Goodreads asked Lucinda Roy:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Lucinda Roy Jellybean "Ji-ji" Lottermule, the biracial, enslaved protagonist in THE FREEDOM RACE, wouldn't leave me alone. She kept prodding me in the back and ordering me to tell her story. I've focused on historical slavery before in my poetry, political commentaries, paintings, and keynotes. But I wanted to look to the future this time and imagine how slavery would likely reconfigure itself in an age plagued by other crises--climate change, pandemics, labor shortages, and social unrest. I also wanted to do something else--something grand and daring. Something only speculative fiction would permit. I wanted to reclaim myth and infuse it with something both magical and real, something powerful enough to challenge suffering. My editor describes the book as a story of race and resurrection. She's right. So I suppose, in a way, I wrote THE FREEDOM RACE to discover what those of us who trace our lineage back through slavery have the power to reclaim.

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