My Heart is The Tempest Q&A Session 9

What is the role of the landscape in the story? How does it affect both the atmosphere and the style of the book?

My Heart is The Tempest describes an imaginary place made of ice and snow, Niveal, metaphorically covered in a shroud of silence. Inhabited by ghostly-white creatures who have no connection to the human world despite their outer appearance may look familiar and human-like, Niveal is a fantasy realm suspended out of space and time and characterized by a bare landscape which perfectly mirrors Nivealian society’s inflexible rules of conduct.

In this land where light is synonym to cruelty and blindness, emotions are muffled and inhibited. Despite the narration constantly shifts from one main character to another, providing relevant insights into their deepest motives and secrets, much of what happened to them in the past or is happening to them in the present is often left unsaid, because reality is ultimately shown from the protagonist’s perspective, Sycorax, a young girl whose naïveté and ignorance of the world influences the way the story is presented to the readers.

Besides being at odds with everything and everyone surrounding her, she doesn’t understand much about Niveal and its inhabitants’ rules, consequently what the reader knows mainly relies on her blurred, imperfect point of view. This in turn leads to many events and characters remaining out of focus or simply on the background, so that many of Niveal’s mysteries, such as the genesis of the insect-like creatures or the way they reproduce, are left unspoken, hidden and unclear. It was a deliberate choice meant to echo the protagonist’s struggle with a world she doesn’t understand nor feels part of.