After 18-year-old Nora loses her mother, she sets off to France in search of a place to scatter the ashes. One moment, she is traversing the world amid a global pandemic in the year 2021, and the next, she finds herself in 1946 war-torn Europe. The surreal, mystical novel transcends time while also navigating through themes of grief, love, forgiveness, and self-discovery. Arnold has earned worldwide acclaim for her young adult and children’s books, including the popular A Boy Called Bat and its sequels. She is known for featuring neuroatypical perspectives and feminist themes in her work.
Tell us about this story.
“The idea came to me in 2021. I saw an image that I’d seen before of a tunnel made out of plants, and it just looks like a portal. It’s a really ancient path that has been formed deep into the earth, and it’s called a holloway. The book is about two time periods and places where things have fallen apart after a run at supremacy by a fascist leader that denies and scapegoats, and explores how we find a place for ourselves in the aftermath of tragedies that are so big. I was originally going to write a fun time travel romance, and I wrote this instead.”
Nora is dealing with a lot of complex emotions. How did you navigate conveying grief through the eyes of a teenager?
“I ended up rewriting this book many times. All of the backstory is woven through it because it’s told sort of moving forward, but also in flashbacks. It’s really about her coming to understand her relationship with her mother—the layers of her grief and the layers of her misunderstanding of her relationship with her mother, and coming to understand who her mother really was. Seeing the radicalization of news and people only getting fed the news they wanted to be fed, and people going off the deep end.”
Where do you find inspiration?
“I used to think ideas were rare, special things, but the more I’ve been at this, the more I see that everything is interesting and connected. The way I see this holloway, my interest in neuroatypicality, my interest in art and philosophy, my knowledge about World War II, the anti-vax rhetoric I lived through, they all belong together because I lived a life. I think inspiration is found by saying ‘I wonder’ and ‘what if’ a lot. Even if you don’t make something with your wonder, as a person you can live a more wonderful life if you loosen and notice more.”
You depict both a post-COVID world and a post-WWII era. How did these two eras parallel?
“Through art in a lot of ways. My character Nora is an artist, and in World War II there was a rise of surrealism and absurdism as a response to the war in Europe, largely led by Jews and by a bunch of different people who were trying to make sense of how the world can fall apart and what a world looks like afterwards. That’s a question especially a lot of young people have. How do we have joy and make art when it feels like the world is on fire, and is there a point for joy or playfulness or hope?”
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