The Fever King is set in a speculative North Carolina. Please describe the content of your latest book and what can readers expect from the read. I recommend it to pretty much everyone I know. Her Malaysian-inspired fantasy Girls of Paper and Fire deals with so many important subjects-particularly sexual abuse and survivorship-and also has one of my favorite sapphic romances in YA literature. I feel like my favorite author changes every day! But right now it’s probably Natasha Ngan. Plus teens themselves-especially this generation of teens-are so socially-aware and driven, and the types of books being published now reflect that passion.
YA books engage with so many incredibly timely topics in such an unflinching and real way-partly driven by the recent push in YA for authentic storytelling voices.
I feel like young adult books take a lot of risks that the adult market either can’t or won’t. That’s all I can say really without giving too much away! Why do you feel young adult books are so popular and have such a voice right now? What’s your favorite young adult author? Noam’s anger and passion resonates a lot with me, but Dara and I have shared a lot of specific experiences that are very formative. Like…if you mixed up their DNA in a vat and came up with some genetically engineered product of the pair of them, that’d be me. I relate to both Noam and Dara in different ways. What character do you most relate to and why? They end up being really different in the end, of course, but a lot of my books have that musical inspiration. I’ve written whole books just ‘cause I wanted to turn a certain song into novel form. Song lyrics are one of my biggest influences.
I also may or may not have had this massive playlist of songs I’d listen to on repeat when writing. For me, I wrote this through the lens of being Jewish American (for Noam: Atlantian-Carolinian), but I think this is an experience a lot of different groups have shared. On the intergenerational trauma side, I wanted to write a story that touched on the experience of feeling like an outsider in your own country. Specifically, I wanted to write about what it means to face our trauma, and the way the world can demand that we “have” to confront our abusers in order for trauma to be viewed as legitimate. One of the main things I wanted to write about was the intersection of intergenerational and personal trauma. Victoria: That’s hard to nail down, because The Fever King is the amalgamation of a lot of separate initial ideas…and I actually wrote like six different initial drafts of this book trying to figure out what story I was actually trying to tell. Aurora: What was your inspiration behind your most recent novel?
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