earth, and she raises valid questions about Tina's heroic dreams. I loved writing the scenes in which Tina and Elza start to see each other more clearly and recognize that they're both obsessed with trying to save people, just in different ways.

You mention so many alien species throughout the book. Do you have a favorite?
This was a huge part of the fun of writing this book and this trilogy overall. I had a total blast. I ended up creating a private wiki to keep track of all the aliens and all of the worlds and backstories in the book. Between all the different drafts and deleted chapters and alternate versions, there's so much more about all these aliens than you ever see on the page. 

My favorite aliens change from day to day, but I have a huge soft spot for the Javarah, who are sort of fox-cat people who invented special "fur" to help them control their violent impulses. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Victories Greater Than Death.

I loved how, no matter where the crew goes, no matter what species they talk to or how different their culture or values are, nearly all the characters in the book introduce themselves with both their names and their pronouns. Why did you decide to make that custom so (literally) universal?
It just made sense to me. If you have a device that can translate any alien language, then it ought to be able to make sure there are no misunderstandings of any kind—and getting someone's pronouns wrong is a kind of misunderstanding. This ended up feeling like wish fulfillment to me: a world where nobody ever gets misgendered or labeled against their will.

There’s a temptation to view every story that features spaceships and supercomputers as “futuristic,” but in fact, much of this book involves the crew investigating and learning about the galaxy’s past. What roles do history and the past play in this story?
The future is nothing but the product of the past. When I think about the fictional worlds I've gotten obsessed with, the thing they all have in common is a rich and complex history, with lots and lots of old wounds that were never fully healed. Part of what made me feel like this series was starting to click was when I came up with a fun explanation for the ancient mysteries the characters were trying to solve and the Seven-Pointed Empire, which is the oppressive regime that fell hundreds of years ago. I wanted there to be a lot of wild, gonzo backstory that people could keep uncovering.

Photo of Charlie Jane Anders courtesy of Sarah Deragon.

With a reputation for ambitious prose and surreal storytelling, A.S. King is one of the most critically acclaimed YA writers working today, as well as an accomplished author of middle grade novels published under the name Amy Sarig King. She wrote her new YA novel, Switch, after suffering an unthinkable loss and trying to find a way to “soften to life.” The book takes place in a world where time has stopped—it’s been June 23, 2020, for nine months. While working on a school project, teen javelin prodigy Truda stumbles onto a way to repair time.

Your acknowledgments reveal that this book started when you were asked to give a speech about time. Can you tell us about that speech and what exactly is going on with time at the beginning of the book?
In writing the keynote for the launch of the 2018 edition of the Johnson County, Kansas, Library’s teen literary magazine, Elementia, I invented a clock based on psychologist Robert Plutchik’s emotion wheel. I hadn’t thought about stopped time at all for that speech—just about the concept of the clock and how we spend our time on Earth ignoring emotions, especially as we get older. I wanted to give everyone in the venue a new way to think about how to spend their time. A new way to look at emotions.

As for what’s happened to time at the beginning of Switch: It has mysteriously stopped. Or the clocks have, anyway. Seems like someone needed a break and just turned the world off. It seemed natural, in that situation, that adults would have to distract children from the whole mess with something lackluster, like a school project or an essay. This is where Plutchik’s Clock walked back through the saloon doors in the hands of our narrator, Truda Becker, and said, “Howdy, Amy.”

When did you first learn about Plutchik, and what drew you to incorporating his ideas into Switch?
I love Plutchik and his work. I’m unsure of exactly when I came across him, but I have read every one of his textbooks. I found him during a time in my life when I needed to be reminded that emotions are real, important and natural after a lifetime of having mine denied.

When humans slow down, they can usually see all the parts of their lives they are running from.

One of my favorite things to do in my books is share cool random knowledge in order to help readers make sense of their world, so in Switch, Tru explores psychology, from developmental to psychoevolutionary, in school. I was so excited when I wrote that speech for the library’s keynote, to introduce a few hundred people to this concept of the Plutchik’s Clock. Now I am even more excited to share the idea more broadly. Heck yes! This is what Robert Plutchik did for me. He made me want to spread the word about how smart he was—and in doing so, he has helped me help other people, which is why I was born.

Tell us about Tru. How did you develop her character and find her voice?
Tru wanted to be written. I know this because she migrated from two other books I’d been writing. She and her talent for javelin seemed to want to talk, so I let them.

I wrote Switch during the hardest time in my life. My teenage daughter Gracie died in 2018, about five months after I made that speech in Kansas, and I wasn’t able to finish the book I was writing. I wasn’t able to do anything, really. I didn’t think I’d ever write another book, to be honest. But four months later, I wrote a poem about a switch, and it wouldn’t end. I sat down at the desk, threw away Tru’s original introduction and pages, and dove into this poem about her home life to see what it might yield.

I think all of my characters find their voices through experiences I have in my own life. In Switch, I wanted to explore how the world treats girls with skill. How their entire environment eats them without them knowing it. I wanted her to walk through that with her head up. Her confidence is what I’m most proud of. She may not be super confident, but she has the confidence to know what she is walking through and name it. That’s a huge step in healing.

Can you describe Tru’s home? Why did you choose this setting for the story?
It was the choice of the book, not me. Though I do start out telling the reader about the switch. In the house, there is a switch, but Daddy says no one is allowed to touch it. He builds boxes, often out of plywood, around the switch as a safety measure, and then he builds more and more boxes that take over rooms and hallways. As the story develops, it twists and turns and feels a bit like a tilt-a-whirl. So the house and its series of boxes become one, too.

We need to teach young humans how to nourish themselves and give them ample time to do it. Now.

How to describe it? Chaos, I guess. The chaos of four different people coming to terms with the same realization but on different levels and timelines. Isn’t that how every family deals with traumatic things that happen to the family unit? In Switch, life imitates each family member’s psychological wrestling. So their house becomes a plywood carnival. It looks great from the outside, though. Of course. Doesn’t it always?

Although Switch doesn’t take place in our current moment, the ways its characters’ lives have been reconfigured are going to feel familiar and perhaps even a bit prescient for readers. Is Switch a different book because of the COVID-19 pandemic? How has your thinking about the book changed, knowing that readers will bring their experiences of the past year or so to the book?
I am a cosmic sort of person; I have a brain of granola and believe in astrology. So to me, this is all kismet in a very personal way. It was me who needed time to stop. When I lost Gracie, I was unable to do anything normal. I couldn’t even talk or think right for months, even years. I still can’t some days.

Once I could try to work, I started writing a book that made me stop time for eight hours a workday. Like Daddy in the book, I needed a reset. A deep breath. Anything. Like Daddy in the book, I needed to somehow access my emotions again and soften to life.

The kismet happens when a pandemic comes along, and suddenly everyone else is living in a world where they don’t know what day or month it is either, and they are suddenly forced to live entirely different lives. That’s just weird. The books come from personal realities. The surrealism comes from trauma. The cosmic stuff gives me a joyous shrug because it feels like a bigger puzzle, and I love puzzles; that’s why I’m a writer.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Switch.

But yes, I think readers who have just experienced this series of quarantines and shutdowns will relate in several ways. When humans slow down, they can usually see all the parts of their lives they are running from. That is essentially the cold open of Switch.

How did writing Switch change the way you think about time?
The reason I was invited to speak about time at Johnson County Library was because my work pretty much always deals with or plays with time. So it’s what I’m thinking about most days—it’s my lens. In the case of Switch, what you give your time and attention to is important. Growth is what the switch is.

I wager we should be flicking switches all day—finding new ways to see old things. Finding new things. Growing. That is what time is for. For a decade of my life, I grew all my food from seed in my greenhouse to harvest in the field. I know that every centimeter of growth counts. When we mistake ignoring emotionally teachable moments as valiantly “getting over it,” we skip vital cogs in the machine. The machine turns out people whose clocks are set to eat themselves. The imbalance between personal emotional learning and book or social learning is always going to show in the crop. We need to teach young humans how to nourish themselves and give them ample time to do it. Now.

I firmly believe that we need to center the mental and emotional health of children. And ourselves. If we all don’t take or make time to learn how to rest and heal, we are going to continue to pass down intergenerational trauma that is only going to get worse. We need a giant reset. If I ran the world, I’d give us all a plump vacation with a Plutchik’s Clock and a ton of mental health care. And some of Daddy’s cooking.

Author photo courtesy of Krista Schumow Photography, 2011.

Rita Williams-Garcia is one of the most acclaimed authors of children’s literature working today. Her many prizes include a Newbery Honor and three Coretta Scott King Awards, and she has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Though she is best known for her middle grade novels, including One Crazy Summer and P.S. Be Eleven, her new book, A Sitting in St. James, is for older teens and adults. It’s a vividly rendered portrait of the putrid institution of white Creole plantation culture in antebellum Louisiana.

Who and what is A Sitting in St. James about?
The book follows the life of a plantation mistress, Madame Sylvie, but is really about everyone connected to the big plantation house. Madame Sylvie survived the French and Haitian Revolutions and a forced marriage at 13, along with a heap of suffering and humiliation. Now 80, Madame feels entitled to all that she wants—specifically, a portrait sitting. Ultimately, Madame’s insistence on the portrait affects the lives of her son, her grandson, the granddaughter she denies, the enslaved people on the plantation and an unusual young boarder.

How did you come up with the book’s central premise?
The story came to me in pieces over time, through a daydream, a dream and a boy. In the middle of a faculty residency lecture, I daydreamed about a teen grooming his horse. I realized he was thinking of a boy, a fellow West Point cadet whom he was separated from and missed. At another residency, I awakened one morning after dreaming of a woman singing in an African language. In that dream, a young woman had been chased by white men. She couldn’t outrun them, but she managed to throw her baby into the ocean. I remember that her singing was joyful.

About a year later, I was part of a panel discussion at a screening of Stanley Nelson’s documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. A boy of maybe 12 tearfully asked, “Why do they hate us?” They, the police. They, white people. My answer was something like, “When they see us, they don’t see human beings.” I felt I owed him more of an explanation. Almost instantly, the images of the West Point cadet, the African mother saving her baby from capture, a head of cabbage and an elderly woman lifting her neck with vanity and pride while sitting for her portrait came together as a story and as my answer to the boy at the screening.

“The more humanity we see, the better we can judge, acknowledge, understand and even indict. There is the horror, and there is also the hope. I wouldn’t be here if not for the people who endured but also loved.”

The book is steeped in history. What research did you do? 
With all projects that require research, I comb through a lot but include only what is needed to tell the story. I began with online digital archives of local newspapers from the antebellum period, both in French and in English, just to see what was going on and what my characters would be aware of. I speak no French, so my French dictionary was always nearby. I made notes of goods and services from pages of newspaper ads. I visited my neighborhood libraries to research everything from the French and Haitian Revolutions, early Louisiana and Louisiana Creole history, the Battle of New Orleans, the presidential political scene of 1860, the culture of West Point and oil painting in the mid-19th century. 

I studied the Kouri-Vini, or Louisiana Creole language, to hear the voices of the people. There are online sites that offer dictionaries and even tutorials, but ultimately, I deferred to experts to verify and correct my usage. I read plantation letters, journals and ledgers to get firsthand detail of daily plantation life. I read narratives of survivors of slavery in Louisiana that have been collected in government archives, just to have those voices with me, although the central focus of the story is on the Guilberts, whose family owns the plantation.

To portray a working sugar plantation, I had to read about every aspect of sugar-cane planting, harvesting and production, but nothing took the place of being there. As much as I hate to fly, I boarded planes to venture south and visited the Laura, Whitney and Magnolia Mound estates. These plantations and museums stand as acknowledgements of a cruel past but also as relics of pride for culture. I felt that this coupling of a cruel past along with domesticity and pride was what I had to capture in the Guilberts at Le Petit Cottage.

What was the most challenging aspect of this story to get right?
I am an outsider to this historic culture. I had to forget what my North Carolina-born grandmother told me about her grandparents and great-grandparents who were survivors of slavery, because North Carolina isn’t Louisiana. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of A Sitting in St. James.

In a note included with advance editions of the book, referring to slavery and its legacies, you wrote, “At no other time in our nation’s history have readers sought out more this examination and conversation.” Why do you think now is a particularly important moment for this reflection?
I’ve revised this answer 10 times. I have been watching the trial of the police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd. I have become that boy who asked, “Why do they hate us?” And then I have my answer and I get angry. I’m a person in my 60s who sees the present as a cycle. We fight for rights because we experience inequities and brutalities, we get rights, we move forward, and then we repeat the cycle. What is happening—the murder of and violence against people of color, the suppression of rights, the unequal access to health care—is not new. It’s part of the cycle. 

We need to talk openly about what is happening to people because of their race, ethnicity and gender, because the cycle continues. We see it happening before our eyes daily. Each and every one of us has to become the conscience of this country by what we say and do. People are being killed or brutalized on the basis of simply existing. We are not too far from our enslaved ancestors. We have to speak up and act up when the unconscionable is normalized. But we have to talk before there can be any reparations. We have to be unafraid to have uncomfortable conversations with an emphasis on listening.  

You made another statement I found powerful. You wrote that readers will “find hope in the end” of this story. Hope is often a scarce commodity when we discuss matters of race in America. Where will readers find hope in this book? 
I hope to have humanized the Guilberts in a way that allows us to feel a range of emotions about them. Do we root for them? Curse them? Laugh at them? Notice, I’m endeavoring to give to white slaveholders what they failed to see in my ancestors. It’s my hope that if we see the human and not the monster in them (although, yes, they do monstrous things), we will see the suffering and inhumane treatment that they inflict as real, and from there, we can see the survivors of their treatment as real. My intention is that the more humanity we see, the better we can judge, acknowledge, understand and even indict. There is the horror, and there is also the hope. I wouldn’t be here if not for the people who endured but also loved. I want to pass that on to the reader.

Author photo of Rita Williams-Garcia courtesy of Ferdinand Leyro.

Leah Johnson burst onto the YA scene in the summer of 2020 with her acclaimed debut, You Should See Me in a Crown, which received a Stonewall Honor. She returns with Rise to the Sun, the story of Olivia and Toni, who meet on the first day of the Farmland Music and Arts Festival. Together, they race to solve scavenger hunt clues, nail onstage performances and learn to trust each other with their hopes and fears in Johnson’s ode to summer, friendship and love.

Let’s start from the outside and work our way in. What did you think the first time you saw the book’s cover art?
I full-on got teary-eyed. It’s beautiful art—bright and hopeful—reflecting Black queer girls in love, and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

Can you introduce us to Toni and Olivia? Where are they in their lives when readers first meet them?
Toni is grieving the loss of her father, who passed away eight months before the book begins. She’s hoping that returning to the music festival they both loved will bring her closer to him and give her some insight into what she should be doing with her life after high school. 

Olivia has just been the victim of a pretty nasty breakup that’s left her an outcast at school and at home, and she’s hoping that one epic weekend with her best friend, Imani, will help her forget what her senior year has in store. 

They’re both precious little unsure babies trying to convince the world that they have it all together. (Reader, they do not.)

Both Toni and Olivia describe feelings of distance and isolation from their peers, but they are each attending the festival with a close friend: Olivia with Imani and Toni with Peter. What do these friendships mean to them?
Their friendships are lifelines for them, but in different ways. Toni has some serious trust issues that have kept her from letting people get close to her at all. Olivia is perhaps too trusting and lets a lot of people near her but doesn’t allow anyone to really know her besides Imani. With their best friends, they’re able to be their full selves, which is a gift I think a lot of us often take for granted.

Your first book was told from a single character’s point of view, but Rise to the Sun alternates between two perspectives. What motivated that decision? Was that always the plan?

From the start, I knew that I wanted the book to be told from two points of view and also take place over a pretty tight span of time, which is an homage to some of my favorite books (Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist being at the top of that particular list) but also an effort to more intimately explore two sides of the same fear.

I believe in the power of the sonic cathedral. In building something together under those lights that I could never build on my own. And that belief has changed my life.

Both Toni and Olivia are terrified of being seen for who they really are. Digging into that more—the ways they arrived at that fear, what it takes to push past it, allowing themselves to be loved through it—felt like not only an interesting craft challenge but also a real opportunity to explore the ways all of us at our cores are both remarkably similar and wildly different.

The book’s dual perspectives enable us to see that when Olivia views one of her personality traits as a flaw, Toni actually considers it to be one of Olivia’s strengths, and vice versa. It’s a really effective way to capture how girls, especially young queer Black girls, internalize negative perceptions of themselves. Was this always something you wanted to explore in this book?
Thanks so much for saying that. I hoped it would illustrate the ways that so many of us are unable to see the best parts of ourselves because the voices that want us to be ashamed or embarrassed or small are often the loudest in our heads. But when you’re able to divorce yourself from those voices and unlearn that shame, you become your fullest self. Sometimes it takes someone else who sees that grandness in you, and is so unabashed about it that there’s no room in your head for anything else, in order for you to begin to see it yourself.

I’ve been really lucky that I’m surrounded by people who love and support me, but that love is under constant threat of buckling under the weight of a world that doesn’t want me to love myself. Black women—Black girls in particular—are expected to be palatable, to shrink themselves into something small and “respectable.” I wanted to buck against that in this book. Black girls should have room to be selfish, to be careless, to make mistakes and still be redeemable. Still be worthy of and capable of boundless love. 

You really captured the power of live music as a communal experience during the Farmland scenes. What do the connections between artist, audience/listener and music mean to you? Do you make music yourself?
I play the ukulele pretty poorly, but I’ve always had a heart for live music. I can’t count the number of times I’ve lost myself in a crowd at a show, become family with sweaty strangers standing next to me at a concert, felt something too big to name under the stars at a music festival as I shouted lyrics at the sky. Live music has given me shelter when I needed it and shined a light on the things I wanted most to hide when I needed that, too. Not to wax too poetic about it, but I love it a great deal.

Dave Grohl wrote about this in The Atlantic last summer: “Without that audience—that screaming, sweating audience—my songs would only be sound. But together, we are instruments in a sonic cathedral, one that we build together night after night.” And I think that’s the whole thing. I believe in the power of the sonic cathedral. In building something together under those lights that I could never build on my own. And that belief has changed my life.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Rise to the Sun.

I loved the book’s dedication: “To the Black girls who have been told they’re too much and to the ones who don’t believe they’re enough: You are the world’s most beautiful song.” Who do you hope will read this book, and what do you hope they’ll take away from it?
All of my work is for Black girls who deserve to see themselves reflected in the pages of the stories they read, but this particular book is for the Black girls who have internalized shame about who they are. There’s nothing wrong with being someone who feels “too much” or loves “too hard.” It’s OK to be afraid of the future and unsure about what you want. Be loud, be foolish, be a little reckless. Be quiet, be brooding, be contemplative. You deserve to take up space, to be whoever and whatever you are, and be loved not in spite of those things but because of those things.

I once heard a writer say that you spend your whole life writing your debut novel and then just a year or two writing your second one. What was the experience of writing a second book like for you, and how was it different from your first?
I don’t know if we even have enough time for me to get into what it was like to not only draft and revise a book in a year but also to do it during a pandemic. It was a wild, impossible-seeming, deeply challenging experience. From cross-country moves, to health emergencies, to your regular case of the sophomore scaries, this book was forged in blood, sweat and tears (literal tears—so many of them!). I’m so proud of the book we were able to make, not just because of the story but also because I know how hard it was to get it done. You Should See Me in a Crown was written in a different world and, sometimes it seems, by a different person. They both come from the same heart, though—from the same desire to write Black girls in a way that is honest and funny and sometimes cringey. And that’s my North Star. The why doesn’t change, no matter where or when I’m working.

There are some super fun Easter eggs in Rise to the Sun for fans of You Should See Me in a Crown. Why did you decide to connect the worlds of the two books?
I have always been a sucker for a shared universe in an author’s work! I love it. It feels like an inside joke between me and the writer somehow, like they planted a seed just waiting for me to come along and watch it blossom. It feels less like fiction and more like a real, tangible world being built. I knew that if I ever got a chance to do that in my own books, I would do it in a heartbeat. Luckily, my editor let me get away with it.

I’ve noticed a recurring theme of competition in both of your books—prom queen challenges, scavenger hunts, music contests. Do you think of yourself as a competitive person?
Ha! Yes and no. I’ve recently gotten really into the game Catan (thanks to Brittney Morris, incredible writer and tabletop gamer extraordinaire), and I’m taking great pride in beating everybody I know at it. Apparently it is a secret gift of mine. So when it comes to Catan, watch out, I’m cutthroat. But most things? I’m just here to have a good time.

Photo of Leah Johnson courtesy of Reece T. Williams

Malla Nunn is the author of four highly praised crime novels for adults, as well as the young adult novel When the Ground Is Hard, which won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature. Her new YA novel, Sugar Town Queens, tells the story of a biracial teen girl named Amandla who lives with her unstable white mother, Annalisa, in the impoverished neighborhood of Sugar Town on the outskirts of Durban, South Africa. Amandla discovers a secret that Annalisa has long hidden from her, and the revelation upends both of their lives. 

You were born in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and have lived in the U.S. and Australia, but South Africa takes precedence in your fiction. What is it about South Africa that commands your imagination?
I ask myself that question all the time! My childhood was embedded in the smell, dirt and heat of rural Eswatini, and those memories have a powerful hold on me. My attachment to southern Africa is confounding. Being there ties me in knots. I swing between anger, anxiety and a hopeless, blinding love for the place. Call it “unfinished business” or “unrealized trauma,” but southern Africa owns a piece of my heart that no other place can lay claim to.

You wrote your first mystery series for the adult market, but your two most recent books are for young adults. What drew you to writing for teens?
Crime writers spend a lot of time delving into the dark side of human emotions. I love that so many YA stories cover hard topics and still work their way to hope. There’s also a special magic in firsts. First love. First “best friend forever.” First time realizing that your parents are flawed. First broken heart. The path to the future is still being built, and that gives teenagers a special power. Crafting a story with struggle and hope at its heart is deeply satisfying.

I love that teenagers are on the cusp of making discoveries about life and love and what the future might hold. Amandla is on the bridge from girlhood to adulthood, and that’s what makes her life and her experiences in the township so special. She’s old enough to be aware of the dangers of Sugar Town but young enough to dream of a better life.

Dark and long-buried family secrets are at the heart of Sugar Town Queens, but it’s also a coming-of-age story about a girl going through typical teen experiences. What inspired the novel, and what made you want to tell it through the eyes of a teen girl?
The inspiration for Sugar Town Queens comes from real-life moments when I’ve wondered what my life might have looked like had my parents stayed in southern Africa instead of migrating to Australia. In that “what-if” dream space, my visions of poverty and helplessness are tempered by memories of growing up in a close-knit community with countless aunties and friends.

Setting is incredibly important in this novel, and you do a beautiful job of making Annalisa and Amandla’s home come alive on the page. How did you accomplish this?
Years ago, I sent my father a link to a photo essay of “poor whites” living in a township and basically said, “Why should I feel sorry for people who were given every advantage by the government and did nothing with it?” My father’s answer, “I’m sad for everyone who has to live such a hard life,” cooled my anger. Life in the townships is hard. For everyone. When it came time to write Sugar Town Queens, the township location was there waiting for me, but it was tempered by my father’s humanity. 

What is unique about South Africa is that the young are living in the shadow of a dream that felt so close to being realized after Mandela’s release.

Evoking Amandla and Annalisa’s home came easily, and I wasn’t surprised to find (through my father and older sister) that the first house we lived in as a family was a one-room shack with dirt floors and no running water. Call it root memory. I knew every detail of Amandla’s home even though I was too young to recall sleeping on the floor with my siblings.  

The racial dynamics of contemporary, post-apartheid South Africa play a prominent role in the story, as the novel takes us into intimate spaces within vastly different segments of a stratified and still somewhat segregated society. How much of what we see on the page comes from research and how much from your own personal experience?
Pretty much everything that made it into the pages of Sugar Town Queens has a personal component. The location, Sugar Town, is partly based on a “government area” that my mixed-race cousins were forced to move to after their homes inside Durban city were reclassified as “whites only.” On my rare visits back to southern Africa, I have moved (in the space of a few hours) from a rarified beach suburb with ocean views to a one-room tin shack in the country. The gap between rich and poor is shocking. 

Amandla’s journey takes her from the bottom rung of society, where a majority of Black South Africans still live, to the very top of the economic system, where white South Africans still dominate. I have seen and lived this disparity in real life and real time, so no research was needed.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Sugar Town Queens.

Throughout the book, I got the sense that the late South African president and freedom fighter Nelson Mandela had left an indelible feeling of idealism among South Africans—a multiracial, egalitarian national dream that had not yet been reached but was still held sacred. Do you think the idealism of Amandla and her friends is unique to young South Africans, or is it more universal?
The idealism of Amandla and her friends is deeply rooted in South African soil, but it’s also universal. Social inequality and poverty are part of Amandla’s life, but millions of girls around the world share the same struggles. In a strange way, the more location-specific the struggle, the more universal it becomes.

What is unique about South Africa is that the young are living in the shadow of a dream that felt so close to being realized after Mandela’s release. They were promised freedom and opportunity and watched those promises disappear before their eyes. The disappointment and anger is fresh. Reality has fallen short of Mandela’s promises, and a hunger for justice and change has ignited a fire in a new generation of South Africans.

Connection is such an important part of Amandla's culture, yet she and her mother are living very disconnected, isolated lives at the start of the novel. Could you talk about the concept of Ubuntu, how it informs the book and what that means to Amandla?
Ubuntu is the concept that “a person is a person through other people.” We are all connected together, and this sense of togetherness is necessary for us to live a full and meaningful life. Both Amandla and her white mother are so focused on getting out of Sugar Town that they miss the opportunity to connect with others. When Amandla is forced to ask her neighbor for help, she finds kindness and connection. One brief visit opens Amandla’s world up to other people and other ways of doing things. She begins to live more fully inside Sugar Town, and when danger comes to her door it is Ubuntu, not isolation, that saves her.