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3 thoughts about my book’s weird kids-to-adults structure
Doing readings in various cities, I’ve gotten asked some
pretty interesting questions about All
the Birds in the Sky. And in particular, it’s been fun to geek out about why exactly I wrote
the book with this weird structure—Patricia the witch and Laurence the mad
scientist are 13 or 14 for a long stretch, and then the book jumps ahead 10
years and they’re in their early 20s.
I already talked here about how I don’t see “coming of
age” as a process that suddenly ends when you turn 18. But here are a few
other thoughts about this odd structure.
1) I read a lot of Dickens and other 19th century novelists
when I was younger, and somehow I ended up with the idea that this is what
novels do. Of course novels start out in childhood and then follow the
protagonists into adulthood. That’s just normal, right? I kind of forgot that
hardly anybody does this any more, because somewhere in my mind Great
Expectations is still a totally normal novel.
2) I’ve heard people describe the book as feeling like a
young-adult novel until it suddenly turns into an adult novel—but I don’t
really think that’s true. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the typical YA
protagonist is a few years older, like maybe 17 years old. You can be younger than that and read a YA book, but I can’t remember reading a YA book whose characters were younger than like 16. Definitely,
Katniss and Tris and their ilk start out around 16. Of course, Harry Potter starts out as an 11-year-old and then ages up over the course of seven books, but I get the impression that’s sort of unusual for a YA protagonist, and some people feel the first few Potter books are actually Middle Grade. So I don’t think the first 1/3 of All the Birds in the Sky is really like
a YA. I think of it much more as being a dark coming-of-age story (Lord of the Flies, Catcher in
the Rye) for adults, which some teens will probably get into as well. (See Friday’s thing about whether All the Birds is appropriate for kids.)
3) I’m just going to quote from what I told Locus Magazine
in an interview a while back. (The whole thing is in their January issue.)
What I was consciously thinking about as I was writing and revising All The Birds in the Sky was
this narrative about finding where you belong in the world, and coming
of age – the notion that we define ourselves through others, and we try
to find people we belong with and can communicate with. When they’re
in junior high school, Laurence doesn’t know any other mad scientists,
and Patricia has never met any other witches. She’s completely isolated.
They’re like, ‘If I can only find people like myself, I’ll be
understood, and things will be perfect.’ Then we skip ahead to a time
when they’ve found people like themselves, but it’s not great, and not
perfect. There’s a whole other set of problems that comes with that. The
people who are allegedly like you have a whole set of expectations they
put on you, and they’re not necessarily connected to the person you
want to be.
Top image: Great Expectations/PBS
