SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Meg Medina's new novel begins with a splash and a shock. A gust of wind tears 13-year-old Graciela Lima off a cliff. She crashes into the water and is sucked down to the very bottom of the sea.
MEG MEDINA: (Reading) When she finally awakened, 100 years later, Graciela sat up, shocked at the dark water all around her and at her own, now translucent skin. Hagfish, writhing like eels, sucked away the last morsels of meat from what was left of her bones. There wasn't even time to scream before she heard a voice in the darkness. Don't be afraid, it said. I'm Amina.
SIMON: And that's when Graciela's afterlife - or is it another life? - begins. "Graciela In The Abyss" is the new novel for young readers from Meg Medina, winner of the Newbery Medal and a former National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. She joins us from Richmond, Virginia. Meg, thanks so much for being with us.
MEDINA: Oh, a pleasure to be here.
SIMON: Graciela awakens as a kind of sea ghost. Is that like a mermaid and a pirate of the Caribbean?
MEDINA: Not really. It was interesting. I was trying not to do the mermaid trope, so to speak, with sea stories. I really wanted this to be a collection of spirits - all kinds of people who end up in the watery depths to begin the next phase of existing. When you die in this book, in the world of "Graciela In The Abyss," you sleep for a hundred years. And then you awaken and assume a job - a role in the sea that helps keep the world in balance. And in Graciela's case, she is a glazier. She turns broken, forgotten things - trash - into beautiful pieces of sea glass for kids to find and others to find on the seashore.
SIMON: Meg, did you - and I apologize in advance for the term - did you hesitate over such a grave beginning for young readers?
MEDINA: I always do. I always do when I'm going to write hard things for children that involve death or suffering or intense evil. Although the characters are ghosts, for the most part, it's really a book about living and what kinds of people we choose to be as we move through community and friendship. So when I started this novel, you know, she does fall off the cliff. She dies, but I wanted to focus on how she chose to live afterward. The other thing that's really ironic is that death is the one constant, right? It's true for all of us, and so I try not to tiptoe around those things with kids. I like to tell them the truth.
SIMON: I have read that this novel has been a part of your life and work since 2010.
MEDINA: Yes. I meant it to be my sophomore novel. And I tried so hard to write it, but I kept writing the first 50 pages over and over again. I couldn't really find the story. But, you know, I think a book happens in its time. In 2013, my mom passed, and it was a really difficult passing. And suddenly, the notion of regrets and death and all of those things came bubbling forward, and then I found my way into the novel. I found the story that I really wanted to tell. This book, I think, taught me the most about being a writer in that sense because we think sometimes we write something, it doesn't work, that we failed. Sometimes, it's really just a matter of putting it away for a long while and letting the back of your mind sort of puzzle with it.
SIMON: Speaking of afterlife here, I gather you have a name on your file of ideas.
MEDINA: Yes. It's called the graveyard (laughter). And I go back to it. I pick through it like a bone digger. And sometimes it's for the smallest things. It might be the name of a character or a street, or that one sentence that my editor said, oh, it's too flowery, but I really loved it and couldn't bear to press delete on. I just keep all kinds of things there. And then I go back and I see if I could give it another life, just like Graciela.
SIMON: She becomes very useful in the life of a youngster who's - I'll put it this way - still a landlubber, if you please.
MEDINA: Jorge. They're both working against lots of regrets and difficulties in their own existence, Jorge with these utterly terrible parents and a legacy. He comes from a family of blacksmiths, and they have fashioned a most terrible harpoon that has now fallen into the wrong hands - a harpoon that threatens the balance of the world. And he finds that he and Graciela have to work together. I loved the friendship between them and the fact that both of them make so many mistakes, which is one of the things I love about kids in general. They make loads of mistakes, and there's a way back. It's not that you make mistakes. It's how you fix them, how you move on from them. And so it was fun to watch these two figure out literally how to be in the same space together, and also how to work for a common good.
SIMON: Meg, I have to ask you a question in your capacity as the 2023, 2024 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Do you worry about young people reading and seeing so much stuff just flash by on screens?
MEDINA: I do. I think one mistake we've made is that we allowed reading to become, quote-unquote, just a subject at school. And we've gotten away from the joy of giving kids choice about what they're reading, giving them time during the day to read, focusing them on the notion of, like, reading as enjoyment, as escape, as a way to figure yourself out and other people. And that really comes by giving kids a lot of great books and a lot of freedom in choosing what it is they want to read.
SIMON: Last question. I hope you don't mind. If you were to be a sea ghost, what kind do you think you'd be?
MEDINA: I think I would want to be the kind of sea ghost that dances to move the currents. I've always secretly wanted to be a dancer. My genetics didn't work that way (laughter). But I would love to be one of the ghosts that moves the currents and does it gently, and just keeps everything moving along.
SIMON: Meg Medina. Her new book - "Graciela In The Abyss." Thank you so much for being with us.
MEDINA: Oh, it was a delight. Thanks so much. Happy reading. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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