'For me, the book raises questions about how we connect with other people, how we form a community, how we maintain empathy for other human beings. Those are all the questions I hope readers will sit with, after turning the last page.'
Set in a near-future America, we follow a 12-year-old boy named Bird. Bird’s mother, a Chinese American poet, disappeared three years ago, and Bird has no idea how to get in touch with her. Because of enforced regimes and new preservation laws, books seen as unpatriotic are banned and those found moving against the government, and a new act called PACT, are punished. Bird’s father wants his son to stay under the radar, but Bird is determined to figure out what happened to his mother.
FP: Oof, yes. Those are huge questions to explore. And it’s so interesting to hear that the seeds of this idea arrived way back in 2016. But speaking of raising a child in this tumultuous time, this is also a story that centers around motherhood — the decisions Margaret makes for Bird, but also for the greater good. Why was this important for you to explore?
CN: I think most of us would like to believe that we’d live by our principles and stand up for what we believe is right — but that calculation becomes really complicated if your children might be at risk. Even before the Trump years, I had been thinking that the worst thing I could imagine, as a parent, was being separated from my child.
CN: It did! Book bannings have been in the news a lot in the past few months, but there’s really been a steady rise in it over the past few years, as you mention. So, it wasn’t at all hard to imagine that escalating, as it seems to be now. When I started writing the novel, I found that I was instinctively writing without quotation marks. I felt that was right, but I had to think about why.
I should add that the novel has a lot of storytelling, and particularly oral storytelling, in it — so, the idea of a story that is told aloud, vs. read, felt organic. In some ways, the novel is a coming of age story — as Bird leaves home and ventures out into the world, his awareness of the world grows, too. As readers, we slowly become aware of what this world is like alongside him. So, he felt like the right guide, so to speak, for us to follow.
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