A conversation with author of HC: 978-0-7636-6735-1 • E-book: 978-0-7636-7042-9 272 pages • Age 10 and up

Q: You start with a scary opening scene. If I hadn’t been told that this was a “mild ghost story,” I might not have gotten past it. Some of your other writing can be very unsettling. What made you decide that this story would be more mild? A: Questions of mildness never came into it. An idea comes to you, and it brings with it its own spirit — some are eerie, some are quiet, some are loud, some are slinky, some are strange. I knew this would be a story for children set during the war. The age group creates certain limits around what you can and can’t write. I never thought of it as being a ghost story as I wrote it, so I didn’t spend any time making the boys scary. I wanted them to be able to be mistaken for real children by the reader, so I kept a lid on their scariness. The opening scene is, I’m told, a little scary. I think a book should start with a bang, and so the scene is a kind of bang. I used to play Murder in the Dark as a kid; it terrified me. I play it with my dog sometimes; it still terrifies me.

Q: What inspired you to write the story-within-the story, weaving the tale of a family evacuating from London to a country estate during World War II with the mystery of the missing , nephews of King Richard? How do those two elements, World War II and the mystery of the princes, resonate for you, if they do? A: I’ve always been interested in the story of Richard and the princes, and I’ve alluded to it a few times in various novels, but I always wanted to write something more substantial about it — to really look inside the characters’ heads. I’ve also always found the whole evacuation saga to be fascinating — how brave those children must have been, how wretched it must have been for the parents, how frightened and uncertain everyone must have felt. Those children were really going into the unknown, with no idea of their fate. I started the novel knowing I would combine

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the two stories — the princes and the evacuees — but I was unsure how well they would knit. In the end, they worked easily together, I think perhaps because underneath all the history and the drama you have children who are helpless and not in control of their destiny. A child is a child, regardless of the era they are living through. I realized that the princes and the evacuees would have much in common, and so would their stories.

Q: There are a lot of references to Cecily’s not being smart, but she is very astute at summing up people. Her comment about her mother — “She’s always nice, but always cross. She lets me do whatever I want, but everything I do annoys her”(page 67) — really seems to capture that parental conflict. As you created the character of Cecily, did you intentionally make her smart in this way? A: Cecily was a great character to write — she proved to have more spark than I expected her to. I had thought I would like May best, but Cecily easily became my favorite character. I didn’t mean to make her accidentally astute — she made herself that way. Some characters write themselves, and she certainly did that. Sometimes she surprised and delighted me with the strength of her life. She carried the book for me, and I’m grateful to her for doing so. It causes me some pain when people say — and they say it often — that they don’t like her. It is important to remember that she has a good heart.

Q: Heron Hall is so beautifully and vividly described that you feel as if you could walk through the doors and know just where to find things. Was there a particular place you drew on to create this home, or was it all created in your mind? A: I based Heron Hall loosely on a house in Kent called Road Hill House — it was the scene of a famous murder in 1860, and the house is much-documented — as well as on Byron’s house, Newstead, through which I was once given a private tour. A lot of it, however, exists only in my mind and has no real shape or layout but is more just a collection of images that I altered as required. You can’t get too specific, I find, with architecture and landscape, because you never know when you’re going to need, say, a tree, where there was no tree before. I tend to use small details to define a space or place — a flock of sheep, a purply weed, a spacious fireplace, a candle dripping wax on a mahogany side table — and leave the assembling of the whole to the reader’s imagination.

Q: Peregrine warns his audience that his story “is not a pleasant one” and that “the world was very different then — yet also, underneath, much the same” (pages 98–99). Did you set out to express this message, that war remains the same over time, or did it grow from a desire to write a historical ghost story? A: I think the theme developed itself to a great degree — I remember worrying, when I started the book, about how I was going to draw the two time frames together, but in fact they meshed insistently, and I guess that was because they both revolved around the ideas of power and the

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wastage that is war. It’s not just war that remains the same over time: it is the world, or at least the people in it. Humans have always been driven by greed, selfishness, jealousy, all the nasty kinds of things. They are the underlying causes of war, and always will be. Often I was surprised and really pleased by how the two time frames knitted. It was as if the five hundred years separating them were just a blink — that all the protagonists and their excuses for besieging each other were almost interchangeable.

Q: This is one of your three books about war, the other two beingThe Silver Donkey and . Do you see them working together to convey a common message? A: I’m not a great fan of trying to instill any “message” in my work — I don’t subscribe to that idea of author-as-wise-one. If my books say anything, I hope they say that we should love and respect animals and the natural world. I suppose the three novels together suggest that war affects the innocent in a grindingly brutal, unforgivable way, but no one needed me to tell them that, did they?

Q: Do you think that Peregrine felt something of the same way for his nephew Jeremy as King Richard felt for his? A: I think Peregrine admires and likes Jeremy, and sees himself in him, and has great hopes for Jeremy’s future. I don’t think Richard felt this way toward his nephews. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Richard felt somewhat indifferent to them. He doesn’t seem to have known them well, and it was a time when you could hardly afford to get too attached to anyone. There was a lot of unexpected death going around.

Q: What did you think when King Richard’s bones were discovered beneath the parking lot? It generated a lot of attention about a man immortalized by Shakespeare as evil, but it also brought out his protectors who pointed out (as you do in your book) the many good things he did for his people. A: I have a bit of a hard time believing the bones are his, but everyone says they are, so I guess they’re right. I’m confused about the hunchback question: it’s long been accepted that Shakespeare made up the physical deformity, and certainly none of Richard’s contemporaries mention any physical deformity — and yet the bones are said to show a curvature of the spine, and suddenly Richard is supposed to have had a problem after all, thus making the bones definitely his. It doesn’t quite make sense to me. Bones aside, I think Richard has been pretty unlucky: he was a product of his rather fierce time, and no worse than anyone else — in many ways, he was a lot better. Dispatching the princes was never going to look good on his résumé, though. If he had been living in a slightly different time, he might have got away with it, but he was living on the cusp of historical change, and it was a change that went against him. I think that he was, ironically, quite a moral man, but he was also a (rightly) frightened and cornered man, and his circumstances drove him to desperate and immoral acts. And I think he regretted this, but could see no alternative.

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Sonya Hartnett is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and a Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. She lives near Melbourne, Australia. Photo by RedFiveStudio by Photo More titles by sonya hartnett HC: 978-0-7636-7211-9 • PB: 978-0-7636-7314-7 HC: 978-0-7636-5315-6 • PB: 978-0-7636-6461-9 E-book: 978-0-7636-5990-5 ★ Delicately told and deeply resonant.... A U.S. Board on Books for Young People Outstanding This tender fable of peace will linger International Book with both younger and older readers.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) A National Council of Teachers of English Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts

The Midnight Zoo ★ “Hartnett adeptly conveys the pain and loneliness of HC: 978-0-7636-5339-2 • E-book: 978-0-7636-5632-4 an older sibling facing a monumental moment of change Children’s Book Council of Australia and captures what growing up really means to a child. Book of the Year Winner This joyful choice for reading aloud serves as a discussion Short-listed for the Carnegie Medal starter on coping, acceptance, and maturity, and as an instruction manual on personal narratives. There are “An evocative story about unusual war myriad ways to appreciate this pitch-perfect story.” victims whose enduring belief in goodness brings true — School Library Journal (starred review) freedom.” — Kirkus Reviews Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf “A riveting, edgy read, leaving one examining the whole HC: 978-0-7636-2644-0 • PB: 978-0-7636-3416-2 notion of civilization versus wildness.” — The Horn Book An American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults HC: 978-0-7636-4760-5 • PB: 978-0-7636-6334-6 E-book: 978-0-7636-5193-0 ★ “The deliberate pacing, insight into teen angst, and masterful word choice make PB: 978-0-7636-3423-0 • E-book: 978-0-7636-6005-5 this a captivating read to savor.” — School A Michael L. Printz Honor Book Library Journal (starred review) An American Library Association Best Book ★ “The portrait of Plum is exquisitely written; the third- For Young Adults person point of view is steeped in emotional clairvoyance and expressed in poignantly age-appropriate phraseology.” — Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (starred review) What the Birds See PB: 978-0-7636-3680-7 The Ghost’s Child HC: 978-0-7636-3964-8 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Winner

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