Melanie La’Brooy on ‘The Wintrish Girl’
Melanie La’Brooy’s The Wintrish Girl (UQP) is the first book in her ‘Talismans of Fate’ fantasy trilogy for middle-grade readers. Featuring magical creatures and new friendships, the book uses tropes of the fantasy genre to create a ‘sophisticated world’ and a ‘fresh, captivating adventure’, according to reviewer Angela Crocombe. She spoke to the author.
You’ve created a wonderfully sophisticated world with a number of magical creatures, special rituals and quirky features, such as paintings that are portals to the location of the people in them. Did you spend a lot of time world building before you started writing and can you tell us about some of the unique features of your magical world?
I definitely figured it out as I went along! With each new draft I had to discard rules that weren’t working or come up with new places and ideas to meet the demands of the story.
Some elements were there from the start such as the Librarynth, which is a cross between a library and a floating labyrinth, and Betwixt & Between, the strange shadow world where memories are buried. Others went in during editing. I came up with the Loopholes because I needed a way for my heroine, Penn, to escape from a locked and guarded room. Loopholes are secret tricks that can make hidden passages or doorways appear. The tricks are those seemingly universal kid rituals, like only stepping on the black or white tiles if there’s a black and white chequered floor or trying to get around a room without touching the ground.
I also tried to make the world as rich as possible by wrapping fabulous creatures and ideas in words that are delicious to read aloud. By the time the reader finishes The Wintrish Girl, they should have a whole new vocabulary with words like Quintessence, Gargoths, Succursa, Taliskinesis, Occulorum, Marvellance and more.
What were some of your influences, literary and visual, in the writing of your story?
Obviously The Boy Who Must Not Be Named looms large over this genre, you can’t escape its influence and I didn’t want to anyway because it’s an amazing one. As a child I loved The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander and anything by Joan Aiken. I wanted The Wintrish Girl to be one of those exciting adventures where a band of misfits undertakes an impossible quest, travels to fabulous places and triumphs over fearsome villains and odds.
The Wintrish Girl starts off like a lot of other books in this genre: kids discover their extraordinary powers and are assigned to specific roles in a magical world. But it ends up somewhere quite different, with the realisation that having a magical power label kids and tell them what they will be when they grow up, rather than letting them chart their own destinies, is actually a terrible idea.
I used to write political columns for the Age so I also wanted to venture into real issues in my fictional world. My favourite line in The Wintrish Girl is a veiled reference to fake news—I hope you spot it!
I loved the unique features of each of your main characters (Penn, Juniper and Arthur) and the way they worked together, despite their differences, as well as your secondary characters, who felt very complex, and quite real. Do you have a favourite character and why?
Thank you, that makes me so happy to hear! I started writing with very specific goals: I wanted my main character Penn to be a physically brave and adventurous girl. With Arthur, I wanted to write a boy whose main characteristic and ‘superpower’ is kindness. Juniper is clever, logical and has her heart in the right place but definitely prioritises being ‘right’ over being kind. I love that they all learn from each other so by the end Arthur is acting bravely, Juniper is showing more empathy and Penn has learnt to stop and think before jumping in headfirst.
The secondary character I most enjoy writing is definitely the Augur, Portentia. She’s powerful (or she would be if she hadn’t mislaid her Augur’s staff), wise (except when she decides to take a bath instead of rescuing Penn and her friends from execution) and slightly unhygienic (she lets birds nest in her hair and keeps recipes down her socks). Portentia is a total joy to write and my biggest problem with her is knowing when to stop. Although I’m not entirely sure I can take credit for her dialogue. I’m almost certain Portentia is dictating and I’m just her typist.
Penn, the dark-skinned protagonist, is Wintrish in a world that treats Wintrish as slaves, due to their being on the losing side in a past war. Were you intentionally exploring racism and prejudice with this unjust treatment of the Wintrish?
Yes. Racism is definitely one of the big themes explored in the book. The Wintrish are an oppressed indigenous race who were the original inhabitants of the land that is now the Empire of Arylia. Penn is a servant and has been taught to believe that her dismal fate is tied to her racial identity and is inescapable.
I extended the themes of the book to my storytelling choices. For example, I set myself the challenge of writing a book set in a magical world without once using the word magic! I came up with Marvellance and Malevolence to get away from the tired idea of white magic (good) and black magic (bad). I also tilted the gender ratio in favour of female characters and there’s an imprisoned Princess who can’t be rescued—she has to free herself.
I wanted to constantly challenge the reader, whether through the use of a female pronoun when referring to an unnamed Warrior (whom they might have automatically assumed was male) right through to the major character of the Night Hag, the terrifying creature that hunts Penn throughout the book but which ultimately proves to be far more complex than just a monster.
There is a surprise reveal on the last page of The Wintrish Girl. Can you give us a bit of a teaser about what is coming up in the next book in the series?
I’m very happy with the final line of The Wintrish Girl, I love that it upends everything the reader thought they knew! The next book is going to be very much about families, and not just Penn’s search for her real family. We’ll be going to the Province of Candlemage to meet Arthur’s (very dysfunctional) family, while Juniper’s loving, close family are going to face their own challenges. I don’t want to give too much away but I can say that readers will get to meet the fearsome Magi of Candlemage. Ned, the ferocious Huggle Beast, will be by Penn’s side as usual and Portentia will probably be helping in some way. Unless she’s hiding under the bed because her Augur’s staff is trying to attack her. Don’t ask me, I have no control over Portentia whatsoever.
‘Talismans of Fate’ is planned to be a trilogy but there are so many parts of the Empire that I want to explore (the ice caverns in Midwinter, the Straits of Vengefire, the ruined city in Bloodwild to name a few), I’m just hoping that I’ll be able to fit everything in …
Read Angela Crocombe’s review of The Wintrish Girl here.
