By Cat McKenna ’28 and Honora Quinn ’27
Staff Writers
“What did your grandparents do?” is how the #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Holly Black kicked off her conversation with fellow#1 New York Times Bestselling Author Marie Lu at an event at the Odyssey Bookshop on Saturday, Oct. 18.
The question, which Black cited as from Author David Levithan, was just the beginning of a fun and engaging conversation about Lu’s debut novel in the adult genre, “Red City,” published on Oct. 14. Lu paused after this opener, before confessing to the crowd that she wasn’t quite sure.
Before “Red City,” Lu’s novels were within the young adult space, including her 2011 dystopian debut novel, #1 New York Times bestseller, “Legend,” and her 2017 #1 New York Times science fiction bestseller, “Warcross.”
Set in a reimagined Los Angeles, “Red City” puts readers into a world where “alchemy is the hidden art of transformation. An exclusive power wielded by crime syndicates that market it to the world’s elites in the form of sand, a drug that enhances those who take it into a more perfect version of themselves: more beautiful, more charismatic, simply more.”
After Black’s opening question, she asked Lu how she came about centering the world and magic of “Red City” around alchemy. Lu explained that one summer, she enrolled in an astronomy class at Oxford University. When she encountered a book on the history of alchemy in Oxford’s library, the concept of alchemy being the center of “Red City” began to brew.
With “Red City” being Lu’s adult debut, Black also brought up questions about her approach to structuring a story for older readers after havinge written for a younger audience for over a decade. On that point, Lu told Black that she “trusts an adult audience to sit with the discomfort of adult themes.”
When Mount Holyoke News interviewed Black about her own thoughts on “Red City,” she touched on this darkness: “[It was] super interestingly brutal in its interpersonal dynamics. Specifically, the family backgrounds of both of the main characters.”
Black and Lu touched on this specifically when they discussed the complex dynamic between Sam, one of the protagonists, and her mother. Lu explained how Sam and her mother’s relationship has elements of Lu’s own upbringing. She and her mother immigrated to the United States when she was five. Parts of her immigrant experience are shown in the novel. For instance, Lu explained that in the opening scene of the book, Sam is waiting in a closet for her mother to finish her waitressing shift. Lu recalled how, in her childhood, she would wait in a restaurant's closet for her mother to finish work as well. On this, Lu and Black both commented that financial hardship seem more real in “Red City” and adult novels in general.
Sam’s co-protagonist, Ari, faces hardship in a different sense. Ari is an apprentice at one of the syndicates. Lu said she finds common ground between herself and Ari in both his apprenticeship and his life. She revealed how, in her own academic life, nothing ever really came naturally. That is reflected in Ari’s apprenticeship and arc in “Red City.” Both Ari and Lu “really have to work for [success],” which Lu posed in contrast with Sam’s character.
When reflecting on both Sam and Ari, Lu said during the event, “I gave half of myself to her and half of myself to him.”
At the end of the talk, Lu talked about her writing process and how she pursued writing projects in college. When asked what advice she had for college students hoping to be writers, she said, “Take your time, take the time you need, find the time in between things. There's a million different ways of getting it done, and all of them are valid.”
The event concluded with a book signing in front of the store. During the signing Lu was asked what she wanted readers to take away from “Red City.”
Lu said, despite the darkness of the novel, she hopes “[readers] take some sense of hope from it, where even though you live in this dark world, there's somebody who remembers you and there's somebody who loves you, and that you know that there is worth in yourself.”
Maeve McCorry ’28 contributed fact-checking.