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NonfictionMusic

In Taylor Swift we trust

When Rolling Stone music critic Rob Sheffield called me from New York City, I didn’t spend any time with softball questions or developing rapport. I jumped right in with my hardest-hitting question about his new book, Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music: Did he write an essay about the 1989 bonus track “New Romantics” to drive listeners to play the song—and sing-scream his book title, a “New Romantics” lyric—on repeat?

I’m serious, though; immediately after reading the chapter, I cranked up my car stereo and belted out “New Romantics” three times in a row. Sheffield laughs; he understands.

“I think it was more that I was shouting out the title of the book while I was writing. That song is absolutely nuts, so perfect in terms of a statement of her worldview, a statement of her entire philosophy of life,” he says.

“Writing this book was going deeper into the Taylor Swift mysteries that have been perplexing us all over the years”

That outlook on Taylor Swift’s music shows up throughout Sheffield’s latest book and repeatedly during our conversation. And it’s clear from the outset of Heartbreak that Sheffield is a Swiftie, and his fellow Swifties will find lots to love here. But it’s not just for us: I could hand this book to a casual music fan who wants to understand the fuss or to a lifelong Swiftie. They would both leave with something new.

It’s hard to discuss the book and Sheffield’s motivation without slipping into fan talk. Heartbreak is relatable in part because of the connection to “all the Taylors you’ve ever been,” as Sheffield writes about the rhapsodic, parasocial reaction to the star’s Eras Tour.

“These songs, because they’re so emotionally intense, they catch you at the moment you are,” he says. “Even if the songs aren’t describing the situations you’re going through on a superficial level, they speak to the emotional truths. She’s got an uncanny knack for that.”

Sheffield leans in to that connection, crafting a book that isn’t exactly a biography, nor precisely a fan memoir or exclusively a cultural analysis. He uses all three of these approaches. It’s the same process he used for two of his most recent titles, 2016’s On Bowie and Dreaming the Beatles the following year. Sheffield’s love of his subject’s music is always part of the story, yet he goes beyond his own perspective.

 “No one listens to music more closely and are tougher to con than the teenage girl fans,”

“Like I said in my Beatles book,” Sheffield says, “I wasn’t writing a behind-the-music book, not where the music came from, but where it went—how it created the world we’re living in.” Significantly, he wrote about Bowie after his death and the Beatles long after the band’s dissolution. As an artist still in motion, Taylor Swift presented a new challenge: “As I was writing, she was always a step ahead of me.”

Those unfamiliar with Sheffield’s work might be surprised by a 50-something, male Rolling Stone writer following the avatar of American girlhood. They might even think he’s cashing in on the moment when Swift seems to be the world’s biggest celebrity. Bowie, the Beatles and other classic acts might seem more obvious choices. But Sheffield has been a Swiftie longer than I have—and probably longer than you, too.

“For me, it all comes down to ‘Our Song,’ ” he says of the 2007 single, Swift’s third. “Oh my gosh, I couldn’t believe my ears. . . . The way it’s this teenage girl saying, ‘I’ve heard every song ever made and ever recorded, and they’re not good enough. I’m just going to have to write my own song that is our song.’ Even before I Googled the singer, I Googled the songwriter.”

Sheffield was startled to find that the songwriter was also the singer—and that she was a teenager. He thought at the time, “Wow, I hope she has another song or two that’s this good.” He laughs. “Little did I know. Little did any of us know.”

Swift has written more than a couple of smash singles, and in fact, you can read Rob’s complete song-by-song ranking on Rolling Stone’s website. He updates it with each new release—but he always cheats to keep “Fifteen” at No. 15. Heartbreak is filled with knowing allusions to Taylor’s lyrics and catalog, which continued growing as the book was underway.

Sheffield began writing just before Swift’s record-setting Eras Tour began in March 2023. Why then? “For a while, I was thinking in terms of, wow, when she sort of hits a plateau level, that’ll be the time to take it all in,” he says. “When she stops innovating and inventing on a week-to-week basis, that’s the time to take stock.”

It became clear that Swift wasn’t slowing down anytime soon, so Sheffield took the plunge anyway. “I was trying to do justice to where she was at that point; at that point, Midnights was the new album,” he says. She’s released an album and re-released two others since then (and with Swift, there’s no telling—there could be another before this interview publishes). “By the time this book is out, she’ll have done something that demands another chapter,” Sheffield says. “She’s been on this hot streak for the past 18 years, and it’s rare for anyone to have a hot streak like this for one year.”

“She always wanted those songs to make a mess in your heart and your mind and keep making a mess.”

Sheffield continued to marinate in Swift’s music as he worked on the book, attending three consecutive shows early in the Eras Tour. “After three nights, I was absolutely ready for a wheelchair and a feeding tube,” he recalls. “I said, how is she even possibly functional this week given that all I did was stand in the audience and scream and sing along? And as we now know, she was not only doing this but making The Tortured Poets Department”—her latest album as of this writing—”between shows, which was just absolutely insane.”

Sheffield had plenty of material to draw from. “I’ve been writing about her for so long and pondering this stuff for so long and reading about her for so long—and reading since the early days, when almost everything written about her was condescending and dismissive. You hate to say, but that’s how she was written about for years,” he says. “Writing this book was going deeper into the Taylor Swift mysteries that have been perplexing us all over the years. I wasn’t trying to solve these mysteries, but just understand them a little better. A little deeper. Really, that’s the process for me. I was listening to the music. But I’m always listening to all those records.”

Heartbreak recounts Swift’s career with tremendous respect, and Sheffield’s knowledge of both her discography and the music she admires is clear. He draws connections to many artists whose influence shows up in her music: “She was a teenage prodigy who had studied all the greats,” including Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, the Beatles and more. “It was so fascinating that this was someone who was so early in her career but was determined to be on an all-time great historic album.”

Sheffield also analyzes the world’s reaction to Swift, who has often been dismissed with derision, particularly earlier in her career: “People are always saying, ‘Oh she’s good for her age.’ But who are the people older than her who are supposedly writing better pop records?”

The condescending attitude also loops in teen girls, which doesn’t sit well with Sheffield, who is quick to note that Swift’s career started when she was a teenager. Now in her mid-30s, Swift continues to put teen girls first. Those teens are not only the secret to Swift’s success. They’ve been behind most artists with multigenerational fans.

“The teenage girls are just the most sophisticated listeners,” says SheffieldSheffied. “No one listens to music more closely and are tougher to con than the teenage girl fans,” he says. “In case you didn’t learn this from the Beatles or Bob Dylan or David Bowie or whoever, the teenage girls are getting things that the rest of the audience doesn’t.”

Heartbreak is an ode not only to the artist who sees those listeners as paramount, but also to the industry she’s reshaped in her image. Many of Swift’s fans have grown up with her, Sheffield notes, and that’s a rarity. “Ex-Swiftie is not a category, really. It’s not a phase that people grow out of, which was what was already predicted in the early days.”

Read our review of ‘Heartbreak Is the National Anthem’ by Rob Sheffield.

Today’s pop charts reflect this influence, too, with young women such as Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan releasing 2024’s songs of the summer. “That’s what pop music is now,” says Sheffield. “Taylor very much remade pop music in her image. The idea that pop music by women, for women is pop music. It’s not a subgenre or a sidecar to the story. It is the story. That’s an astoundingly huge innovation.”

And Swift’s music has given these musicians and their fans room to revel in the entire emotional experience of a song. “She was never writing songs that ended as songs. [It isn’t] ‘oh, what an elegantly turned verse, what an expertly turned chorus,’ ” Sheffield says. “She always wanted those songs to make a mess in your heart and your mind and keep making a mess.”

Heartbreak is a love letter to the songs that have created that mess in Sheffield’s own heart, and an invitation to bathe in the music. Swifties, in particular, are likely to find themselves queuing up track after track as they read—at least, this one did—and join Sheffield and me in shout-singing his book’s title again and again.

Photo of Rob Sheffield by Marisa-Bettencourt.

 

 

 

 

 

In Heartbreak Is the National Anthem, Rob Sheffield pens a love letter to the megastar and the teenage girls who sing-scream her lyrics.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Lee and Andrew Child’s approach to bookstores would do Jack Reacher proud

What are your bookstore rituals? For example, where do you go first in a store?
Lee Child: My first concern is how good of a breakfast I ate. How much weight can I carry home? I know there are going to be 20 or 30 titles I want. I usually glance at the front tables but start at the back, for the undiscovered gems. Then I calculate how much strength I have left and pick up what I want from the new titles.

Andrew Child: For me this depends on whether I’m browsing or going in for a specific title. I much prefer to browse! How I approach this depends on the layout of the store. Does it have different rooms? Multiple levels? I take stock of the geography and go from there, usually at random. For example, there’s a store in the town nearest to us in a building that started life as a brothel. There’s a central “parlor” that houses the new releases and popular categories, and a bunch of side rooms that now contain the more specialized genres. I like to pick one of the smaller rooms on a whim, start there and move on as the mood takes me. The only consistent factor in visiting a bookstore is to make sure I take a very large bag.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
LC: I started at a tiny local place but quickly read all the books there, so I graduated to a bigger library in the neighboring municipality, which was a long walk and a scary trip on a high footbridge over a canal. I remember it as a huge glass-fronted palace full of books. Ironically, I just got involved in a campaign to secure its funding, and as an adult I realize it’s perfectly normal size. That place both enabled and created my life.

AC: My favorite is my first—the same tiny local place that Lee started in. However, the family moved before I had read everything there and the library in the town we wound up in was just not the same. Not welcoming in the same way. Something to do with the layout or the lighting, maybe? Or the way the librarians sat behind glass screens at a high, impersonal counter? The experience of visiting wasn’t as much fun, but I still went there. I had to. It was the only source of books.

“I have literally never walked past a bookstore without going in and checking it out.”

While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful, or a surprising discovery among the stacks?
LC: Deep stock in a chain bookstore helped me: I found a book about money laundering in the narcotics trade—moving and storing so much cash was an industrial-sized problem for the bad guys. The details within led to the spine of my first book, Killing Floor.

AC: I find that “research”—the profound, story-defining kind rather than fact-checking—works the opposite way around to what people often expect. I never set out to find an interesting topic to write about. I write about a topic I already find interesting, and the reason I find something interesting often stems from a suggestion from a bookseller. For example, a book about white-collar crime that was recommended to me in a store contained a section on malicious ways to short stock, and that became a central theme in Too Close to Home.

Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature?
LC: Not really—I’m so thrilled with the real-world examples I didn’t feel the need for more.

AC: Not literature, but TV. I would love to visit the shop in Black Books, an offbeat British comedy in which the curmudgeonly store owner seems intent on not selling books.

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet? What’s on it?
LC: All of them. Every single one has a quirk or a choice that makes them fascinating. I have literally never walked past a bookstore without going in and checking it out.

AC: My favorites tend to be the kind of quirky gems you discover by chance, tucked away down a backstreet or in a neighborhood you stray into by mistake. As a result, there’s no real way to foresee what they’ll be and where you’ll find them, so it’s not possible to make a list in advance.

In Too Deep by Lee Child and Andrew Child book jacket

What’s the last thing you checked out from your library or bought at your local bookstore?
LC: Yesterday I bought a book about linguistic choices in framing political arguments. I love insights into how things are done.

AC: My most recent purchase was The Battle of the Beams by Tom Whipple, which is about the way that the development of radar shaped the outcome of World War II.

How is your own personal library organized?
LC: Organized is a big word, and I’m not sure I can lay claim to it. Generally, I keep fiction and nonfiction in separate rooms, or at least separate bookcases. Beyond that, nothing. Any form of organizing means every time you get a book, you have to move every other book. That’s way too much!

AC: Lee may be horrified at this, but Tasha [Alexander, his wife and fellow mystery novelist] and I keep our library organized via an app. Every book we buy is added—mainly because we got fed up with the quantity of duplicate purchases we were making.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
LC: Dogs for sure, the same as every other walk of life.

AC: Why pick between them? Why not have one (or more) or each?

What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack?
LC: I’m part of a generation that saw books as expensive, rare and precious, so I wouldn’t dream of eating or drinking in a bookstore or library.

AC: I don’t eat or drink while browsing, either, but I do love it when bookstores have a built-in coffee shop. That way I can dive right into my newest purchase and caffeinate at the same time.

Photo of Lee and Andrew Child by Tasha Alexander.

We asked the brothers behind the iconic suspense series about their favorite libraries and bookshops.
Lee and Andrew Child author photo
FictionLiterary Fiction

Best friends for life, and after

When one of the two central characters in your debut novel is dead, there are unintended consequences, as Anna Montague reveals at the start of our conversation about How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? In the book, Magda, a psychiatrist who is turning 70, takes a lengthy, life-changing road trip with the cremated remains of her best friend, Sara, buckled into the passenger seat beside her.

“My apartment is just covered in urns,” Montague says, speaking from the Brooklyn apartment into which she has just moved. “I’m actually really looking forward to exploring other decor options once the book is out. I have maybe 15 in my entryway.”

In fact, Montague’s late grandfather, who was the manuscript’s first reader, suggested she call her book The Urn. People have already been sending them to her, and no doubt she’ll be getting more with the publication of her highly anticipated novel. What’s more, one of these gifted vessels may actually contain remains. “It sounds distinctly like there are some ashes in it,” Montague says, laughing, “but it seems to be locked. I don’t know who sent it, so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern with that one.”

“I remember wondering what it would be like to try and start over . . . when you’re in your 70s, and you think you have everything sorted out.”

While she was working on the book, Montague lost not only her 100-year-old grandfather, but two other dear people: her 94-year-old grandmother and a woman named Dorothy (Dot), one of her father’s elderly neighbors whom she had befriended. One day, as Montague dog-sat for Dot’s husband, who was traveling, she suddenly realized that Dot’s ashes were in an urn in the room where she was writing. She notes that “many of the impulses that Magda has” towards her friend’s urn in the book—like talking to it—“are very true to real life. At least for me. I found that the desire to connect and pay homage to that person still very much existed in ways that I didn’t expect.”

Montague’s initial inspiration for the story came when her therapist dropped her. “It’s not as sad as it sounds,” she interjects, explaining that during the pandemic, her therapist—whom she guesses was in her 70s—decided to downsize her practice to only patients she was seeing regularly. “When I asked her what she was planning to do with all of that newfound free time,” she continues, “there was a pause. And she said, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll travel.’ I remember wondering what it would be like to try and start over . . . when you’re in your 70s, and you think you have everything sorted out.”

Thinking about her therapist led Montague to the character of Magda, and Sara’s character appeared soon after. “I thought I was drafting a short story,” Montague recalls. “And within a couple of pages, Sara was already there. I thought, ‘Okay, this is perhaps not a short story, and this is definitely about the relationship, the friendship between these two women.’”

Readers who plunge into this heartfelt, well-told saga may be surprised to discover that Montague is only 31. “It is very easy for me to write from the vantage point of a senior citizen,” she admits with a laugh. “Perhaps too easy.” She describes her friendship with an 80-year-old named Lena, noting, “if you just had a profile of the two of us, you would never know that I was the younger one. [Lena] likes dancing to house music and afternoon boat cruises, and I am often in bed with a cup of tea at an hour that I won’t disclose. But I’ve spent a lot of my life around significantly older people, many of whom were mining the difficult space of recognizing that their lives were more than likely half over, sometimes more than three-quarters over.” The conversations Magda has with herself about what it means to enter her 70s are drawn from ones Montague has had “with many of the older folks in my life.”

“Most women I know become happier and more fulfilled as they get older,” she adds, “and I wanted Magda to very slowly come to terms with that.”

 “That’s the absurdity of a road trip, right? You can have it all mapped out perfectly, but you cannot anticipate all of the events that will happen.”

Montague got to know Lena through SAGE, a national organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ elders and fosters intergenerational connections among LGBTQ+ people. Hearing about Lena’s experiences living in New York informed Montague’s writing, including her decision to set How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? in 2011, just before New York state’s Marriage Equality Act.

“One of the things I was thinking about quite a bit while writing was the inherent queerness of female friendship,” she explains. “The intimacies that are allowed both privately and publicly to female friends that aren’t allowed to men. As an adult, for example, I’ll often have a friend stay over, and my male friends would never have a sleepover. . . . Women are encouraged to support each other in ways both emotional and physical [that] are so different from the ways that men are socialized.” She suggests that the intimacy of female friendships can be confusing for male partners, even a source of envy, “because it’s a degree of closeness that they have not been allowed. And maybe it’s even a degree of closeness . . . they have not been able to achieve with their partners, you know, because those needs are being met elsewhere.”

Montague dedicates her book to her friend Isabel, whom she calls “the platonic great love of my life.” They met at summer camp and have been “a constant” in each other’s lives since they were 13. The two talk every day, and as Isabel is a poet, they often confer about writing projects.

Once Montague decided that Magda would take a road trip, she says, “I had a pretty good sense of where she would go, but I didn’t have as much of a sense of what would happen to her emotional or intellectual self along the way. That’s the absurdity of a road trip, right? You can have it all mapped out perfectly, but you cannot anticipate all of the events that will happen.” She adds, “The first draft had many more flat tires and a number of more absurd characters who didn’t make it through to the final manuscript.”

Montague also turned to psychology textbooks for reference. They were useful for chronicling Magda’s psychiatric practice as well as Magda’s own inner struggles, which are much harder for Magda to face than her patients’ quandaries. Montague confesses, “There were many moments when I just wished I could grab Magda by the shoulders and shake her. And then I had to remember that I was the one creating this person and all of her problems—which meant I was also responsible for solving them.” Never fear, readers. The solutions—and the long and winding roads that Magda takes to reach them—are one of the many delights of this book.

The author still feels connected to Magda and Sara, and anticipates that these characters may reappear in her writing. However, she is now “very much in the weeds with the next one”—something completely different. Montague is an extremely busy literary professional: She also works as an editor for Dey Street Books, focusing on narrative nonfiction, science and wellness books. (She recently worked on NPR music critic Ann Powers’ “kaleidoscopic” biography of Joni Mitchell, Traveling.) Montague says that it helps that she suffers from insomnia, which gives her time at night for her own writing. Writing fiction while editing nonfiction dovetails nicely for her. “It feels like there’s just enough distance between the two, but there’s enough overlap that I can learn and apply those learnings to the other,” she explains.

Montague has always filled her life with books, and juggling between different ones is nothing new. As a preschooler in Irvington, New York, she kept books in multiple rooms so that one was always at the ready. She kept one in her bedroom, another in the kitchen and yet another in the front hallway so she’d have something to look at while putting on her shoes. She began writing short stories at a young age as well. “I was always particularly captivated by people and their motivations for—everything really,” she says with a laugh. “I think at the heart of it, that’s always a principal focus and fascination of mine.”

What about that therapist who dropped her and inspired How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? Does she plan to send her a copy?

“Yes,” Montague says. “She was very excited to hear about the book, and we’ve exchanged letters here and there. My current therapist is also excited to read it, but I’m a little scared of what they’ll make of it.”

Read our review of How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?

Anna Montague author photo by Hannah Solomon.

Anna Montague’s empathic debut novel, How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?, follows a woman entering her 70s and coming to terms with the loss of a friend through the twists and turns of a summer road trip.
Author photo of Anna Montague by Hannah Solomon.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy RomanceFantasy

Carissa Broadbent’s latest fantasy romance goes to hell and back

An acolyte of the sun god, Mische saw her life destroyed when she was forcibly Turned into a vampire. After murdering the vampire who turned her, Mische is spared from execution when she agrees to journey into the afterlife with Asar, a vampire prince, and resurrect the god of death. Tasked by the sun god with betraying Asar and sabotaging their mission, Mische finds herself questioning everything she’s ever believed in when she begins to fall for Asar.

The Songbird & the Heart of Stone takes us straight into an afterlife that’s as intriguing as it is terrifying. How did you conceive of your version of the road to the underworld?
Much of my process adhered to the improv philosophy of “yes, and . . .” I know that many readers love my books for the hot vampires—and make no mistake, I do also love hot vampires!—but I have a streak that just really, really loves weird, gross, dark magic. I always enjoy creating structures to my magical fantasy journeys that have a strong sense of progression, and better yet if they give me the opportunity to try all kinds of different gimmicks. So, I loosely ran with the general idea of “circles of hell” and thought about what those “levels” might look like in the context of the Nyaxia world. Then I mapped each of these levels to the character arcs for Mische and Asar, and tied them into the lore of the gods’ story. This piece was the most fun for me!

So far in the Crowns of Nyaxia series, we’ve been inside the heads of three characters: Raihn, Oraya and Mische. Mische has a very different internal monologue than any of the others. How did you get into her head to really capture that change in narrative voice?
Going from Oraya’s cynical, hard-edged voice to Mische’s optimistic and thoughtful one was a little jarring in the beginning. But, I had a baby in between writing The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King, the previous book in the series, and Songbird, so I had a lot of time to think about the inner workings of Mische’s brain during my maternity leave. I got to know her a lot in borderline-hallucinatory brainstorming sessions at 3 a.m.!

“There’s a lot more to power than physical strength . . .”

Luce, Asar’s beloved necromantic dog, is undoubtedly going to steal some readers’ hearts (just as she stole mine). How did she come into the picture?
It’s only now that I realize I cannot remember when I first conceived of Luce! She came into the picture very early in my brainstorming for Asar’s character. He’s introverted, rigid and definitely a bit scary, but boy does he love his dog! (Rightfully so—she is a very good girl.) I believe that platonic relationships are just as important as romantic ones. It’s important that we see the characters reflected against someone else who is meaningful to them. In this case, Luce really helped me define Asar, and took on an (after)life of her own from there.

Architecture—whether it’s the impressive structures of the underworld or the details of the Citadel—gives a distinct sense of character to the human, vampire and godly locations within The Songbird & the Heart of Stone. Did you have any particular inspirations for the look of each major location? 
I’m very flattered by this question, because it’s so important to me that each of the houses feels distinct! My favorite thing about the Nyaxia world is that it’s just so huge, and with every book that ventures into a new corner of the world, I try to make sure that place feels different from everywhere we’ve been before it. Typically, I’ll start with a very general “vibe” for a place, and then I’ll mash together many different influences until I like what I’ve arrived at. I will be the first to admit that the entire creative process on this front is chaotic!

The Songbird & the Heart of Stone by Carissa Broadbent book jacket

You once mentioned that you ended up with the three courts because you couldn’t choose one type of vampire. What were some of your influences in creating the vampire houses, and if you had to join one of the houses, which would it be?
There wasn’t one specific influence for each house so much as each had a general “vibe” I was trying to capture. The Nightborn are the winged, deadly vampires; the Shadowborn are the seductive, scheming vampires; the Bloodborn are the monstrous, bloodthirsty vampires. Of course, these simplistic ideas bloomed into many others as I fleshed everything out! 

I would be in the House of Shadow, because I’m definitely not coordinated enough to be in the House of Night nor intimidating enough to be in the House of Blood. I’d likely immediately get myself killed in the House of Shadow, too—but at least I could hide out in the libraries for a while first.

Despite following the same god, Mische and Chandra have little in common when it comes to both their outlook and their goals. If their roles had been reversed, how would Mische have taken to life as a midwife for vampires? What about Chandra as a vampire?
Chandra and Mische both have been indoctrinated by their god most of their lives, and both of them have very real, very legitimate reasons to justify hatred of vampires. Chandra is so similar to Mische in so many ways, and yet has followed all of those commonalities to a completely different end. Even at the height of her status in her previous human life in her cult, Mische couldn’t fully accept the harsh boundaries of her world. Chandra was likely exactly the kind of acolyte Mische wished she could be in those years: pious, devoted and unquestioningly loyal. But Mische was never going to be that person, for better or for worse. Even if her positions were swapped with Chandra, they would always end up in radically different places.

Just as Chandra and Mische are foils, so too are Mische and Asar. We get Mische’s perspective the first time she sees Asar, but what does Asar think of Mische at first sight?
I can’t answer this question in too much detail because it might be something we cover in the next book! In a super general sense: Asar knows right away that Mische is unusual, and he’s intrigued by her right off the bat. Some of that is just because he’s a guy who likes to know things, and Mische is objectively unusual because of her background. But even from the start, when he’s underestimating her, he gets the sense that there’s more to her.

Imbalanced power dynamics and the abuse of power are themes that have cropped up several times in Crowns of Nyaxia so far, from Vincent in The Serpent & the Wings of Night to this novel. This is obviously an issue in our own world as well, but do you think that there’s something about vampire society that makes it particularly interesting to explore? 
The exploration of power runs through the entire series. In the world of Nyaxia, there are just so many different layers to those power dynamics: humans versus vampires, gods versus mortals and, of course, the plethora of interpersonal power dynamics that are specific to each character. What makes this particularly interesting to me is that some groups or characters stand in very different places on the power spectrum depending on the lens you’re looking through. Vampires, for instance, are much more powerful than humans physically, but they’re also often brutally hunted if they venture beyond Obitraes. Vincent, Oraya’s father, was obsessed with maintaining power, but the things he had to do to keep it ended up isolating him—and unforgivably harming those he loved most. There’s a lot more to power than physical strength and having so many different layers in this world has made it particularly fun to explore.

Read our starred review of ‘The Songbird & the Heart of Stone’ by Carissa Broadbent.

Even with her own discomfort surrounding her vampirism, Mische holds views on vampires that seem more nuanced than what we see from Oraya in the Nightborn Duet. How much of that is from their backgrounds, and how much is due to the individuals—and the courts—that they’re dealing with?
I love this question! Mische and Oraya are so, so different. They came from opposite backgrounds. Oraya was surrounded by vampires but constantly told how dangerous the world around her was. Meanwhile, as a missionary, Mische learned to help people become better versions of themselves by looking beyond her initial impressions of them. They embody opposite extremes, and we would have seen that even if their positions and Houses had been swapped—but of course, both still isolate themselves in different ways. 

We get a deeper view of the pantheon in The Songbird & the Heart of Stone, including the very intimate interactions between the gods and their followers. What inspired you to have the gods be so very present (and fallible)?
I love the sheer amount of possibility that the pantheon introduces into this world, and from the beginning, I wanted the gods to be highly present, creating very tangible impacts on the story. It introduces a whole other layer to the hierarchy of the world and another level of power dynamics. It throws open doors that would otherwise be impossible to explore!

Are there any gods who we haven’t interacted with yet who you’re excited to explore further?
I am fascinated by the gods, and they play a much bigger role from Songbird onwards. So, the short answer is “yes, so many!”—but I think I’ll leave it at that rather than risk saying too much.

Photo of Carissa Broadbent by Victoria Costello.

The Songbird & the Heart of Stone starts a new arc in the author’s bestselling Crowns of Nyaxia series.
Carissa Broadbent author photo
Children's & YAMiddle GradeChildren's

Kevin Henkes on his protagonist’s disastrous first day of first grade

I first interviewed you back in 1996, with the publication of Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. I began by saying—a statement that certainly still holds true—“Kevin Henkes’ picture books and novels are a celebration of the ordinary, written and illustrated with extraordinary aplomb.” At that time, you had a 14-month-old son. How has life changed in those decades, and how has it stayed the same, especially in terms of your writing and illustrating?
My 14-month-old son is now 29 and on his own. Life is no longer filled with all the things that go along with kids at home. I do remember periods when it seemed difficult to find long stretches of time to really concentrate on book work. But one finds a way to do it. Now, finding time is not an issue, and the actual work is very much the same. When our kids were little, I always wanted to have a book to be working on and thinking about. It was an anchor in my life. That feeling, that need to be writing, has not changed.

Still Sal’s dedication reads: “For Peg, Mel, Abby, and Margaret, with much love and thanks for answering oh-so-many questions about teachers and teaching.” Who are Peg, Mel, Abby and Margaret, and what did you ask them?
They are my sister, my sister-in-law, our kids’ former babysitter and a dear friend—all elementary school teachers. Over the years I’ve asked them so many questions about curriculum, class size and classroom layout. I’ve asked them how they might deal with certain behaviors. I’ve gotten suggestions for names from them, too. I’m reminded when I’ve talked to them how open, generous, thoughtful and patient they are—not a surprise, but traits to be admired. Over the years, I’ve read to their classes and helped decorate some of their classrooms. I’ve sketched in some of their classrooms too (after hours when no students were around). Some rug and floor patterns and wall decorations have shown up in several of my illustrations.

What has been your proudest publishing moment over the years, more than 50 books after starting your career? Has your confidence grown, and do you sometimes face struggles as you create?
I can’t say I have a proudest publishing moment, although I am amazed when I look back and think that I went alone to New York City at age 19 to look for a publisher. I don’t think I’d have the confidence to do that now at age 63. And yes, I always face struggles as I create. I constantly ask myself questions such as: Why is this so difficult? Will I ever have another idea? Why can’t I get onto the page what I so clearly hear or see in my head?

“I am amazed when I look back and think that I went alone to New York City at age 19 to look for a publisher.”

Sal’s dad is a sculptor who works from his studio in the family garage. He’s a wonderfully involved and emotionally attuned parent who loves to make fun shaped pancakes and is nostalgic as he watches his three children change and grow. Did you channel any of your own emotions or experiences into Papa?
Like Papa, I was a stay-at-home artist parent along with my wife, Laura Dronzek. Like Papa, I often made fun shaped pancakes—although it’s harder to do than you’d think, and Papa is much better at it than I was. And now, since my kids are grown and on their own, I’m terribly out of practice. All of my characters probably have a bit of me in them, but Papa more than others.

Which children’s writers and illustrators have been the most influential for you?
Among the picture book creators who have meant the most to me are Crockett Johnson, Ruth Krauss, M.B. Goffstein, Maurice Sendak, James Marshall, Jean Charlot, Garth Williams and Margaret Wise Brown. As far as novels for children are concerned, my favorite writers include Paula Fox, Beverly Cleary, Eleanor Estes and Lynne Rae Perkins.

Sal has lots of very big feelings about what adults might consider to be small, fleeting problems. And yet, as readers, we care deeply about her struggles and feel her pain, as well as her triumphs and joy. How do you make her inner life so authentic, sometimes funny, and always riveting?
I’ve always been drawn to the ordinary, to small domestic stories. And I love exploring the inner lives of my characters. I’m more interested in the ripple than the wave. “Big, bad, things” don’t tend to be my focus. But what qualifies as a “big, bad thing” is subjective. It may be as simple or complicated as worrying that you got the wrong teacher or that you have to share your room or any of the hundreds of concerns and shortcomings that children everywhere work through every day. Precision and clarity bring the characters’ feelings to life.

“I’ve always been drawn to the ordinary, to small domestic stories.”

You write so seamlessly, and yet I imagine that getting the plot and timing exactly right was an intricate process. Could you discuss your writing and editing process?
I still write my manuscripts by hand in a spiral notebook. And I write slowly—sentence by sentence, word by word—in one draft without an outline. Writing this way requires a huge leap of faith. It is an act of trust—trust that somehow I will know my characters long enough and get to know them well enough that things will come together and fall into place beautifully.

E.L. Doctorow once observed that writing was “like driving alone at night: you could only see as far as your headlights. But you could go the whole way like that.”

Eventually, I will get to the point where there really is only one way for the story to go. It is inevitable. So far, anyway, I’ve always found my way home.

Art is such a big part of Sal’s and her father’s lives, and it’s one of the things that “draws” them together. Could you talk about the role that art plays in elementary students’ lives, as well as its role in your novels?
I’ve always thought of myself as an artist so that’s always been an important part of who I am. Because of that, I love writing about characters who are artists. Several of the characters in my novels—both adults and children—are artists.

I think art is important in the life of a child. I wish that there was more support for the arts in school, and that art in general was treated with greater respect in society.

As an illustrator, do you visualize your novels as you write? Would you ever consider trying a graphic novel?
Writing a novel is very different from writing and illustrating a picture book. But because I am an illustrator, I do visualize my novels as I work. I love creating and describing the spaces in which my characters live. It’s one of my favorite things about writing. I have thought about trying a graphic novel. Who knows? I do think of my picture book Egg as a graphic novel for preschoolers.

I love Sal and her friend Griff’s mini golf course creation with spoons and marbles. Have you made your own?
I have not made my own mini golf course, although my kids built many things like that. I remember very elaborate villages constructed from twigs, leaves, stones, shells, etc.

Also, Sal’s Papa makes a memorable macaroni and cheese recipe. Are you a mac and cheese chef?
Laura is the cook in our house and makes great macaroni and cheese. I’m very good at eating it!

Your Miller Family Stories, including Still Sal, remind me of Beverly Cleary’s books. Might Poppy Miller get her own book someday?
I never intended to write a second book about Billy Miller and his family. But I couldn’t get him out of my mind, and so it felt right to reenter that world. Now, after four books about the Miller family, I would have thought I’d be finished, but I’m getting little signals that there might be another. Maybe someday Poppy will get her own book.

Read our starred review of ‘Still Sal’ by Kevin Henkes.

 

Still Sal once again brings back the memorable characters of the Miller Family Stories.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Red is an earth tone

Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Erdrich is adept at creating all-consuming domestic plots that adroitly reveal broader insights about society, power, economics and our natural world. She’s done so again, to great effect, in The Mighty Red.

The Mighty Red encompasses so much—a community of wonderful characters and a riveting plot, plus a profound look at our relationship with the natural world. What was your initial inspiration for this book?

Inspiration? If only. I get curious about a subject and investigate. There’s no lightning strike. When I want to know something, I keep reading about it, talking to people about it, taking notes. And I make the most of personal experience, of course. I grew up in the Red River Valley, and there’s nothing like the sky there. I was used to seeing the weather coming from a long way off, even though I was a town girl. All I knew about farming was some field labor. I hoed beets and also picked cucumbers or whatever came in season. It was obviously hard work, but I loved being on a girl crew and making good money. It was one of the few jobs you could get before turning 14. My mother and many other Turtle Mountain people picked potatoes near Grand Forks, North Dakota. She and her friends did it every year to make money for school clothes, dragging a gunny sack down the rows.

I’ve worked on The Mighty Red for at least a decade, but finishing the book only happened once I’d accumulated pieces of information, incidents, stories, ideas and, of course, characters.

At the beginning of the book, you write about the Red River of the North, saying, “The river was shallow, it was deep, I grew up there, it was everything.” Tell us about your relationship with the river.

There are so many things I still don’t know about the river that defined so much about my life. I wanted to think about that.

“I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me.”

I love when one of the book’s central characters, Kismet Poe, reads Anna Karenina and says she is “surprised by how much of the book [is] about farming.” The Mighty Red is also about farming, and the details are fascinating. What sort of research did you do? Was it tough to integrate these facts so seamlessly into the narrative?

I read Anna Karenina every few years and the passages about farming are always interesting to me, sometimes more interesting than the doomed romance. My problem with writing about farming was that I found it hard to stop myself. I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me. But then I’d get someone whose profession was connected with these issues, and we’d talk for hours.

Plenty of farmers are anxious to do the best they can for their land. Farming has always been a business, but there are businesses that care, and businesses that don’t. What’s most appalling isn’t in this book. For instance, R.D. Offutt, a giant agribusiness that supplies potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, has bought up land around communities on the White Earth Reservation and is using up fossil water and polluting tribal drinking water there. They operate with impunity. They just don’t care.

And most of that deep aquifer water is gone forever—for fries that are only delicious for six minutes, exactly. But, one might say, oh, those six minutes! Not so. You have to cram them in your mouth all at once, you can’t linger. Once they are 10 minutes old, they are limp, gummy and taste only of late-stage capitalism and mindless greed.

Which character came to you first? Which was the most difficult to write? 

Hugo was the first character I wrote, and honestly they were all difficult. I wrestled with this entire book. So now I’m pretty sure St. Hildegarde (one of several patron saints of books and writers) will look upon me with favor and just cause my hand to move on the page until the next book is finished to perfection.

“I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write.

Tell us about how you settled on Kismet Poe’s wonderful name.

Years ago, I wrote down Kismet’s name. I have no idea where it came from, but I have lists of names and titles. While I was writing this book, my daughter Pallas raised a baby crow. We both wanted the most special name we could think of at the time, so I consulted my list. So there’s Kismet Poe and Kismet Crow. You can see her on TikTok @__pallas.

Also, my hope is that someone comes to me at a signing and says, “I named my treasured child for your character, Kismet.” I’d be so delighted. So far, besides Pallas’ crow, the only thing I know of named Kismet is a giant candy store on the way to Duluth.

Without giving anything away, Kismet’s father, Martin, is particularly intriguing! Did any of his actions surprise you as a writer? He seems to exemplify what you described in an interview with Time as “the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write.”

This book is set during the economic collapse of 2008–09. What Martin does is only what a lot of people wanted to do. I didn’t think of what he did as villainy, but yes, I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write. I have to amuse myself.

The book club scenes in the novel are marvelous! Are you in a book club?

I am not in a book club these days, but I did run the Birchbark Books Singles Book Club at our bookstore in the early days. Everyone who came to our meetings was incredibly introverted. Nobody talked, everyone seemed embarrassed to be there, and after the meetings were over everyone raced off in different directions. Was it a failure? Perhaps not. I like to think that, after all, some strange alchemy took place. By serendipity, perhaps, a couple of the members met in a grocery store checkout line. They bonded over the weirdness of the book club, went back to one of their apartments, shared the groceries, etc., and a savior was born.

Read our starred review of The Mighty Red.

Author photo of Louise Erdrich by Jenn Ackerman.

Love, a river and sugar beets—in Louise Erdrich’s stunning 19th novel, it’s all connected.
Author photo of Louise Erdrich by Ackerman + Gruber @ackermangruber
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionHorror

In Rivers Solomon’s hands, a McMansion is just as scary as a creaky old Victorian

Ezri Maxwell and their sisters fled the house they grew up in—a malevolent McMansion in a gated community where the Maxwells were the only Black residents—as soon as they were old enough. Their parents stayed, and now they’re dead, seemingly in a murder-suicide. To finally face the traumas of the past, Ezri and their sisters will have to return to the nest. 

Model Home is a striking take on a haunted house novel, and in its pages you make it clear that you know the trope’s lineage well. What are some of your favorite haunted houses, and what drew you to the house-as-monster motif?
Having a favorite haunted house feels a little like having a favorite serial killer—it’s hard to hold something in any kind of esteem when what gives it its cultural hold is its degree of terror. I came first to the haunted house genre, if it can be called a genre in its own right, via film. Alejandro Amen&aacutebar’s The Others (2001) upset all my ideas about how we define a haunting in the first place, and for that reason was extremely formative for me when dreaming up Model Home. 

I also can’t talk about Model Home without discussing Toni Morrison’s Beloved. They don’t have much in common at first glance besides families surviving in, to use Morrison’s word, spiteful homes, but both books also deal with the United States itself as a kind of specter, an entity that possesses. There’s so much that cannot be exorcized, no matter how much we will it. 

 “When writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?”

Model Home is a very internal novel. Can you talk a little about what it was like getting inside Ezri’s head?
Ezri has an extremely fractured, poorly realized identity. At many points in the novel, it’s evident they don’t see themself as a person or self at all. Still, they’re extraordinarily observant and self-examining. Getting into Ezri’s head was a little like writing about a subject the way a scientist might, with a very keen, cold, objective eye. I wrote Ezri the way I’d write someone filling out a lab report about themselves, trying desperately to understand something they never could.

One of the more unique features of the prose in Model Home is the lack of dialogue punctuation when Ezri is remembering a conversation, rather than actively taking part in it in the present. Why did you choose to use quotation marks for conversations in the present but not in the past?
Everything that happens in the past is happening in Ezri’s memory, which necessarily has a dreamlike quality to it. When writing, I aim as much as possible to use the tools of language and prose to mirror various feelings and phenomena. The lack of quotations in the memories calls to attention the haze and murkiness inherent in the act of remembering.

Model Home by Rivers Solomon book jacket

A narrative featuring a heavily racist community could have (obviously) been set in a lot of places. Why did you decide to set Model Home in the suburbs of Dallas?
I spent a lot of time as a kid in the North Dallas suburbs, and it will always have a really intense hold on my imagination. Texas, in general, actually. It’s a strange place with strange people (though, of course, that can be said of anywhere). My mother and I used to visit houses for sale  in fancy gated communities just like the one in Model Home, fantasizing about what life there would be like. There was a short-lived TV series set in Dallas called Good Christian Bitches, based on a memoir of the same name. I’ve never seen the show or read the book, but I remember when I heard that name and learned it was about Dallas, I was like, oh, yes, absolutely, correct.

Over the years, I’ve loved seeing the breadth of places where your mind has taken readers—and how strongly you’re able to invoke those places. How do you go about instilling that sense of place within your work?
I was always that kid who could get lost in a fantasy, and I haven’t outgrown that. I live in the worlds I create in my head, fall asleep thinking about them. It’s genuinely a pleasure. The realm of the imaginary, even when what I’m imagining is something awful, is a refuge for me. It’s like real life but more. Or sometimes less. But in just the right ways I need at a specific time. I like to think that by spending a lot of time in these fantasy worlds, I can pull out the details that give a place its uniqueness. I moved around a lot growing up. I am always longing for places I’ve been before. So when writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it? 

I love the environmental contrasts that come up constantly in Model Home—from the heat of Dallas versus the cool of the interiors to the difference between Texas and the U.K. Why did you highlight the extreme contrasts of these environments?
Contrast makes things easier to see. The fake sterility of a new-build development appears sharper against a crumbling old Victorian. But also, I love place. It’s strange how every city, and every pocket within a city, has a flavor and a history and a strangeness. It feels right and correct to write about it and draw out that uniqueness.

Read our review of ‘Model Home’ by Rivers Solomon.

Emmanuelle, Ezri, Elijah, Eden, Eve—why the “E” names?
There’s nothing special about the letter “E” in particular—They used to have all “F” names in a previous draft!—but I thought Eudora might be the sort of parent who would give all of her children names with a similar theme or sonic motif. Since she and her husband shared “E” names by coincidence, she decided on the letter E for her offspring: Ezri, Emmanuelle and Eve. I think the fact that Eve and Ezri kept up the tradition shows the hold their mother still has on them.

We mainly see the siblings’ father through Ezri’s eyes: a distant man who, while not particularly harmful to their upbringing, certainly has his own shortcomings. Do you think that Emmanuelle and Eve would have the same things to say about him?
I think for all the siblings, their mother was such a massive force in their life that no matter what kind of father their dad was, he would’ve been overshadowed. 

Your work spans several media. Has working with different forms—and video in particular—affected how you approach your writing?
I absolutely think through a multimedia lens when I write. Through playwriting, I’ve learned specifically how to think about bodies in space, how they move, how they interact with the objects in a scene. And I always think about each scene as if it were in a film. What is being communicated through the actions of the characters? What does the space look like? What’s the geography of the room they’re in?

Photo of Rivers Solomon by Wasi Daniju.

The author’s new horror novel, Model Home, is a terrifying new take on the haunted house.
Photo of Rivers Solomon
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Sabaa Tahir takes readers back into the fire

Sabaa Tahir’s Heir kicks off a duology taking place 20 years after the events of her bestselling An Ember in the Ashes series. Heir follows Aiz, a lowborn orphan seeking vengeance; Sirsha, an exiled tracker who takes on a dangerous job; and Quil, the reluctant heir to the throne who faces a threat to his empire. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, all three cross paths as they grapple with a mysterious force committing horrific crimes throughout the land.

What led you to revisit the world of An Ember in the Ashes? Did anything in particular spark the creation of this new duology?

It was really working on the last book of the Ember quartet, A Sky Beyond the Storm, that had me asking questions about one character in particular: the future Emperor. That’s how Heir began, back in 2020. By that point, I’d spent 13 years in the Ember world and planned everything for the characters of the first series. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I didn’t know everything about this world, nor did I know everything about my characters. It made for a very unexpected writing experience!

“I want the conflicts and conversations and victories and heartbreaks and emotions, most of all, to feel real and believable.”

Heir can be read as a standalone, so readers new to the AEITA world won’t have a problem keeping up. But returning fans will be delighted by some callbacks to the original series: What are you most excited for them to encounter in this book?  

I’m excited for all the little Easter eggs I’ve left in the book for them, but I don’t want to spoil the book by giving them away! I’m also very excited for them to meet this new generation of characters, who have their own journeys and stories to share.

What was it like to weave together the complex storylines of Aiz, Sirsha and Quil? 

Complicated. I knew how I wanted them to intersect, but without giving anything away, I’ll say that Aiz’s storyline in particular posed a challenge. I ended up planning a lot of scenes out on notecards, laying them all over the floor and then figuring out how they all fit together visually. It felt a bit like knowing the picture I wanted and having half the puzzle pieces. I had to move them around to see exactly where they belonged and then fashion the rest of the pieces to fit the empty spots.

Which was your favorite character to write?

They each had their own appeal. Aiz was the most challenging to write—I think I learned the most from her. Quil was the most challenging to edit—he ended up needing a lot of time because he was hard to get to know, at first. Once I did get to know him, though, it felt as if a whole world had opened up. Sirsha was just a joy to write. I feel like she walked into my brain fully formed.

Read our starred review of Heir. 

What was it like to continue the legacies of beloved characters from the main series, 20 years later? 

It was so much fun, but also very thought-provoking. Laia, Elias and Helene are characters who have been through a great deal of trauma. How would that impact the way they transition into adulthood and ultimately parenthood? Figuring out the answer to that question was arduous and took many drafts. I also had to focus on letting Quil, Aiz and Sirsha shine in this story. It is in the Ember world, but it is certainly not an Ember book. Finding a balance between the past and present was tricky.

What’s your secret to bringing compelling romance into your fast-paced, thrilling plots? 

Well, romance is the ultimate wrench in the machine, is it not? In my books, my characters are already going through a tough time and then . . . they fall in love!  Their minds go places they tell them not to, their bodies misbehave. They don’t want to fall in love because it is deeply inconvenient, and yet . . . it has happened. It’s a challenging plot twist, it raises the stakes and it is such fun to write something so hopeful in the midst of all the drama. I think finding that joy, (as well as the longing and frustration along the way, of course) is what I focus on when writing romance into my fantasy!

You don’t pull any punches with your stories, especially in Heir—and your fans keep coming back for more. What do you think is the key to winning fans’ hearts with these emotional rollercoasters? 

I wish I knew because I feel like that would make writing much easier! Ultimately, I strive for authenticity. I want my books to feel true, even if they take place in fantasy worlds. I want the conflicts and conversations and victories and heartbreaks and emotions, most of all, to feel real and believable.

Your conflicts, despite taking place in a fantasy world, feel close to reality—for example, characters born into vast inequality are faced with difficult choices in their quests to break free. Is this aspect of your writing inspired by anything specific in real life?

So much of my writing is inspired by historical and current global events. I was an editor of foreign news [at The Washington Post]  after graduating college, years ago now, so I will always carry that interest in global affairs and history with me. The influences range from news stories about refugees, famines and aerial bombardments, to the poetry and literature that arise from the disenfranchisement of entire populations, occupations and those surviving despotic governments.

But ultimately, at the heart of everything I write is the question: Why do we treat each other this way? I think I ask that question because as a writer for young people, I wish to convey the hope that we can be better. And I think that being better, and seeing each other with empathy, begins with asking ourselves this question.

Are there parts of the AEITA world you still want to explore? 

Yes, so many. Entire countries and continents and epochs I haven’t gotten to. I think the stories in this world really are endless. It’s just a matter of if I go hunting for them or not!

 

Heir, the spinoff to Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes series, throws a new generation of characters into a world of chaos and danger.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Ramona Emerson bears witness to the dead

“As a Diné person who has worked in forensics for 16 years, I saw death,” Ramona Emerson says. “I saw death all the time.” 

She speaks by phone from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, explaining how her Navajo heritage and work as a forensic photographer and videographer informed the creation of Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department. Emerson’s first mystery starring Rita, Shutter, was a surprise hit that garnered numerous accolades and awards, including a spot on the National Book Award longlist.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone to read it, to tell you the truth,” she admits. Emerson, who is also a documentary filmmaker, adds, “I’ve never had anyone be interested in what I was doing.” 

Indeed, there has been great anticipation for Exposure, the second book in her projected trilogy. Rita is summoned to photograph a horrific crime scene in the opening chapter: the murder of a retired police detective, his wife and six of their children. The oldest son, a teenager, is a suspect, but the ghost of one of his murdered sisters leads Rita to believe he is innocent.

“. . . you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done.”

Rita’s ability to see and hear the spirits of the dead is both a gift and a curse: The constant din of their voices becomes physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Navajo tradition, however, makes it taboo to talk about death, so Emerson had serious concerns about how her character might be received. “You don’t talk about people once they have died. You have a four-day mourning period and it’s done,” she explains. “So, my biggest fear about writing Shutter was that I was going to have some sort of Navajo backlash.” Instead, she happily discovered, many Native readers thanked her for openly discussing the subject.

“There are Navajo Nation police officers who see death—and nurses, doctors and forensic workers,” Emerson says. “Pathologists, scientists, all these people who work with life and death. And we do our jobs because that’s what we’re trained to do, and we’re good at it. And so, this second book is about this idea of Rita realizing that she has a spiritual side that she’s not tending to.” 

“It’s a really big part of your work-life balance,” she continues. “Like, you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done. And a lot of what I write about in Exposure was Rita’s own healing, embracing the ideas of Navajo traditional culture, and why it’s there to protect you.”

Exposure by Ramona Emerson book jacket

Emerson has experienced a few paranormal events—although quite different from her character’s encounters. Once, while teaching a summer film workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she and two others heard a strange noise in an editing room where they had been having odd technical problems with the equipment. They all turned around and watched a coffee mug move on the table, all by itself. “We saged that editing room out so fast!” says Emerson. In addition, on the same campus, she felt something grab her behind the bleachers in the black-box theater, where she and others were filming a production. “I thought maybe I just stumbled and there was something behind the curtain. But about 30 minutes later, when I got in my car, I had three huge scratches on my arm.”

Emerson has also had her own share of nightmares from difficult cases. In fact, Emerson’s late grandmother was so worried about her granddaughter that she took her to see a medicine man about a year and a half into the job. And in Exposure, Rita’s grandmother travels from the Navajo Nation town of Tohatchi—where Emerson herself grew up—to bring a medicine man to help Rita when her job becomes overwhelming. 

Like Rita’s grandmother, Emerson’s grandmother played a pivotal role in her life. “She taught me to read and she was a big reader,” Emerson recalls. “She was real big on stories. She bought me my first video camera. She took me to the movies, even if she didn’t want to watch them. She just supported that idea of being a storyteller. I wrote these little stories and she always read them.” Although she died in 2001, Emerson notes, “She’s still a big part of my life. I always think about her.”

Despite her abiding interest in stories, Emerson never set out to write crime fiction, and her path to becoming a novelist has been particularly long and winding. Surprisingly, writing has never come easily to her. “It’s hard for me to sit in one place and do one thing for a long period of time,” Emerson says. Instead, her life’s dream was to make movies, and her initial attraction to film involved a touch of forensics, almost as though foreshadowing her future career. 

Growing up in Tohatchi, there wasn’t much to do, so she and her friends watched VHS tapes that they rented from a man in a trailer “with like a hundred crazy strange movies in there.” That included a horror film, Faces of Death, about a pathologist who presents a variety of gruesome deaths. Once the adults left the house,  Emerson recalls, “we’d go and get all of that horrible, horrible stuff that we weren’t supposed to watch, and we’d watch it right away.” Harkening back to Navajo taboos about discussing death, she adds, “So when we watched Faces of Death and didn’t explode, we figured that it’s all just a bunch of hooey.” 

“When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”

Later, when her mother took her to see Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues in a theater, Emerson was transfixed, and decided she wanted to make her own films. After studying film at the University of New Mexico, she had trouble finding a job, which is how she ended up as a forensic photographer. She blindly called a man whose audiovisual company had police contracts. “He was kind of a mean, gruff, walrus-looking guy, and his name was like 10th on the Yellow Pages list.” Eventually, she says, she did photography as well as video work for him, “because I was the only one who could put up with him. He was so mean.” 

In addition to photographing crime scenes, part of her work was making what she calls “day in the life” documentaries to show how peoples’ lives had been compromised by injuries. “My job,” she explains, “was to get the worst stuff on camera and make sure companies settled cases before they got to a jury. Because they knew if the jury saw my video, they would give them way too much money.” She adds, “I would have dreams about these people for months. I think the live people were the ones that stayed with me more than the dead people.” 

However, she says that in both her forensics work and her fiction, focusing carefully on the details of dead bodies helps humanize victims. “I would always think, ‘Oh my God, this is so horrible. This is somebody’s daughter. This is somebody’s mom.’ That’s where my mind always went. And so, by talking about the details, and everything that you could possibly say about who they are and what happened to them kind of honors them in a way.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Emerson’s prose is so immediate, her descriptions so vivid. “When you’re doing a documentary and you want people to understand who a person is, you film their room, you film their hands,” she explains. “You show how dirty their fingernails are. You look at their shoes, where they live, what the town is like, all of that stuff. I think I just attack stories the same way as I would attack a visual story.” She adds, “When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.” 

Read our starred review of ‘Exposure’ by Ramona Emerson.

Plus, she says, “I think people don’t realize how long you’re there [photographing crime scenes]. On TV, it’s like everybody’s in and out in 10 minutes, but when you have a big murder scene or you’ve got something like that first scene in Exposure where there’s a whole family, that could take two or three days of processing. You take thousands of photographs, pictures of every little thing, even if you don’t think it matters. You spend a lot of time out in the boonies by yourself photographing really weird things, or in strange positions, underneath vehicles. So, I think just giving readers the breadth of how many photographs Rita takes gives people a real idea of how hard it is to do the work physically.”

Emerson’s years of forensic work had a bonus of giving her access to her boss’s cameras and editing equipment. She began making her own movies as well, and she and her husband, Kelly Byars (also a filmmaker), formed a production company called Reel Indian Pictures. Byars is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and heritage is a primary focus for both. Their documentaries include The Mayor of Shiprock, about a group of young Navajos who meet each week to improve their small community in Shiprock, New Mexico. 

Emerson also enrolled in a creative writing MFA program at the University of New Mexico, obtaining her master’s degree in 2015. While there, she began writing stories about her grandmother, and was also writing about some of her forensic cases as background for a possible documentary about Navajos who work in forensics. The resulting pages were what she describes as “a weird collection of research and stories”—and she couldn’t figure out how to unify the hodgepodge.

At the same time, Emerson enrolled in a 16-week CSI course offered by the Albuquerque Police Department, hoping to learn more about forensic science and technical procedures. The topic of the first session was a terrible case involving a woman who jumped off a highway bridge, with accompanying graphic photos. “I think half of our class didn’t come back after that,” she recalls. “It was brutal. But I went home and wrote about that case.” 

“. . . it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”

When she presented the chapter to her MFA class, her mentor, novelist Sherman Alexie, responded, “I’m so disturbed. I’m sickened by that chapter. But I want you to make that your first chapter. And add six to 10 pages more, because I also want to know every detail.” Emerson took his advice. “Once I did that, everything else started to fall into place. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ ” Suddenly, her musings and observations coalesced into a first draft of her debut novel, Shutter. 

All told, however, the writing process took 10 years—quite different from the almost rapid-fire way she wrote its follow-up. “I really had 10 years to lament over every page of that first book,” she says. “This time, I just had to move on.” One thing that helped was that she was also working on a docuseries (Crossing the Line) about border town violence and death in several communities surrounding the Navajo Nation, including Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico—both of which are crime scene locations in Exposure. “It was easy for me to research both things at the same time,” Emerson explains. “And it just kind of fell into place.” She adds that she has witnessed policing from the perspective of officers, the court system and lawyers, but also notes, “It’s a different kind of experience for people of color. Policing is about enforcing white laws on brown bodies. I think a lot of people think police protect them, but brown and Black people don’t believe that police are there to protect them. And I think that’s probably why I speak about that a lot in my stories, and about corruption.” 

Just as Rita Todacheene speaks for the crime victims who can no longer voice their stories, Emerson works to champion Native women in both her books and films. “I really feel like there’s not another group of women who are more underrepresented than Native women,” she says. “They’re never talked about; they’re never given a chance. And that’s why I feel the thing I have to do is give them power or give them a voice. Now, because of the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s movement, Native women are more visible. But it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.” 

Emerson is already hard at work on the third book about Rita—although fans are likely to clamor for more after that, even though her story began as a planned trilogy. “I may take a break after the third book and write a different book,” Emerson says. “But I have a feeling that somebody is going to try to resurrect Rita at some point, and it’ll be tough to keep her down as a character.”

Photo of Ramona Emerson by Ungelbah Davila Shivers.

For the forensic photographer-turned-mystery novelist, humanizing the victims of violent crimes is more than just a profession: It’s a calling.
Ramona Emerson author photo
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Wright Thompson’s ‘The Barn’ chronicles the fight to preserve the memory of Emmett Till

In 2020, a long cypress barn near the tiny town of Drew, Mississippi, captured the attention of author Wright Thompson. Here, in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped and then tortured and murdered by a gang of white men. His capital offense? Allegedly whistling at the wife of one of his killers. It’s a story that’s been told by other writers, but in the hands of native Mississippian Thompson, the crime and the troubled soil out of which it grew take on a profound new resonance.

Thompson grew up a half-hour’s drive away, yet he never knew that a nondescript structure just 23 miles south of his family’s home was the site of a savage murder. What’s more: It was still standing, without a marker or sign indicating what transpired there. Thompson learned of the barn from Patrick Weems, a local activist who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, an organization that was formed to push Tallahatchie County to acknowledge its fault in Till’s murder and the obstruction of justice after the crime.

“Ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”

Interviewed from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, in an unmistakably Southern-accented voice that comes rumbling from a place deep in his body, Thompson tells BookPage, “As a Mississippian, I needed to know more about this barn.”

The result is The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, a deeply reported history rooted in that unique and specific piece of ground.

Drew is located within a 36-square mile segment of Sunflower County that, Thompson writes, has “borne witness to the birth of the blues at the nearby Dockery Plantation, to the struggle of [1960s voting rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, to the machinations of a founding family of the Klan, and to the death of Emmett Till.” The exact legal location of the barn is “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian,” a phrase that is repeated, occasionally in altered forms, more than 60 times in The Barn. Thompson says that by the time the book reaches its conclusion, he hopes his very intentional repetition “carries the swelling power of chorus.”

The Barn was a passion project, one that propelled Thompson through hundreds of interviews, some 100 visits to the barn, and archival research in places as distant as Spain and England. However, “this was not work,” he tells BookPage. “This was something I was going to do whether anybody knew anything about it or not.” Though Thompson is best known as a writer for ESPN, his last book, 2020’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last, revealed that his interests extend beyond the world of sports.

 “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one.”

After sketching out the story of Emmett Till’s murder and the predictable, yet inexcusable exoneration of the men who committed it, Thompson moves into a detailed economic and cultural history of that small patch of land the barn stands on and the territory surrounding it. Though his survey spans some 400 years, he homes in most on the period from the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 through 1933, the year Congress saved the cotton industry from collapse amid the Great Depression. In that era, he says, “cotton was oil,” and Mississippi “had a seemingly limitless supply of the world’s most important commodity.”

Thompson says that one crucial element of The Barn is its focus on people like Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who was visiting Mississippi with Till at the time of the murder; Parker’s wife, Marvel; and Drew residents like Gloria Dickerson, who integrated the town’s school system as a child and has spent her retirement working to preserve the memory of Emmett Till and give meaning to his life and death. It was important to Thompson that he honor their efforts to secure justice for Till, he says, “because ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”

Read our starred review of ‘The Barn’ by Wright Thompson. 

The work of Till’s family members and Drew residents culminated in the 2023 authorization of a national monument to commemorate Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, whose insistence on forcing Americans to confront the brutality of her son’s lynching by allowing photos of his corpse to be published in Jet magazine galvanized the Civil Rights movement. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the murder of George Floyd a century later, the killing of Emmett Till is one of the most heinous racial crimes in an American history that’s deeply stained with them.

Thompson also candidly interrogates his own ambivalent relationship to his home state, writing that “the story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.” In this regard, he’s unsparing of his own ignorance. Near the end of the book, for example, he recounts his experience in a boarding school as a 16-year-old, where he festooned the walls of his dorm room with Confederate flags.

Questioned about his choice of decor, he says he had buried the memory for many years, but when it suddenly surfaced as he listened to a speech at an Emmett Till commemoration, he raced home to record it. When asked why he felt he had to take ownership of that long-ago episode, he admits some initial ambivalence, but then says, “Man, if you’re not doing this, you need to give the money back. If you’re not doing this, then everything you say you want this book to be is a lie.” The Barn is an eloquent antidote to Americans’ propensity to forget, and Thompson hopes there will be some healing power flowing from this work.

“The story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.”

“I’m a very proud American,” he says. “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one. And seeing ourselves clearly doesn’t make us a lesser country, but a greater one. If the Mississippi Delta, and therefore America, has any future at all, it has to start with standing on one postage stamp of ground and saying, ‘This is what happened here.’ I certainly didn’t start off with that intention, but that became my sort of prayer for the thing. It’s not a book. It’s a map.”

Even as he expresses that ambition for his work, Thompson is notably humble in describing the product of his efforts: “I feel a profound sense of being a carrier of something, not the creator of it. There are going to be a lot of books written about this murder. There have been; there will be a lot more. So I’m very aware of being a tiny piece in a large mosaic of people still trying to understand how a 14-year-old child gets tortured for whistling.

“You can’t go back in time and stop it. But you can go back in time and understand exactly and specifically over the longest possible arc how all of these people came to be occupying the same piece of land on the same day at the same time in 1955. And I hope that answering that question adds to the mosaic, not just of that murder, but of every one like it.”

Photo of Wright Thompson by Evan France.

 

 

 

 

Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

TJ Klune returns to Marsyas Island

TJ Klune’s gentle yet politically pointed tale of six magical orphans, their devoted caretaker, Arthur, and Linus, the government official who comes to love them, The House in the Cerulean Sea, was hailed as a beloved modern classic practically the second it hit shelves. Klune’s sequel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, is told from Arthur’s perspective as he, Linus and the children continue the fight to protect their makeshift family.

The title card for the novel coming after the prologue felt wonderfully cinematic. How and why did it end up there instead of in the very front of the book?
I thought of some great moments in film, television and video games where the title card comes not at the beginning, but partway through. I tend to be a visual writer, and the thought of the title coming after the prologue felt like a neat little trick. Not only that, it’s different! I want to try and find new ways to tell stories, and this is just the first step.

The technology in Somewhere Beyond the Sea, which takes place in a world just a few steps away from our own, is both fantastical and outdated—almost like what people thought “futuristic” would look like in the 1960s. What inspirations did you have for the setting, especially its technology and time period?
I adore the idea of retro-futurism. It’s kind of funny how I chose what and what not to include. For example, there are radios and computers, but no mention of cell phones or televisions. Music gets played on records. People dress a certain way. It’s timeless, in a way, but also very much in the right now. It gives the illusion of this being a fairy tale of sorts, while allowing me to write about issues of today while still bopping about in the old-school.

The rich and playful sartorial choices in Somewhere Beyond the Sea are delightful. What visual or cultural influences went into our beloved characters’ iconic looks?
OK, stick with me here because this might sound a little weird: You know Studio Ghibli? The makers of such animated film treasures like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or The Castle in the Sky? No one—and I mean no one—can animate food like they can. The soups! The bread! The big hunks of meat! Not only do I want to create literary visuals on par with Studio Ghibli (Reach for the sky!), but I want readers to feel like I do when I see Studio Ghibli animated food. It is such a weirdly specific thing, I know, and yet, it is something that gets stuck in my brain. You can feel the love and passion the animators have over such little details. That’s what I want to do with my writing. I think so many authors can get stuck on the Big Picture which, OK, fair play. To me, however, it is these little details that mean just as much.

“So many decisions are being made on behalf of children, but why is no one asking what they think or want?”

Poetry and song lyrics, especially from jazz standards, are absolutely everywhere, whether it’s via direct quotation, allusion or description. Why is music so important to Somewhere Beyond the Sea, and why the emphasis on jazz in particular?
Music has always been a big part of my books, perhaps none more so than in these two books. But with the sequel, I wanted to push it a little further. Jazz music in particular feels like these characters, given how many variations of jazz there are. Jazz can bounce, it can sneak and slither, sometimes all at once. Particularly, I think of Lucy and Chauncey and Talia [some of Arthur’s charges] in terms of jazz music.

There are multiple moments in Somewhere Beyond the Sea when older generations try to pass down the defense mechanisms of respectability politics, an act that is generally met with justified pushback from the children. What do you hope people—especially older readers—take away from this debate?
That so many decisions are being made on behalf of children, but why is no one asking what they think or want? It boggles the mind that some people seem to think that they can take away books or come down hard on trans students and not expect there to be repercussions. The youth of today are smarter, more worldly than we ever were at their age, and we expect them to just sit there and take it? That’s not going to happen. Kids know what’s going on, and they are furious about it. They walk out of schools in support of their classmates. They’re marching in the streets to show that they won’t let people in power get away with taking away their rights. 

This book is meant to show that no matter how hard you prepare kids for the future, there will always come a moment when you have to step back and let them make their own decisions, their own mistakes. It’s part of growing up. 

Read our starred review of ‘Somewhere Beyond the Sea’ by TJ Klune.

The idea of equity and human rights as an intersectional struggle comes up several times, from comments about nonbinary pronouns, to opposition to queer couples adopting, to race. You could create whatever kind of world you wanted, so why did you decide to create one where transphobia, homophobia, sexism and racism are still issues?
Because I remember how certain people reacted in 2015 when same-sex marriage was legalized. They said things like, “Homophobia is over now that queer people can do what everyone else can!” Do you remember what followed? We were told that allowing same-sex marriage was a slippery slope toward degeneracy. 

And now, here we are, in 2024, and the world has gotten that much worse, especially with regards to the LGBTQ+ community. If we don’t face these things head on, if we don’t call them out immediately, then they fester and grow. 

Same-sex marriage isn’t even a decade old, and we have certain Supreme Court justices signaling they think the 2015 decision oversteps. We were told Roe v. Wade wouldn’t fall, and yet it did. The same could very easily happen with same-sex marriage.

And it boggles the mind that there are people in the queer community—mostly cis white gay men—who are just as transphobic as right-wingers are. Do we really think they’ll stop at the trans community? They won’t. If people in power have their way, they’ll come for the rest of us next. It brings to mind the fun little internet expression coined by Adam Brott on Twitter in 2015: “ ‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

All the children have their own stories and struggles, but Lucy’s transformation into a child who loves actively and fiercely over the course of both books is such a powerful one. How do you balance that with the fact that he is, technically, the Antichrist?
Initially, I chose to include the Antichrist in the first book as I wanted an “extreme,” someone who is capable of great power. It fed into the idea of wanting to explore nature versus nurture. What would happen if a child like Lucy, a child of immense power born of darkness, was given the chance to be a child? What would that look like if he got to grow up just the same as everyone else?

In these stories—particularly in the sequel—we get to see Lucy reckon with the idea of what it means to be human. As he says, it is so hard being human. And it is. What I love about Lucy is that he takes this all in and makes his own decision about what it means to be human, or what it means to be good. Though I adore Arthur, I think it’s important to show that not everything is black and white; there are so many shades of gray that we can fall into, and still try to be good. That’s where I think Lucy is.

“Not everything is black and white; there are so many shades of gray that we can fall into, and still try to be good.”

Arthur’s relationship with the basement changes by necessity when David, a new addition to the orphanage moves in. Why did you put David’s bedroom there?
These stories have always been about healing. What does it look like? How can it be different for each individual? How long does it take, or is it a lifelong process?

Part of Arthur’s healing was to remove the power that some places/people/things can hold over us. In his case, the basement was a place where Arthur was held because he was told he was a monster. To take something that caused pain and suffering and turn it into a beautiful thing, a room for a boy who has never had his own room before, seemed like something Arthur would do. It is for David, yes, but I like to think it was also for Arthur, too.

David mentions wanting to be a monster—and wanting to scare people—as a way of giving them what they want and bringing them joy. To say that Arthur is at first ambivalent about this concept feels like an understatement. How do you think each of their perspectives has changed by the end?
Arthur has spent so long fighting against that word: monster. Not only for himself, but for his children, his community. And then, to have a child come to their home, one who finds power in that word? While Arthur is lovely and caring and would do anything to help, he’s also a bit stuck in protective mode, as many parents are. Bringing David to the island with his monstrous talents was meant to show that even Arthur can sometimes make mistakes. He too needed to grow, and I think David was the best thing for that. 

Lucy mentions Florida as a place to send an unwanted individual, and the existence of Ella Fitzgerald does imply that the U.S. exists somewhere in this world. Does it—and Florida—exist as we know it in your version of Earth, or has Lucy glimpsed its unique horrors through the fabric of the cosmos?
I do believe the U.S. exists in this world, at least some variation of it. And let’s be honest: Florida is probably not so great there, too. How delightful is it that even children who have never been know not to travel there? Though Chauncey would probably enjoy all the hotels along beaches in Florida, he would be dismayed at the fact that the Florida government isn’t allowing rainbow colors to be shown during Pride. As Chauncey says, “Gay rights are human rights!”

Photo of TJ Klune courtesy of the author.

How jazz and Studio Ghibli helped the author write a sequel to his bestselling The House in the Cerulean Sea.
TJ Klune author photo
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews wants out of his genre

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews wants out of his genre.

Or that’s what the husband of Attica Locke, author of the Highway 59 mystery trilogy, said when he finished reading Guide Me Home, Locke’s exceptional final volume in the series. 

“It’s as if he’s kind of done with the cops and robbers of it all,” Locke says of Darren, the flawed lawman who first entranced readers in 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird. There, Darren slipped into seedy Aryan Brotherhood bars to help a grieving wife solve her husband’s murder. His uncle William was the first Black Texas Ranger, and Darren followed in his footsteps, wearing his silver star with pride. 2019’s Heaven, My Home saw him investigating the disappearance of a white supremacist’s son, as Darren’s marriage unraveled and his drinking got worse. Throughout both books, Frank Vaughn, a white district attorney with political ambitions, tries to expose Darren for lying to secure the freedom of an elderly Black man, who was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.

Guide Me Home is set three years after Heaven, My Home. Vaughn is still building his case, and a depressed, soul-weary Darren decides to take an early retirement from law enforcement. The very day he turns in his badge, his troublemaking mother, Bell, shows up uninvited at his family home. Bell blackmailed Darren in Heaven, and she is the key witness in Vaughn’s case. But she brings with her something Darren cannot resist: the kernel of a case. Sera Fuller, a Black college student, has gone missing, and the members of the all-white sorority she joined know more than they’ll admit.

Highway 59 snakes from the northeastern corner of Texas down through Houston, Locke’s hometown, and sweeps southwest to the border. “We would drive up and down Highway 59 all the time to go visit grandparents and relatives,” Locke tells BookPage from her home in Los Angeles. “And those car rides were my early kind of daydreaming out the window, thinking about stories, just making stuff up in my head.”

“I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”

Locke often shifts from project to project, writing novels (Pleasantville, The Cutting Season) and for TV (Empire, When They See Us). The years she spent writing Guide Me Home were catastrophic: COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the 2023 Writers Guild strike all weighed heavily on Locke’s mind as she sent her hero hurtling toward ruin. She asks readers to grope around in the dark with Darren as he confronts truly painful truths, with the central mystery at times taking a backseat to his internal conflict and family drama. 

“Darren is also just my whole heart,” Locke says. “And I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here? He’s not doing all the shoot ’em up, bang, bang, tough guy stuff. Where is all that?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”

And yet, Locke’s take on the missing girl trope is a standout in a genre that sheds girls like skin cells. While Sera is away at a nearby college, her family lives in an insular gated community called Thornhill, where families work in chicken and pork processing factories on-site in exchange for their cookie-cutter houses, K-12 schools and top-notch health care. As is usually the case, the utopian concept is, in practice, anything but. Rather, it’s a modern sharecropping system that keeps workers from ever accumulating wealth, all while they breathe acrid air from factories that might just be making people sick. Sera’s father, a Black Trump supporter named Joseph, has become a puppet for the rich white people who own Thornhill, ready and willing to be the Black face of the “movement” for “compassionate capitalism.” He is clearly lying when he denies that Sera has disappeared from her college campus: Her belongings are found in the trash, including her medication for sickle cell anemia. 

Thornhill only truly clicked one day as Locke walked her dog: “I was thinking about two things that became really clear to people during COVID. We are not taking care of each other in terms of health care. It’s just really fucking difficult to be alive and have health care in this country. And capitalism does not give a shit about workers. . . . I’m realizing the ways in which COVID laid bare these two facts, and somehow they found their way into the soul and the plot of the book.”

Read our starred review of ‘Guide Me Home’ by Attica Locke.

The other valve in the dark heart of Guide Me Home is the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and the escalating danger and sense of alienation it caused for Black Americans. Locke writes that Darren is “profoundly, unimaginatively sad in this world,” in the “fever dream that had been the years since Donald Trump was elected. Years that had laid bare the fragility of democracy.”

“This book series inadvertently became a treatise on the Trump era in a way that had not been intended,” Locke says. “I think in the series, Texas is often a stand­-in for America. There’s a reason there’s that saying, ‘As Texas goes, so goes the nation’ . . . there is a sense that Darren’s ambivalent feelings about loving Texas are, I think, a mirror for a lot of people who have ambivalent feelings about how do we love our country through its worst impulses.” 

Darren can’t imagine living anywhere else, even as the state constantly disappoints him. It disappoints Locke, too. “When I watch it from afar, it frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is,” she says, “when I know it to be, on the ground, infinitely more complex and infinitely less hateful. Now, I say that knowing full well that there are wild pockets of hateful people everywhere, and there are a lot of hateful people in Texas. But there are, I would argue, to some degree, more that aren’t.” 

It’s not lost on Locke, or on Darren, that being a Black cop is complicated. As the series progresses, Darren is at odds with two competing ideologies handed down by the uncles who raised him, Texas Ranger William and defense attorney Clayton: Must Black people be protected by the law, or from the law? Locke lays this out in chapter one: “Sure, it was a sentiment among Black cops these days that ‘Black Lives Matter’ meant a gun and the law had their purpose—safeguarding Black folks in every corner of American life. But Darren felt resentful of the idea that Black cops somehow bore the sole responsibility for this. Surely it was someone else’s turn to do the work of righting the country’s racial wrongs, case by trauma-inducing case.” 

“It frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is.”

Locke echoes this yearning: “There is a limit to what Black and brown folks can do alone to right some racial wrongs. And we kind of need help. And the hope is always that there will be folks who will consider that, just like I didn’t ask for the history on my back of slavery . . . You [meaning this white interviewer] also didn’t ask for all the privileges. You didn’t ask for it, but it’s real. So what do you do with it?”

All of this comes to bear on Darren’s psyche and heart. His alcoholism, present but not destructive in the first two books, is now raging. And his upbringing, developed marvelously in Bluebird and Heaven, comes into question. As an infant, Bell relinquished him to his uncles, and she’s breezed in and out of his life ever since, growing more manipulative and nasty with each episode. Her blackmailing him was the last straw. Darren’s trauma over her abandonment was so severe that he never asked her what happened, but took his well-meaning uncles’ version of the story as the truth. As he investigates Sera’s disappearance and Thornhill’s suspicious origins, he uncovers questions that only Bell can answer. Locke, whose daughter starts college this fall, hopes Guide Me Home will “flip how children see their parents.” The book’s dedication—“For every mother whose child knows only half the story”—conveys this hope, and Bell’s as well. Darren can only find home once he solves one final mystery, that of his own origins. 

The Highway 59 series closes during the 2019 holiday season. In a few months, a global pandemic will take over the world. Darren has no idea what’s coming, but, thanks to Locke’s brilliant storytelling, readers will have faith that he’ll be all right.

Photo of Attica Locke by Victoria Will.

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In the finale of Attica Locke's beloved Highway 59 mystery series, her hero turns in his badge.
Attica Locke author image
FictionSatireLiterary Fiction

Danzy Senna tried writing for TV. Instead, she wrote Colored Television

Over two decades of writing books, author Danzy Senna (Caucasia and New People) faced the same obstacle again and again: “I kept coming up against the problem of my work being uncategorizable and me being uncategorizable.” At 53, Senna has earned critical acclaim, but she’s still keenly conscious of “being a writer who doesn’t fit into the binary world” in terms of how the American public consumes art and how publishing companies package race and fiction for publicity. As someone of mixed race who writes about the complexities of race, sex and class, she explores subjects that the industry has yet to gain comfort handling.

At the same time, living in Los Angeles, Senna was constantly aware of the “glittering television world” surrounding her. This parallel cultural universe was not just co-existing with the scruffier literary world she inhabited; it had “sort of taken over everything in our public conversation.”

Curious about what lay beyond the literary landscape, Senna decided to dip into television writing—and in the process, she found the seed for her fourth novel, Colored Television.  Speaking to BookPage by video call from a sunny, mid-century modern den in her home, Senna talked about the origins of her novel, and how her life, past and present, has fed into her art.

“It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

At first, there was just a kernel, an observation about her TV meetings: There was something inherently humorous and provocative about them. The network employees Senna met with were just sort of “cravenly thinking” of Senna’s mixed identity. “It’s almost pure, in a way, compared to the literary world—the way they think about how to market you.” Tongue only sort of in cheek, Senna remarks with a chuckle, “It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”

Then, a few years ago, Senna recalls, in the midst of the renaissance of television, and an accompanying hunger for diversity on screen, the story of struggling literary writer Jane Gibson came to her nearly fully formed. “I thought it would be funny if this character kind of hit a wall [as a novelist] and was ready to sell her soul to Hollywood.”

While there are “autobiographical undercurrents” in the book, Senna has a way of mining experience as a starting point and then letting the imagination and satire take flight. In writing fiction, “I’m looking for the story that didn’t happen within the story that did . . . taking a shred of truth and then mining it for the fictional possibilities,” she says. Her softly cutting, satirical sensibility is a key part of Senna’s brand and drives the process of transforming experience into fiction through embellishment and intentional provocation.

“I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton. And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

The novel gains further complexity through its supporting characters, whose takes on making and selling art amid American racial dynamics represent different parts of Senna’s own experiences and perspective. One of these characters is Hampton Ford, a successful Black producer Jane meets with. While his name calls to mind the HBCU Hampton University and ties him to civil rights activist and Black Panther member Fred Hampton, it’s meant to be a bit ironic, conveying a certain kind of racial consciousness, while also drawing a contrast between Hampton’s upbringing and where he landed. “I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton,” says Senna. “And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”

As Senna explains, Hampton’s perspective is defined by “fear and the idea of scarcity,” a sense of precarity even in times of success. It’s the realization that, while “the white gaze looks at you [now] and says that you’re valuable,” as a Black artist, you know that being in vogue and in demand may not last: “A year from now, they may have moved on.” Senna says that this “sense of fleeting interest in your story” cultivates “a kind of desperation . . . that I think every writer of color has felt.” In the wake of the publishing industry’s retrenchment from its promises during 2020’s vaunted summer of racial reckoning, it’s easy to see how this perspective is reflected in a broader social reality.

While Senna is sympathetic to Hampton, her satire cuts sharper in other places. One of Colored Television’s defining passages is a gutting of a certain kind of tokenized nonwhite, neoconservative thinker often celebrated in white circles—a type exemplified by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for The Atlantic who previously thought of himself as Black but no longer does. Williams once declared to Senna, she reveals, that her own identification as Black was “a legacy of slavery.” In the novel, Jane delivers the perfect takedown of Williams’ disavowal of race: “Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an ‘out damn spot’ situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.”

Senna’s point of view is informed by growing up as a mixed-race girl in Boston, where she came of age in the 1970s and ’80s. As she so effectively captured in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, those were turbulent and difficult times for her family and their community. Boston was infamously resistant to integration. “It was like [what] my mother calls . . . the ‘Deep North,’” she says. To get across what it was like to be a mixed-race person or a Black person in Boston at the time, she says, “you would have to say you were from Alabama in the ’50s . . . it was so racially fraught.”

Senna’s mother, poet Fanny Howe, is a prolific writer from a wealthy, white New England family. Her accomplished editor father, Carl Senna, is a Black man from a somewhat murky, unrecorded working class background in the South. The two had a contentious divorce when Senna was 7. After living through that tension, when it came time to apply to college, to Senna it felt “like leaving the scene of a crime.” She applied to schools in California, and chose to attend Stanford University, just outside Palo Alto and thousands of miles away from the difficulties of home.

Senna’s memoir was a bit of her own personal reckoning, and it stirred up pain that stuck around for a while. Today, she looks back on her hometown with equanimity, saying, “I go back and I sort of have a lot of affection for it.” The older she gets, the more she realizes, “that was a formative thing. I don’t think I would have had the same level of politics and consciousness had I been raised in a different kind of environment.”

She’s also glad to have returned to writing fiction, which gets her “closer to these eternal and subconscious truths about race and family. The problem with memoir is you can stick to the facts, but the truth of the story changes over time. Your relationship to the facts changes. . . . So the true story is always changing, but the made-up one remains true.”

Read our review of Colored Television.

In the author's biting and hilarious fourth novel, a literary writer pushing the limits of her patience and her pocketbook gives Hollywood a shot.
Author photo of Danzy Senna. (c) Dustin Snipes

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