An interview with Arushi Raina, by Y S Lee

Arushi Raina's potent debut novel, When Morning Comes, is a coming-of-age story set in apartheid-era South Africa. Told by four alternating first-person narrators - an angry revolutionary, an ambitious gangster, a son of extreme privilege, and a peaceful activist - it sets the narrators' personal stories against the backdrop of the Soweto Uprising of 1976.



Here's the official description:

Zanele is skipping school and secretly plotting against the apartheid government. The police can't know. Her mother and sister can't know.

Her best friend Thabo, schoolboy turned gang member, can tell she's up to something. But he has troubles of his own—a deal gone wrong and some powerful enemies.

Across the bridge, in the wealthy white suburbs, Jack plans to spend his last days in Johannesburg burning miles on his beat-up Mustang—until he meets a girl with an unforgettable face from the simmering black township—Soweto.

Working in her father's shop, Meena finds a packet of banned pamphlets. They lead to a mysterious black girl with a secret, a dangerous gangster with an expensive taste in clothes, and an engaging white boy who drives a battered red car.

A series of chance meetings changes everything.

A chain of events is set in motion—a failed plot, a murdered teacher, and a secret movement of students that has spread across the township.

And the students will rise.

When Morning Comes is a striking achievement. With four very distinct narrators who are often hostile to each other, it would be easy for the novel's structure to fracture or spin out of control. Instead, it coheres. Raina's handling of race and politics is both subtle and consistent. And her prose is by turns vivid and moving, striking and restrained - precisely the vehicle such a story demands. After finishing it, the novel haunted me for days. I'm so glad that Raina kindly agreed to answer some of my more persistent questions here.

YSL: I really admire the way you tell the story through four interlocking narratives. Each voice is incredibly distinct, the characters are frequently at odds with each other, and yet the novel holds together – an impressive technical accomplishment! Why did you choose to structure it in this way?

AR: I’m tempted to say that the book wrote itself that way—it’s a story about collisions, the personal, day to day collisions the characters have with eachother, against a backdrop of the larger collision of the Soweto Uprising of 1976. I needed to go to different parts of the city, to see things differently, to create the underlying tension in the story. But the truth is, I’ve been playing with different points of views for a while, I love how Zanele, Thabo, Jack and Meena all tell the story differently, and how the writer (me) and the reader has to come to terms with which, if any version they most relate to.

YSL: You were born in South Africa, but long after the novel’s action takes place. What inspired you to write about your earliest homeland and what kind of research did you do to establish a sense of time and place?

AR: For the longest time, I didn’t write about South Africa, partly because I didn’t feel I was able to, and partly because to write about home in North America made me feel like I was trying to pull some kind of exotic card out my bag of writer’s tricks. I was partly right about the first, wrong about the second. To write about something familiar from home may seem exotic to others, but may be the story you need to tell, which is less exotic to you, than, say writing about an epic slumber party in the heart of Jersey City (not that there is anything wrong with slumber parties or Jersey City). Like many, though, I finally felt inspired when was leaving Johannesburg to immigrate to Canada. And my doubts about being able to do the story justice, helped. I learned to tread carefully (but more on this later).

It was a tipping point, in many ways, but immigration is not super convenient for research. At high school, we’d spent a number of years studying apartheid history, and the Soweto Uprising in particular. This was a starting point, and a good one—I’d been a teenager then and remembered the experience of reading about it in a textbook. But it needed to be real. And for me, to make history breathe is to make it fiction.

After that, it was a lot of trawling through English and American libraries for the odd reference book on primary resources, and of course, the internet. And South Africans, too.

Arushi Raina, presently of Vancouver, B.C.

YSL: Inhabiting the minds of two black characters living under apartheid is a bold step. How could you feel confident that you were doing them justice? And what do you make of Lionel Shriver’s recent provocations on the subject of cultural appropriation?

AR: I think it is, and having grown up in Johannesburg, the complexities of the country and race relations are raw to me in a way that’s hard to describe. Being closer makes it harder to describe the context in large, defined brushstrokes. And the short answer to your question is no: I can never be fully confident that I’m doing them justice. I can only give my very best shot, I can tread carefully, questioning my assumptions at each step, pulling forward a universal humanity while not shying away from some of those differences. I can look at primary sources and read the words of the South African township youth (there are a number of speeches and records of letters available) - these words are sharper, more eloquent, than anything I could put to paper.

I think the attempt to reach and respectfully tell stories in other voices, marginalized voices is important, as much as the openness to further discussion and debate on my attempt, and depiction is important. I don’t want to be defensive, I want to try my best because it is an important story rarely told, and I want to hear all people’s views, least not South African teens. I think Lionel Shriver is contributing a specific point of view to the discussion, and she’s put forward a number of rather out-there examples. Living in post-apartheid South Africa, interacting with First Nations groups in Canada has made me aware that where there is pain, there is a need to tread carefully. But this does not lessen our responsibility to empathize and try telling difficult stories, always empowering these communities to either be involved or discuss/question what we do as storytellers. That’s really where our learning begins, or at least I hope it does.

YSL: Early in the novel, Thabo says, “it was stupid to put the one thing that mattered to you in a red dress for everyone to see”. And yet he does, repeatedly, because he doesn’t believe he has a choice. This is a powerful metaphor for a lot of things that happen in the novel. Is choice – or the lack thereof - largely an illusion for your characters?

AR: That’s a tricky one. I’d like to think that the characters, including Thabo, come face-to- face with a narrowing pool of difficult choices. And their resilience is in their ability to make and come to grips with these choices.

YSL: Each interracial relationship in the novel begins with antagonism, or at least guarded suspicion. This is logical enough and I imagine there’s a lot of historical evidence for interracial romances like Jack’s and Zanele’s. I’m curious about Zanele and Meena, too. How unusual was it to form platonic friendships across racial barriers?

AR: Pretty unusual. Talking to South Africans who lived through that time, you only did so if you really stuck your neck out. Your entire life wasn’t designed for you to do so. In the rare cases they did, it was through anti-apartheid activism, which, to Meena’s credit, she does get embroiled in.

YSL: Family bonds seem largely broken and/or ineffectual in your portrait of South African society. Jack’s parents value his academic achievements and whatever glory his bright future can reflect upon them; Zanele’s mother is trapped both by single parenthood and institutional racism; and Meena’s relationship with her father is dutiful but remote. This is surely not a coincidence! What connection do you see between a dehumanizing body politic and its subjects’ humanity?

AR: You know, I never really noticed this until you pointed it out! The parents sort of wrote themselves that way, inflected of course, through the point of views of their children. As you’ve pointed out, in many ways the apartheid institution wears at the very core of the family—in Zanele’s case, her family has been split apart by labour and group area act laws, breaking open all the cracks that may have lain underneath a family that didn’t suffer the same injustice. In Meena’s, she has to come to terms with the strange triaging of color, where Indians were treated marginally better to black people. To take advantage of this slight preferential treatment is a recipe for survival, and Meena’s father has already surrendered to it.

I also think that families can be a source of insulation from the threats of the wider world. In many cases, they were, in apartheid South Africa, from my friends’ parents’ accounts. For Meena, Zanele, Thabo and Jack to be who they end up being, they needed to have the insulation damaged, or ripped off.

YSL: Could you leave us with a quotation (or two) that really encapsulates the flavour of When Morning Comes?

AR:

“It’s the kind of storm that happens only on the Highveld, the thunder loud and rapid. She doesn’t speak. I need her to. Maybe she’s counting the people who’ve died since we first met.”

YSL: Thank so much, Arushi. While it's a cliché to call a novel timely, that is precisely the case here. I hope When Morning Comes is very widely read, especially at a time such as this.

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This post is my (Ying's) last as a regular History Girl. Thank you to everyone who read and commented over the past two years! If you'd like to keep in touch, please consider signing up for my sporadic author newsletter.

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Arushi Raina grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. So far, Arushi’s also lived in Egypt, Nigeria, India, the US, UK, and most recently, Canada. At Vassar College in New York, Arushi studied Economics and English, where she was able to put together the beginnings of When Morning Comes. Besides writing, Arushi enjoys travelling, arguments, and long car rides. As a day job, Arushi works as a consultant. One day she’ll explain what that means.

Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn mysteries (also called The Agency quartet in North America). She's presently writing a novel set in Southeast Asia during the Second World War.

An interview with Stephanie Burgis, by Y S Lee

Stephanie Burgis’s Masks and Shadows (Pyr Books) is a bold historical fantasy set in Hungary, 1779, at the height of the Habsburg monarchy. Featuring opera, alchemy, political intrigue and “the most famous castrato in Europe” as its romantic hero, it’s an astonishing, richly detailed novel. As both a musician and a music historian, Burgis writes about the power of music with unusual freshness and subtlety. She also has a keen eye for social and cultural detail. And, as fans of her middle-grade Kat, Incorrigible trilogy might expect, there’s a difficult and compelling sibling relationship at the heart of the story.

Masks and Shadows stayed with me long after I finished it and I’m so eager to read its companion novel, Congress of Secrets, to be published this November (also by Pyr Books). Steph has kindly agreed to answer a few questions for us here.

YSL: So, the Habsburgs! And the astonishing rococo confection of Eszterháza Palace! What first drew you to this time and place?

SB: It all started with my love for late-18th-century opera. Vienna was seen as a cultural capital of Europe – but Joseph Haydn, one of the two legendary composers of the era (along with Mozart) only ever got to visit Vienna in the winters. He spent most of his life stuck in the middle of the Hungarian countryside, in his employer Prince Nikolaus’s palace, Eszterháza. He and Mozart form a really interesting contrast to each other, because Mozart was the first famous composer to strike out on his own, move to Vienna and try to support himself as a capital-A Artist - whereas Haydn was a loyal retainer to the Esterházys for almost all of his life. He lived where they lived and composed what they wanted him to compose. He wasn’t even allowed to sell his music elsewhere without their permission – and since he wrote his operas to suit Nikolaus’s particular taste, they didn’t follow all of the expected formulas for the operas performed in the theaters in Vienna.

Haydn loved the rich musical life of the capital, which he only got to experience during Prince Nikolaus’s annual visits – but his cultural isolation for most of the year led to the development of a really interesting and original musical style on his part, and Eszterháza became famous for the glorious music performed there. His operas are gorgeous and idiosyncratic, and his music was part of what drew visitors to Eszterháza from all over Europe.

I wrote my M.A. thesis on Haydn’s opera Armida, and I spent three years researching a PhD on opera and politics in Vienna and Eszterháza between 1765-90. At the end of the three years, I only had half of a thesis written…but I did have a whole first draft of Masks and Shadows! So the research turned out to be useful after all. ;)

YSL: You describe your hero, Carlo Morelli, in the clearest possible terms: a musico with a “high, sweet tone of… voice”. Other characters see him as a “freak”, his voice “alien”, his face “disturbingly feminine”. While he’s also brilliant, compassionate, good-looking and rich, making him the romantic hero is still a radical - and possibly divisive - move. Can you tell us about this decision? And how have readers received Carlo as a hero?

SB: The first time that a draft of this novel was sent out on submission, back in 2005, it was taken to Acquisitions meetings multiple times only to be shot down by marketing departments who said they didn’t know how to market a romantic fantasy where the hero was a castrato. Luckily, times have changed, and by the next time it went on submission, in 2014, people were much more receptive to that idea. Whew! (And I love my publicist at Pyr Books!)

Part of my inspiration for this book actually came when I was reading about how divisive the idea of castrati romances were in eighteenth-century Europe. The castrati were famous for their sex lives as well as their voices, having tumultuous romantic affairs with both women and men, but when they actually fell seriously in love and wanted to get married, it became a much more provocative social issue. The question of whether castrati should be allowed to marry was a hotly debated issue that went to court again and again throughout the century - and which brought up a lot of the same arguments that would return in the late 20th- and early 21st-centuries over the issue of gay marriage.

The Catholic church took the stance that castrati could not be allowed to marry because they could not physically father children (the only “true purpose” for marriage); the Church of England initially said that they could legally marry, but then in a landmark case near the end of the century, they annulled a castrato’s marriage (against his will) because they said it could never have been a “real” marriage anyway.

Again and again, though, women and castrati did fall in love and want to marry, and as I read about those court cases, I started imagining my own characters…who of course are officially the most unsuitable match possible for each other…but who are perfect for each other anyway!

YSL: Joseph Haydn and Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy are significant characters in Masks and Shadows. That takes some nerve! How do you reconcile the authorial desire for maximum drama with your historian’s duty to real figures?

SB: It can be nerve-wracking! What really helped in this case was that I’d spent so many years reading about Haydn and reading his letters that I had a very vivid sense of him as a person – I felt very confident in imagining how he would have reacted to all the situations in my novel. And Prince Nikolaus cut such a dramatic figure in real life, it wasn’t necessary to add much for the sake of fiction!

Stephanie Burgis, author of Masks and Shadows

YSL: You treat servant characters with the same interest and dignity as the Empress of Austria, and at least two of your characters, Carlo and Anna, threaten the entrenched social hierarchy in complex – and potentially revolutionary – ways. At one point, even the conventional and dutiful heroine, Charlotte, utters something so offensively democratic that she’s forced to flee the room. What shaped your interest in social mobility and radical (for the time) political ideas?

SB: The late eighteenth century is a fascinating time because on the one hand, it was the era of the Enlightenment, when philosophers were openly debating the natural rights of all men, regardless of birth; but on the other hand, it was still a rigidly class-based and hierarchical society. I’ve always been fascinated by the glittering history of aristocratic Europe – while also being perfectly aware that if I had been alive myself in any of those earlier time periods, I would have been the one scrubbing the ballroom floors rather than dancing in glamorous outfits!

As far as I know, there’s not a single upper-crust ancestor in my family history, whereas there were a lot of poor farmers, tailors, etc. The wealthiest ancestors I know of were my Jewish-Ukrainian ancestors, who had to flee the Ukraine in the early 20th century in the wake of a vicious set of pogroms. By the time they’d reached America, all of their money had been spent on their escape – and my great-grandfather (the child of the family) ended up becoming a founding member of the United Auto Workers union. So I grew up hearing stories of the battles they fought for reasonable working hours, etc. – and when I started researching those glittering 18th-century upper-class lifestyles, it was natural for me to be just as interested in the servants who made it all possible!
 
YSL: While we’re talking about Anna, a maid who becomes an opera singer: is hers a story lifted from history? It sounds like a fairy tale but I desperately want it to be true!

SB: I’m afraid her story wasn’t lifted from history! But it was a plausible story in that particular situation. Opera singers often came from families of professional musicians, but that wasn’t always the case, and many of them did have interesting and unusual origin stories.

YSL: I love that, in a time of heavily powdered hair, the revelation of someone’s hair colour becomes an intimate detail. The clothing, too, is remarkable – the skirts are immense and stiffly starched (Charlotte taps her finger against hers, at one point). Was it tricky plotting action scenes while respecting the limits of women’s fashion?

SB: It really was! Aristocratic women’s skirts were so wide at this point that they presented real challenges for choreography especially at the climax of the novel. They were, of course, gorgeous in a very stylized way – but I had a lot of fun writing the scene where Anna (the maid-turned-opera singer) has her first experience of wearing a noblewoman’s outfit as the costume for one of her operatic roles. She grew up as a servant, so of course she saw all the (massive) advantages that came with aristocratic birth – but then, her clothes at least allowed her the freedom to move (so that she could get her work done)! Clearly, any sensible person would choose the safer and far more privileged life of a noblewoman over that of an overworked and underpaid maidservant, but it’s still a fun moment to bring out that trade-off.

YSL: Your Kat, Incorrigible trilogy (for children), features such warm, delightful sibling relationships. But in Masks and Shadows, the idea of family becomes deeply sinister: parents use their children as political tokens, husbands are either impotent or despotic, and sisters find themselves locked in childhood roles that can only damage them as adults. The novel’s one mutually caring couple exists outside the legal definition of family. How did this reversal come about?

SB: Honestly, most of those relationships in Masks and Shadows are taken directly from the historical record. Prince Nikolaus really did relegate his wife to the shadows in their own palace (even though he refused to allow her to move away from it) while he ruled with his young mistress by his side; his mistress really was married, and her husband was paid off by Nikolaus. (We know very little about the real mistress and her husband – whenever Haydn referred to the mistress in his letters, he did it in code, because discretion was extremely important for a loyal servant - but historians have picked out those details.) My aristocratic heroine, Charlotte, is a fictional character – but aristocratic young women were generally married off for dynastic reasons, and since they were raised by an army of servants and only tended to see their parents for short, controlled visits, it’s not surprising that they often didn’t have very close, loving relationships.

Of course, Charlotte’s family goes beyond that norm, which is part of how she and her sister Sophie developed their particular relationship dynamics – Charlotte was her sister’s protector during their early years, which helped save both of them at the time, but which hasn’t led to an entirely healthy relationship as adults.

On a more metaphorical level, this book is very much about the roles that people were (and are) expected to perform in real life just as much as in opera – and it was important to me to show Charlotte being pushed into finally questioning those roles and the rules she’s grown up with. (Her epiphanies are also quite plausible within that time period – there were a number of really interesting 18th-century noblewomen who notoriously flouted their families to run off with “unsuitable” matches of one type or another!)

YSL: Could you leave us with a quotation that encapsulates the flavor of Masks and Shadows?

SB: Of course! I like this one from Carlo’s point-of-view, at the end of his first scene as he rides through the front gates of Eszterháza:

“The most notorious alchemist in Europe and a probable Prussian spy rode in the carriage with him.

“This might well be an interesting visit, after all.” 

 YSL: Of course, Carlo's visit is much more than merely "interesting"...

Thank you so much, Steph, for talking with us about the intricacies and pleasures of writing historical fiction. And congratulations on the achievement that is Masks and Shadows!

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Stephanie Burgis grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, but now lives in Wales with her husband and two sons, surrounded by mountains, castles and coffee shops. She has published over thirty short stories for adults and teens, as well as an MG Regency fantasy trilogy, known in the U.S. as the Kat, Incorrigible series and in the U.K. as The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson. Her first two historical fantasy novels for adults, Masks and Shadows and Congress of Secrets, will be published by Pyr Books in 2016, and her next MG fantasy series will be published by Bloomsbury Books, beginning with The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart in 2017.

Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/Agency novels, published in the UK by Walker Books and in North America by Candlewick Press. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Amelia Bloomer, by Y S Lee

Last weekend, I travelled to the village of Homer, NY, to do an author visit at the Phillips Free Library. While strolling down Main Street, I was delighted to come across this plaque:

"Childhood home - Amelia Jenks Bloomer - Writer, Speaker & Activist - Temperance, Abolition and Women's Rights - 1818-1894

Amelia Bloomer’s childhood home is still privately occupied (the four Victorian-era mailboxes, two on either side of the door, suggest that the house was converted into flats some time ago) and there wasn’t any further information to be had that day, but it got me wondering.

North Main St, Homer, NY

I’d never given much thought to the American suffragists as individuals. I knew the names of the most famous (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and Victoria Claflin Woodhull, to start with). And I’ve mentioned Bloomer before, most recently in my post about women on bicycles.

Illustration of a woman wearing the Bloomer costume. Image via National Park Service

But looking at her childhood home, I realized I didn’t know much about Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818-1894). Here are some things I’ve learned in the past few days:

- Bloomer had only a few years of formal education, and as a young woman worked as a schoolteacher and a governess.

- She turned to journalism when her husband, Dexter Bloomer, encouraged her to write for his newspaper, the Seneca Falls County Courier.

- She began her public career as a temperance campaigner. Because temperance was a female-driven movement, she was thus exposed to other feminist ideas including women’s suffrage and abolition.

- The American women’s suffrage movement grew quite directly from the abolitionist movement: in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, they were denied seats on the floor because they were women. In response, they held the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY. As a consequence, Black abolitionist activists like Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are also closely linked with women’s suffrage. The 1840s and 1850s must have been a heady time for progressive thinkers in America!

THE LILY - A monthly journal, devoted to Temperance and Literature - Published by a Committee of Ladies.

 - In 1849, Bloomer founded The Lily, the first newspaper published by women for women. (To my knowledge, the first feminist newspaper in England published by a woman was Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s English Women’s Journal, founded nearly a decade later in 1858. Please do correct if me I’m misinformed.) The Lily began as a mouthpiece for the temperance movement but soon grew to encompass the matter of women’s rights. Many of its articles about women’s rights and the necessity of legal reform were written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Amelia Bloomer in rational dress, ca. 1852-58. Image via NPS

- Amelia Bloomer didn’t invent the Bloomer costume. The radical “reform dress” came into Bloomer’s life in 1851 when a visiting friend, Elizabeth Smith Miller, wore loose, Turkish-style trousers with a short overskirt to Bloomer’s home in Seneca Falls, NY. Bloomer adored the idea and popularized it – and even published sewing instructions – in The Lily. Circulation swelled from about 500 copies a month to 4000. A few months later, the costume was widely known as the “Bloomer dress”. (No word on whether Elizabeth Smith Miller was relieved or resentful about the mis-naming of her design. Bloomers were so widely ridiculed – its wearers were frequently heckled on the street - that even Amelia Bloomer gave up wearing them in 1859.)

Ted Aub's life-sized bronze sculpture, "When Anthony Met Stanton". Bloomer, at centre, is introducing Susan B. Anthony (left) to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Both Bloomer and Stanton are wearing rational dress. Image via National Park Service.

Bloomer's home in Seneca Falls, NY (where she lived after marriage, now known as Amelia Bloomer House) may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad!

I've a lot more reading ahead of me but I can't help picturing a scene in which Harriet Tubman (a childhood hero of mine) and Amelia Bloomer meet...

The Agency, by Y S Lee

Greetings from North America! This month my American publisher, Candlewick Press, is reissuing the Agency quartet with new, extra-mysterious covers. These are closely based on the UK covers designed by Walker Books, to be sure, but aren't they glorious all the same?

A Spy in the House (The Agency 1)

The Body at the Tower (The Agency 2)

 

The Traitor in the Tunnel (The Agency 3)

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Rivals in the City (The Agency 4)

To celebrate this reissue, I'm sharing share some of the ideas and moments that underpin the Agency and its world. I came to fiction-writing while completing a PhD in Victorian literature and culture, so perhaps it's not surprising that my first reference points are scholarly.

Four inspirations for the Agency:

1. An article (Laura Tabili’s "Women of a Very Low Type") about mixed-race families in late-Victorian Liverpool. The women were typically Irish-born, the men Lascars – that is, Asian sailors.

2. The Great Stink of 1858, when modern urban-industrial pollution met an intense heat wave. The stench of the River Thames was so intense that Benjamin Disraeli fled the House of Commons with a handkerchief clapped across his nose.

3. London itself. I fell in love with it while living in Bloomsbury and researching my doctoral thesis at the British Library. I was desperate to write something that reflected how I felt about the city.

4. An endnote in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, which claims that St. John's Wood was just the type of area in which a Victorian man would stash his mistress. It made me wonder what other kinds of women might live in St. John's Wood. Spies, obviously!

And here are four Victorian novels that changed the way I thought about the period, making it possible to imagine writing fiction in what is so often, for academics, a revered space:

1. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair. Brown-skinned characters everywhere, if you just keep your eyes open. They’re marginal figures and Thackeray didn’t seem to know what to do with them, but at least his panorama includes them. Brown people! In high society, even.

2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. Aurora appears to live on her own, in Kensington, and entertains a bachelor visitor without comprising her reputation! What is going on, here?

3. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone. One of the first detective novels ever. A funny detective novel, at that, with a mixed-race physician and a surprisingly racy scene between Rachel and Franklin.

4. Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Secret love affair, illegitimate child, suicide by shame and opium, and the crushing weight of British law. And who else could get away, in a supposedly realist novel, with attributing a character’s death to “spontaneous combustion”?

The new editions go on sale on April 26 - huzzah! I am so thrilled that a new generation of readers will get to know the Agency.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Agency mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). Read more at www.yslee.com or say hello on Twitter.

Holocaust literature for younger children, by Y S Lee

"Who was Hitler?" asked my seven-year-old, a couple of weeks ago. It was 7.30 on a weekend morning.



It turns out he'd been inspecting the books on my desk. I ought to have seen this coming: I've amassed heaps of primary and secondary sources about the Second World War over the past three years. It just never dawned on me that he'd go browsing through the unglamorous adult books in the study when there are so many age-appropriate books for him in nearly every other room of the house.



Over the past two weeks, taking my cues from S's direct questions, we've spent quite a few hours talking about race, racism, Hitler, war, conscience and resistance. It's been hard: the most complicated, painful thing I've had to explain to him thus far. When I defined racism his first response was, "That's rude." He was so innocent that he didn't have the vocabulary for talking about hate. I had to correct him: "No, that's evil." Yet he's capable of morally complex questions, among them: "Why do people go to war?", "Why did Hitler believe what he did?" and "What would you have done if you lived in Germany and Hitler said you had to be a soldier?"



S's questions also uncovered a cultural fault line in our house. My husband grew up in 1970s/80s England. When he thinks of Hitler, he thinks about the Battle of Britain, rationing, conscription. For him, the war is recent and local and deeply personal. Because I grew up in Canada, Hitler means the Holocaust, the Jewish diaspora and the Allied war effort. For me, the war is frightening but also distinctly historical, definitely elsewhere. S's three-word question has really underscored for me that while our children are biracial, they are also inheriting (at least) three cultures.



We will get to the Battle of Britain and British military history. We will also get to the Pacific War. But for now, our first priority is to introduce the Holocaust without too many nightmares, both literal and figurative.



When I began looking for children's books about the Holocaust, most seemed written for middle-grade or young adult readers. I wasn't even sure there existed such a thing as Holocaust literature for younger children. It was only when I began asking, not googling, that titles began to pop up (hurray for people, not search engines!). The list below is drawn from the generous, well-read brains of bookseller Rachel E. L. King, librarians Eugenia Beh and Paige McGeorge, authors Robin Stevenson and Jill Bryant, book blogger Rebecca Herman, my aunt Cynthia Krause, and a couple of Facebook friends who like to keep a low profile.



Here's a list of picture-book titles thus far. Titles with asterisks are the ones I've read, thanks to the Kingston public library, and for those I include my notes in italics.



Picture books about the Holocaust

*Adams, Simon. World War II (Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness series). Straight-up military history with excellent photographs. Middle-grade. Will save for a couple of years.

*Borden, Louise and Allan Drummond. The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret & H. A. Rey. Primarily for committed fans of the Reys. The story is diffuse and children will need a firm grasp of the events of the War in order to make sense of how the Reys' journeys fit into it.

Bunting, Eve. Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust.

Deedy, Carmen Agra and Henri Sorenson. The Yellow Star: The Legend of King Christian X of Denmark.

Elvgren, Jennifer and Fabio Santomauro. The Whispering Town.

Hesse, Karen and Wendy Watson. The Cats in Krasinki Square.



Johnston, Tony and Ron Mazellan. The Harmonica.

*Kacer, Kathy and Gillian Newland. The Magician of Auschwitz. Based on a true story. Ideally, readers will have a solid understanding of the Holocaust and concentration camps before beginning this book.

Mochizuki, Ken and Dom Lee. Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story.

Oppenheim, Shulamith Levy and Ronald Himler. The Lily Cupboard: A Story of the Holocaust.

*Polacco, Patricia. The Butterfly. An effective introduction to the Resistance. Heavy-handed at times.

Rappaport, Doreen and Emily Arnold McCully. The Secret Seder.



*Rubin, Susan Goldman and Bill Farnsworth. Irena Sendler and the Children of the Warsaw Ghetto. A deft and suitably complex introduction to the concepts of the Holocaust and the Resistance, and my first choice to read with my son. The diction is high and a seven-year-old will need help understanding the ramifications of some statements.

*Ruelle, Karen Gray and Deborah Durland Desaix. The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust. I had very high hopes but was ultimately disappointed by how fragmentary and unverifiable most of the anecdotes were in this book. Again, the diction is too high for the average picture-book reader.

*Spielman, Gloria and Manon Gauthier. Marcel Marceau: L'enfance d'un mime. Originally published in English as Marcel Marceau: Master of Mime. I read the French edition, so cannot comment on the English text. A sound introduction to the Resistance through the framework of Marceau's early life.

*Tryszynska-Frederick, Luba, Michelle R. McCann and Ann Marshall. Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen. A powerful story that requires a sound understanding of the War and concentration camps to be comprehensible. Includes many quotations from Luba Tryszynska-Frederick, which are less effective for children because of how formal her language is.

*Ungerer, Tomi. Otto: The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear. A nice conceit, but odd to my eyes because it places the German Aryan boy's experiences at the centre of the story. The illustrations depict a black American soldier as deeply simian. Can't recommend this one.

*Upjohn, Rebecca and Renné Benoit. The Secret of the Village Fool. Based on the true story of a village outcast who sheltered a family in his root cellar. Simple and moving, with a lovely coda about the family members who survived the war.

Wiviott, Meg and Josee Bisaillon. Benno and the Night of Broken Glass.





This list is a work-in-progress and I'm still reading. If you have picture-book recommendations for me, please do leave them in the comments. And thank you!

Interview with Mackenzi Lee, by Y S Lee

For those who haven’t yet had the joy of reading This Monstrous Thing, Mackenzi Lee's debut novel is a re-imagining of the Frankenstein story set around the 1818 publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 

 

Here's the back-cover bumpf:

In 1818 Geneva, men built with clockwork parts live hidden away from society, cared for only by illegal mechanics called Shadow Boys. Two years ago, Shadow Boy Alasdair Finch's life shattered to bits.

His brother, Oliver—dead.

His sweetheart, Mary—gone.

His chance to break free of Geneva—lost.

Heartbroken and desperate, Alasdair does the unthinkable: he brings Oliver back from the dead.

But putting back together a broken life is more difficult than mending bones and adding clockwork pieces. Oliver returns more monster than man, and Alasdair's horror further damages the already troubled relationship. Then comes the publication of Frankenstein, and the city intensifies its search for Shadow Boys, aiming to discover the real-life doctor and his monster. Alasdair finds refuge with his idol, the brilliant Dr. Geisler, who may offer him a way to escape the dangerous present and his guilt-ridden past, but at a horrible price only Oliver can pay. . . 

Inspired by Mary Shelley's classic novel, Mackenzi Lee's dark yet redemptive debut is part fantasy, part Gothic horror, and ultimately the story of two brothers who might just keep each other human.

Somehow, I don't think that description does the book justice. It ticks all the boxes but somehow doesn't quite convey the thoroughness of Lee's (no relation to me) re-imagining. Instead, allow me to say that This Monstrous Thing is one of the most exciting and enviable YA novels I read last year. I was delighted when Mackenzi agreed to talk to us about research, taking liberties with history, and the scandalous Shelleys and their circle.

Mackenzi Lee

YSL: I really love the novel’s premise: what if Victor Frankenstein was not driven by hubris and he didn’t abandon his hideous progeny? Instead, what if scientist and monster were brothers, bound together by love and guilt and grief (not to mention a string of lies and a thoroughly oppressive police state)? How did you arrive at this starting point?

ML: My novels never have a single inception point, so THIS MONSTROUS THING was borne from many different places. The first was my initial exposure coming to the novel through a stage production at the National Theater--I didn’t know anything about Frankenstein beyond what pop culture had taught me, and I was shocked by how different it was. I was especially struck by how much of a voice and personality and humanness the creature had--that seems to be the first thing modern culture has robbed him of. This initial exposure shaped my reading of Frankenstein when I finally picked up the novel, and definitely shaped how I approached my own story.

The second was hearing Frankenstein misidentified as the first steampunk novel, and thinking “Well that can’t be right...but that’s cool and someone should do it and maybe that person should be me.” The third is a lifetime of being the volatile older half of a pair of siblings.

My story evolved from there.

YSL: In THIS MONSTROUS THING, you give Percy Bysshe Shelley a cameo and make Mary Shelley a substantial secondary character. What kind of research did you do before you felt confident writing Mary Shelley as a fictional character?

ML: I did a lot of research--I felt a huge responsibility in portraying them, and was very nervous with how readers would respond to their characterization. The best research I did was reading Mary Shelley’s journals and letters from the time she was traveling the Continent and eventually ended up in Geneva, where she wrote Frankenstein. They gave me a sense of her as a person in her own words, and I related to her so deeply. Even though, when she was abroad with Percy, she was pregnant and he was married to someone else, she was only nineteen, just a few years younger than me at the time, and she struck me as a young person trying to find her footing in adulthood, in the shifting, larger world around her, and also find where she fit with the people around her. All things that, as a young twenty something myself, I felt very deeply. It reminded me of my favorite thing about history--that no matter how much society and technology and the world changes, people never really do. There are universalities that stretch across centuries.

YSL: When reading your portrait of Mary Shelley, I kept thinking of Joan Didion’s dictum: “writers are always selling somebody out.” How do you balance being fair to a historical figure and doing what is artistically necessary within the scope of your novel? ML: My favorite books are historical novels that portray real people as characters, but I’m often frustrated with how those real people are portrayed as either all good or all bad. History has written a verdict on the legacy that person has left and whether that makes them a good guy or a bad guy, and so we often forget they were real, multifaceted individuals with a lot of complex parts, making choices in the moment with no idea what the consequences of those actions would be. In writing Mary Shelley as a character in the novel, I wanted to portray her as someone with both huge potential for good and bad, same as the other characters in the novel, struggling with which of those qualities is going to define her, and struggling to reconcile with regrets in her past.

I’m also fascinated with real-life Mary’s inspiration to write Frankenstein--she says it came to her in a dream, but that dream was a product of the world she was living in, with its advancing science and enlightenment sensibilities and the questions those raised about the relationship between man and the divine. Part of my reason for writing my novel was wanting to know what that dream and Frankenstein would have looked like in an alternate, hyper-industrialized, mechanized 1818. Mostly cause I like mechanical stuff.

YSL: In your Author’s Note you say, “there are facts that I ignored completely, because I am willing to play fast and loose with history in order to tell a better story”. But changing the closing date of the university at Ingolstadt is a very small thing, especially when you’ve invented an entire steampunk industrial revolution around it! Where do you draw the line when playing with historical fact? ML: Historical fantasy is such a weird genre--like you said, I feel totally confident making up a steampunk society and revolution that happens within it, but I didn’t feel like I could use the word dyslexic to describe the main character because that isn’t a historical term. Why get obsessed with the fact that words like cheeky and posh weren’t used in the early 1800s and spend a long time trying to find a substitute, but that same novel has cyborgs in it?

For me, what can and can’t be played with is never arbitrary. The historical details need to be informed by the alternate historical world you’ve created. I always let the fantasy elements that form the premise inform what I can take liberties with--I stick to true historical details that would have been unaffected by the magical elements I’ve added. For example, a hyper-mechanized cyborg population probably wouldn’t have influenced research into dyslexia, or cause the word posh to be coined a century earlier than it actually was. The fantasy that shapes that initial premise always informs what I’m willing to adjust and what I feel needs to stay true to history--when you’re deep enough in your world, it becomes instinctual.

As for details like changing the date of a university opening--those are the sort that keep historical writers up at night. No one knows them but us, but we feel honor bound to fess up to our fudging.

YSL: On Twitter you mentioned having read YOUNG ROMANTICS, Daisy Hay’s group biography of Shelley’s generation, as part of your research. (I loved the details you harvested from it!) What were some of the biggest surprises you encountered in your research? Are there any delicious anecdotes that didn’t make it into the finished novel?

ML: I love that so much of the Shelleys’ lives have been intertwined with myth and rumor and the celebrity gossip of the day, but also that so much of their lives read like the plots of Gothic novels. My favorite story that didn’t make it into This Monstrous Thing is that Percy Shelley had a disease which caused his heart to calcify, which wasn’t known until he died in a sailing accident in his 30s. And then they only discovered it because, when they burned his body, his heart was basically a bone and DID NOT BURN. Is that not the spookiest thing you’ve ever heard?! Whether it’s true or not, it’s so fitting for these Gothic writers. And, as the story goes, Mary Shelley kept that calcified bone heart for the rest of her life, in a drawer wrapped in her husband’s poetry.

I also love the story that Mary learned to write and spell her name--which was the same as her mother’s--by tracing the letters on her mother’s gravestone. So freaking spooky.

YSL: Could you share with us a couple of quotations or moments from the book that really encapsulate its aims and its atmosphere?

ML: I’m so fond of the first line, and I think it’s a pretty good example of the tone for the rest of the book: “My brother’s heart was heavy in my hands.”
 
Agreed! Despite the guarded optimism of the ending, I couldn't help wondering what kind of future was possible for Oliver Finch. I imagine that his heart will always lie (a little) heavy in Alasdair's hands.

Thank you so much, Mackenzi, for speaking with me about This Monstrous Thing. I can't wait to learn more about what you're writing next.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Agency mysteries, published by Walker Books (UK) and Candlewick Press (USA/Canada).

Literary-historical dogs I have known, by Y S Lee

As the child of Southeast Asian immigrants, I grew up feeling somewhat appalled by the idea of sharing a house with a dog. Yes, our family had dogs when we lived in Singapore, but the dogs' place was in the garden, where they had plenty of shade and water and space to run around. They didn’t come inside the house, much less curl up on sofas or beds. As far as my parents were concerned, dogs were outdoor pets.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because several months ago my children, aged 7 and 4, mounted a vigorous and sustained campaign for a dog. And I’m about to concede defeat. I’ve accepted that our dog that will live in our house and shed on our furniture and need lots of training and exercise and brushing and bathing and veterinary visits and dear god, possibly also tooth-brushing and ear-cleaning and nail-clipping? (Maybe I’ll tackle the history of pet care in a different post.) My point is simply that all this domestic dog chat has me thinking about dogs in literary history.

The first literary–historical dogs I remember noticing was the litter of puppies in Wuthering Heights. They’re never named or numbered, of course; they’re mere props for the vivid illustration of Hareton Earnshaw’s character. As Hareton hangs the puppies (one by one? In a batch? It’s never clearly described) "from a chair-back in the doorway", we readers realize the extent to which Hareton’s own moral growth and intellectual development were strangled from birth.

Branwell Brontë's circa 1834 sibling portrait, with his own image painted out.

What’s most striking to me (as a contemporary reader) about this scene is that Hareton’s sadism towards animals does not expel him from the moral world of the novel. Emily Brontë herself disciplined her beloved dog, Keeper, with physical violence. In 1848, it was a fact of life that puppies (and kittens) were often too numerous and must sometimes be killed at birth. (This practice is relatively recent: my father-in-law had a childhood memory of his father dropping a sack of newborn puppies into a canal in 1950s Manchester.) And Hareton, with the help of Cathy Linton, eventually redeems himself. Together, the young lovers hold the promise of a happy ending for Wuthering Heights – with or without animal companions.

The next fictional dog to make a deep impression on me was Shock, Belinda's indulged pet in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem, “The Rape of the Lock”. For me, the poem is a full-on olfactory assault. Let me break it down for you:

1. There’s a crush of people at Belinda’s house. Their combined body heat will heighten the ripeness of early eighteenth-century bodies.

2. This bodily funk will, in turn, be overlaid by the liberal use of perfumes.

3. The room will be lit by beeswax candles, which add their own sweet, thick scent to the air. (In a poorer household, the candles would be made of tallow and thus smell strongly of animals.)

4. As part of the ceremonial serving of coffee, Belinda’s family roasts coffee beans in the drawing room before grinding and brewing the expensive imported drink. Coffee-roasting novices expect the process to smell delectable but the toasting of green coffee beans actually produces a strong burnt aroma as the husks burn off; the roasted coffee smell emerges only at the end of the process. As a result, the smells of body musk and perfume would intermingle with the strong, acrid smell of burning.

Aubrey Beardsley's 1897 illustration of "The Rape of the Lock". At left, the Baron is about to snip off Belinda's curl.

5. The pampered, yipping, little dog Shock (whose name strikes me as a joke about the English pronunciation of “Jacques”), who fails to protect her from assault. I’m not sure how often pet dogs were bathed in 1717. However, in her biography of Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin describes the general domestic atmosphere of the 1650s: "Every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek which everyone breathed." "The Rape of the Lock" takes place only 60 years or so later.

My third literary dog was a Newfoundland breed named "Boatswain". Having once read it, who could forget Byron’s "Epitaph to a Dog"? It's engraved on this monument at Newstead Abbey, Byron's family estate.

Near this Spot
are deposited the Remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferosity,
and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
if inscribed over human Ashes,
is but a just tribute to the Memory of
BOATSWAIN, a DOG,
who was born in Newfoundland May 1803
and died at Newstead Nov. 18th, 1808.

When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,
Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below:
When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,
Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth:
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

Byron’s anger and disgust with human hypocrisy here is all the more powerful because he practised it so well: “Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,/Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit” is a cri de coeur from a restless artist who spent much of his life at the centre of a bubble of scandal.

Byron originally posed for this portrait in 1813, about 5 years after railing against the "vain insect" that is Man. Image courtesy of a Creative Commons license from the National Portrait Gallery.

There’s so much more I could say about dogs in literary history - and in social history, for that matter. But for the time being, I’ll return to my own practical dog research and continue to battle my residual squeamishness about dog odour and dog hair. Wish me luck!

---
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/The Agency Quartet (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.

Memoir vs fiction, by Y S Lee

Over the past two years, I’ve been reading memoirs from survivors of the Pacific War – that is, the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. Nearly all of them are awe-inspiring, and I’ve already blogged here about Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral and Nona Baker’s Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker.

Refresher: historical sources are typically divided into two categories: primary (artifacts from or documents created during the time of the events in question) and secondary sources (an item that interprets and analyzes the primary sources). It’s a broad-strokes sort of distinction that makes putting together a bibliography more straightforward. Although memoirs are typically written after the events in question, they are generally classed as primary sources because their authors were involved in the relevant events.

However! Having recently read a fair amount of memoir, I’ve come to distrust its simple categorization as a primary historical source. This unease began with my first Pacific War memoir, Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral (1949). It’s a brilliant book, packed with adventure and anthropological insight. Freddy’s voice is distinctive and charming, and while he shies away from emotional and psychological insight, I finished the book with a strong appreciation for his character (possibly too strong: my husband took to calling him "your historical boyfriend”).

Freddy Spencer Chapman

Still, I wondered how Freddy could possibly recall the terrifying and chaotic events of his three years in the Malayan jungle in such impeccable detail. This is a challenge in all memoirs. I am hard-pressed to remember what I ate for lunch three days ago, and in times of conflict or high excitement I often question, after the fact, my memories of what went down. Yes, Freddy kept detailed diaries while he was in the jungle, but on several occasions he was forced to destroy them because they were at risk of falling into enemy hands. His surviving diaries are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but they cover only a portion of his time in the jungle.

After reading Freddy’s memoir, I turned to Brian Moynahan’s recent biography of Freddy, Jungle Soldier: The True Story of Freddy Spencer Chapman, for context. Moynahan is a biased biographer – a longtime fan of Freddy who wants to burnish and prolong his hero’s fame. Even so, at one point, Moynahan points out a significant discrepancy between Freddy’s surviving diary and an event he describes in The Jungle is Neutral.

For publication, Freddy altered the event, probably in order to make it feel more dramatic. Moynahan disagrees with this decision, believing the original diary entry to be superior in terms of tension and the sheer danger of the situation. Either way, though, we now have a primary source (diary) imperfectly converted to a memoir - which is still technically a primary source. Yet we already know that it’s been corrupted. And if we have evidence of this with just one of Freddy’s surviving diaries, how many other events have been elided or embellished or just imperfectly reconstructed? We’ll never know.

This question becomes even more complicated when memoirs are written long after the events they describe and are mediated through others. Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker was first published in 1959, fourteen years after Nona Baker emerged from the Malayan jungle, contributed source material to Freddy Spencer Chapman’s official report on local Communist organizations, and returned to England.

Nona Baker is not credited as the author of her memoir!

Baker doesn’t mention keeping a jungle diary. Her narrative voice is quiet, wry, self-deprecating. She doesn’t in any way seek to portray herself as a heroine: rather, she insists that she was only “busily saving [her] own skin”. Perhaps this is why it took her fourteen years to produce a memoir, and why she distanced herself from the story even further: even though her narrative is written in the first person, the book is officially "by" Dorothy Thatcher and Robert Cross. To what extent is Baker’s voice really her own, here? And what sorts of artistic license have Thatcher and Cross taken with the shape of the story?

My last example today (though I have many more!) is actually a novel by Han Suyin (best known for her 1952 novel A Many Splendoured Thing, which was filmed as Love is a Many Splendored Thing and was also later adapted as an American soap opera). And the Rain My Drink is set during the Malayan Emergency of the early 1950s – the last days of the British empire in southeast Asia.

Han Suyin, the pen name of Elisabeth Comber

While And the Rain My Drink is technically fiction, Han Suyin inserts herself (using a name that is itself a pseudonym) into the novel as a character. This is a postmodern move which ought to undermine the ideas of narrative voice and the conceit of “truth” throughout the work. But the character Suyin tells her story in the first person, in conventional and realist terms. Because of this, and since the character Suyin’s biographical details map directly onto those of the author Han Suyin, the whole novel reads instead like a memoir of Han Suyin’s time in Malaya, with a few imaginative excursions. It presses the genre of memoir into the services of fiction - an act that points up the highly contrived nature of memoir itself.

Perhaps this is only appropriate – that we should end up in such an ambiguous tumult. A wide view of history will always include competing voices, and the line between fact and fiction begins to blur immediately upon examination. I’m thrilled to be feeling my way, step by careful step, in the company of such splendid adventurers.

---
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/The Agency Quartet (Walker Books/Candlewick Press).

A Tyranny of Petticoats, by Y S Lee

Hello, readers. I am tremendously excited to share with you the absolutely glorious cover of Jessica Spotswood's historical anthology, A Tyranny of Petticoats (Candlewick Press, March 2016). Behold!



My friend Cat taught me the phrase "on fleek", and now I just want to walk around now yelling, "It's SO ON FLEEK!"

Here's a bit more about the collection, which combines historical realist and historical fantasy stories:

From an impressive sisterhood of YA writers comes an edge-of-your-seat anthology of historical fiction and fantasy featuring a diverse array of daring heroines.

Crisscross America — on dogsleds and ships, stagecoaches and trains — from pirate ships off the coast of the Carolinas to the peace, love, and protests of 1960s Chicago. Join fifteen of today’s most talented writers of young adult literature on a thrill ride through history with American girls charting their own course. They are monsters and mediums, bodyguards and barkeeps, screenwriters and schoolteachers, heiresses and hobos. They’re making their own way in often-hostile lands, using every weapon in their arsenals, facing down murderers and marriage proposals. And they all have a story to tell.

With stories by:

J. Anderson Coats

Andrea Cremer

Y. S. Lee

Katherine Longshore

Marie Lu

Kekla Magoon

Marissa Meyer

Saundra Mitchell

Beth Revis

Caroline Richmond

Lindsay Smith

Jessica Spotswood

Robin Talley

Leslye Walton

Elizabeth Wein

My ARC arrived in the mail just this week, which means that it's time to proofread my own short story, "The Legendary Garrett Girls", one last time. As regular blog readers know, I really appreciate this last chance to check the story and catch any clangers. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to read the other 14 short stories in the anthology. Yes, I could have read them earlier in PDF format, but - call me traditional, if you must - I still find curling up with a print book more satisfying.

I am giddy with delight to be part of this sisterhood, and I owe it all to fellow novelist and worshipper-at-the-altar-of-history Stephanie Burgis: she's the one who first suggested to editor Jessica Spotswood that I might want to be involved. THANK YOU, Steph!

This was my first time contributing to a fiction anthology and I learned so much. To begin with, the parameters were incredibly open: a story with a girl protagonist at any time in American history. Indeed, it was so liberating that I felt almost frozen with indecision - until I realized that fourteen other writers were simultaneously staking out their own historical and geographical territories. Suddenly, it felt like the start of an open-water swimming race: fast and splashy.

I've noticed that in my fiction I lean towards borders and margins, both literal and figurative. Sure enough, I first proposed something along the Great Lakes or in the Thousand Islands area - specifically, a midwinter prison escape from Ontario into New York state, over ice and open water. But Jessica suggested something less marginal and more definitively American, so I began to scan my shelves.

Several years ago, I went on a family holiday to Alaska. True to nerd form, the souvenir I brought back was a reprint of a nineteenth century memoir and travel manual, William B. Haskell's Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold Fields, 1896-1898.



I'd read bits and scraps of it in Alaska, but when I pulled it from the shelf last summer, it fell open to this quotation: "They now say there are more liars to the square inch in Alaska than any place in the world." -- The Seattle Times, August 1897. Clearly, this was fate: I was going to write a story about con artists in the Gold Rush town of Skagway, Alaska.

That story, "The Legendary Garrett Girls", is just one of the fifteen in A Tyranny of Petticoats. Gloating over the table of contents, I'm struck by how diverse our geographical choices are: not just Boston and Los Angeles, but Wyoming and Indiana; Washington, DC and Washington State. It reminds me how relatively little I know of American history.

I can't wait to change that.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.