Hi readers!  It’s me, Karen Rivers.  I don’t expect you would have guessed that, so there you are.  I’m here today to talk (or blog) a bit about my new series of Young Adult novels:  X in Flight, Y in the Shadows, and What Z Saw.  (Now that I’ve typed that, I’m not sure the third isn’t called What Z Sees.  That’s what having children does to your brain - makes it super-forgetful.) I had a baby girl, Lola, in August, around the same time as X in Flight was released.  Exciting!  It seems like there’s always a lot going on, and usually all at the same time. 

The first book, X in Flight, was a delight to write and a huge departure from what I usually write.  When I write a book, I usually rip a lot of elements for the book out of my actual life.  A lot of things, for example, in the Haley Andromeda books came from my own hilarious experiences (which often weren’t hilarious when they happened, but got funnier when they happened to Haley).  With the XYZ series, I still used different elements swiped from my life and from the lives of people I know:  less of the funny, more of the serious, but both parts are there.  But mostly, this one is all fiction, with a glimmer of me hiding in each character.  I don’t think that’s avoidable!  We all sneak into our own work, sometimes without us even realizing it. 

This time around, my protagonist is both male and African American.  I am neither male nor African American, so it was such a great experience to write the character—someone so different from me on the outside, yet so similar on the inside.  X is a guy who wants to please everyone, who wants to make his mum proud, who wants to measure up to expectations—and that’s really who I was, too, at that age.  My mum (in real life) is a huge fan of Tiger Woods, and so I imagined a character who’s mum also is a huge fan of Tiger Woods, only in a bit of a confusing, expectation-laced way—does she want him to BE Tiger or just be like him? 

When I was in school, there was only one African American boy in our neighbourhood.  I remember once talking with him about what it was like to be a non-white kid in a predominantly-white school.  He told me that he always felt that no one wanted to acknowledge his colour, that he was described as the kid with the dark hair or eyes and that often he wanted to stand up and scream, “I am not insulted if you say I’m black.  I AM and it’s NOT an insult!” His description of the clunky attempts at political correctness when he didn’t know any more than anyone else what was correct and what wasn’t stuck with me.  The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to write about that feeling of displacement, the constant otherness he says he felt and how that parallels how a lot of people—regardless of the colour of their skin—describe how it is to be an adolescent.  We all have different reasons for feeling like we don’t fit in, that’s for sure.  Sometimes it’s because you’re part of a visible minority, but other times it’s something invisible, just something inside that says, “I feel different.”

X is different, that’s for sure, and it’s not because of his colour, it’s because he can fly.  Want to know more?  You’ll have to grab a copy of the book and check it out!  I don’t want to give it all away. 

Raincoast has set up a great website right here where you can read more about the books:

www.raincoast.com/xyz/

And you can always drop by my website (and one day, I swear that I will finish the site, right now it’s very very half-done) or drop me a note at:
www.karenrivers.com

Thanks for reading!  I hope you all have a terrific holiday season.

Best,
Karen Rivers