Latest news with #JessicaTownsend
The Guardian
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Nevermoor's Jessica Townsend on frantic fans, her fantasy smash hit – and feeling ‘gutted' by JK Rowling
Jessica Townsend feels for George RR Martin. The author of the bestselling middle-grade fantasy series Nevermoor has just released the fourth instalment, Silverborn, two-and-a-half years after it was supposed to come out in October 2022. Readers who were nine when the third book, Hollowpox, was released in 2020 had become full-blown teenagers by the time Silverborn hit bookshops in April. Townsend is now wryly mortified to be 'One those authors where people are just tapping their watches and being like, 'Excuse me!' 'I had to turn off social media for a period,' she admits over Zoom from her home on the Sunshine Coast, where she lives with her two spaniels Vyvyan and Rik. 'I was getting so many well-meaning nudges of 'Where's the book?' I'm not having a fun time, guys. I'm not on a cruise. I promise you I'm in agony.' It took her a decade to write the first book, Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, about a cursed girl who escapes into a magical realm. Then, in a whirlwind aspiring authors dream of, it became the focus of a bidding war between eight different publishers. It has sold more than 400,000 copies in the English language alone since it was published in 2017. The sequel, Wundersmith, followed a year later. Fantasy novels are given to heft and complexity at the best of times, and Townsend adds extra layers by incorporating genre elements. Wundersmith was a wizard-school story; Hollowpox was an outbreak story, with nods to zombie tropes. Silverborn weaves in a full-blown murder mystery – which is partly why it took longer than expected. Townsend says she gained a hard-won new respect for how many moving parts the genre involves. 'I mean, what was I thinking?' she laughs. Nevermoor is a sprawling old city – inspired by Townsend's years living in London – full of sentient buildings, anthropomorphic animals, and not one but two magical rail systems. We discover it through the eyes of Morrigan, who has grown up in a grim town knowing she's cursed to die on her 12th birthday. Rescued and smuggled into Nevermoor by her patron, the gloriously ginger adventurer and hotelier Jupiter North, she trains to join the prestigious Wundrous Society, whose members wrangle the magical forces and phenomena throughout the city. Morrigan finds herself making friends and settling into her new life, albeit gradually. While she's deeply empathetic and kind under her spiky, distrustful exterior, she's still a product of a traumatic childhood. Townsend has been careful not to suggest that a lifetime of conditioning can be cured by befriending enormous talking cats or having superpowers. 'I didn't want Nevermoor to be, 'Your problems are solved! Everything's magical and fine now,'' she says. 'Obviously there have to be dangers [and complications].' There are standard fantasy-fare monsters and hidden threats, as well as more quotidian dangers: 'Sometimes the monsters are in plain sight, and sometimes they're politicians,' says Townsend. Townsend had planned Hollowpox as an outbreak novel well before the global pandemic that coincided with its release; despite her initial panic, parents told her the story of a terrifying new disease and how different people respond to it had actually helped their children make sense of what was happening. Other fans asked Townsend if she was evoking the Aids epidemic in her depiction of a brutal and dehumanising disease that affected only an already marginalised group. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning 'I wasn't saying 'How can I represent the Aids crisis in a fantasy children's book?'' she says. 'But we unfortunately have no shortage in history, and in our current world, of groups that are being oppressed in this way.' Townsend, who identifies as queer, has lightly seeded the books with what she calls 'ambient' representation: a female teacher with an ex-girlfriend; a pair of aunts with a husband and a wife between them. She hoots with laughter recounting the occasional message from 'some silly goose' berating her for the very mention of same-sex relationships in a book for kids. 'When I was a kid … if it wasn't a coming out story or a story of queer struggle or a bullying story, [queerness] didn't make the reality of any fictional worlds that we were swimming in,' she says. 'As a queer adult, it's so funny to me when people tell me that I don't belong in the world I created. What a ridiculous thing … I can find it funny because I am a secure, openly queer adult, but there are children reading my books [for whom] there are so many voices that are shouting that it is not OK to be you.' Townsend is going into her press tour for Silverborn at a time when the world's most famous children's author, JK Rowling, is publicly railing against the rights of trans people. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion 'I'm very happy to be quite blunt about it: I'm gutted. It is so upsetting and it's so perplexing, and I will never understand it,' she says. But Rowling's ugly crusade has only reinforced Townsend's innate sense of duty towards the 'tiny brains and hearts' in her audience. 'I do feel a responsibility to make sure that every kid knows that they have a place in Nevermoor,' she says firmly. 'Some of these kids are going to grow up to be queer adults, and some of them already know that about themselves.' As in much YA fantasy, the idea of chosen or found family is central to Morrigan's story. 'People love [the found-family trope] because we are not all fortunate enough to find that soft place in the family that we're born into,' Townsend says. 'I have a great family, but I also know plenty of people who don't. And it's desperately important, I think, especially in kids' books, to show that the family you were born into, if they are not the one, it doesn't mean that you will not find that soft place in the world somewhere.' The great gift of stories, for Townsend, is that they help equip kids with a greater capacity to put themselves in others' shoes. 'I always talk about imagination when I'm talking to kids in schools,' she says. 'Imagination is so important, it gives us ingenuity, inventions, blah, blah, blah – but it also … allows us to grow those empathy muscles. Reading as a child helps you become a more empathetic adult.' Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow is out now in Australia (Hachette) and the UK (Orion), and in the US on 24 June (Little, Brown). Jessica Townsend is touring Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in May and June.
ABC News
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Jessica Townsend's Silverborn sees fantasy meet cosy crime in her latest book of the bestselling YA Nevermoor series
Jessica Townsend remembers exactly where she was the moment she learned she was a New York Times-bestselling author. It was 2017. She had just published Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow and she was in LA on the US leg of her book tour to meet with film executives. The Sunshine Coast local decided to visit Disneyland on her day off when her agent called with the news. "I was like … 'This is so silly' — you don't find out you've hit the New York Times bestseller list when you're walking down Main Street in Disneyland," Townsend tells ABC Arts. "The absurdity of the whole situation just really got to me. But it was a nice, magical way to find out that this totally ridiculous, very unexpected career milestone had happened." To the world, Townsend — then in her early 30s — appeared to be an overnight success. But the publication of her debut novel was the culmination of years of work. "It took me about 10 years to write the first Nevermoor book and, at the time, that was a great source of frustration for me," she says. "But in hindsight, it's the best possible thing that could have happened." The "long incubation process", as Townsend describes it, allowed her to build out the imaginary world of Nevermoor, a sprawling metropolis filled with magicians, fantastical creatures and enchanted architecture. "The challenge for me is not trying to come up with [ideas]. The challenge is how to switch off the tap," she says. That tap has poured forth enough material for Townsend to loosely plot out nine books. A musical film adaptation — currently in development with Drew Goddard (The Martian) as writer and producer, and Australian Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) as director — is another addition to the ever-expanding Nevermoor universe. And now Townsend has published its much-anticipated fourth novel, Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow. The first three books — Nevermoor (2017), Wundersmith (2018) and Hollowpox (2020) — follow the fortunes of Morrigan Crow, a 10-year-old girl from the Wintersea Republic. Born under a curse, Morrigan is destined to die on Eventide (the last day of an age) until the mysterious Jupiter North turns up to save her from her unloving family and tragic fate. He spirits her away to the magical city of Nevermoor, home to the Wundrous Society, where Morrigan learns that she is a magician who can control a powerful substance called Wunder. The only problem is that such magicians have a bad reputation in Nevermoor, thanks to the last one, Ezra Squall, who used his gift to carry out a massacre of innocent civilians. Silverborn, a 660-page doorstopper, combines fantasy with "cosy crime" as Morrigan and her friends investigate a murder. Townsend introduces a raft of new characters and takes readers to previously unexplored corners of Nevermoor, including the wealthy Silver District, home to the privileged Darling family. While the book is still pitched to middle-grade readers, Townsend says a "slight tonal shift" sees Silverborn tackling darker and more grown-up themes. The novel explores the fraught territory between childhood and adolescence as Morrigan, now 13, and her patron, Jupiter, clash over boundaries. It also considers what constitutes home and family. "The whole series is about family, in a way," Townsend reflects. Woven through the Nevermoor series are references to Townsend's favourite books and films. In an early scene in the first book, Jupiter presents Morrigan with an umbrella on Morningtide so she can partake in a Nevermoor tradition celebrating the start of a new age: jumping off the roof of the Hotel Deucalion and floating 13 storeys to the ground. "That was a hat tip to two things: to Mary Poppins, which I've always loved, and also to my favourite movie, Practical Magic," Townsend says. She also drew inspiration from Gregory McGuire's 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, the basis for the musical and 2024 film. "It took this whimsical, absurd, silly children's story … and then treated it very, very seriously, and brought out the things about it that were sinister. That's what I love — having things side by side that are very silly and very sinister, and having them turn on a dime." She also acknowledges the influence of the Harry Potter series, which she describes as "a cultural touchstone". "It changed the landscape of children's publishing forever," she says. "For a lot of people, even for a lot of adults, it is often not just the only children's book they've ever read, it is the only book they've ever read … and so it holds this mythical place in the collective consciousness." But Townsend thinks it's time for the culture to move on. "I would love to think that we could de-centre the conversation in general in children's books from Harry Potter," she says. "I have no interest in thinking or talking about JK Rowling and her creations because as a queer woman, as a trans ally, I am just so gutted and so disappointed [by her anti-trans activism]." As a young reader, Townsend loved books like The Baby-Sitters Club, John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began series and Little Women. These stories exerted such a strong force on the author that when it came to writing her own books, she was naturally drawn to the world of children's literature. "Those are the stories that we hold tight … [and] stick with us in a real, emotional way," she says. Stories with that kind of power can reach readers of all ages — not just children. "I'm deliberately writing books that I hope are being enjoyed by children and adults," Townsend says. "I love the communal experience of adults and kids reading together, and it not being a total drag for the adult, so that they are enjoying it and getting something out of it themselves … on a slightly different level, like a Pixar film." Part of the thrill comes from becoming immersed in a timeless world removed from reality. "I love the idea of creating a place that people can come back to, that they can find in childhood and that they can come back to when they are teenagers and when they are adults, and that it will still have that nostalgic, joyful feeling for them." Melbourne Writers Festival is on from May 8-11. Sydney Writers Festival is on from May 20-25.
