Who: Nova Ren Suma, Libba Bray
What: New York City launch of Wake the Wild Creatures
Where: McNally Jackson SoHo, 134 Prince St.
When: Wednesday, May 7, seat $5, book and seat $18.99, 6:30
Why: At first it was beautiful. A hunter’s moon hovered in the sky, tremendous and pulsing with light, making the air glow warm all around me. I was spending the night out on my own, near the perimeter marked with subtle symbols and stones, wandering for the joy of it, then running because I could. I lost hold of time passing, or maybe the hours themselves held still. Tree bodies everywhere. Knotted oak shoulders and the rough, ridged skin of red spruce and tall firs. The forest I’d known all my life was awake, and so was I: two quick legs whipping through the bright-gold dark, more animal than girl.
I reached the clearing with the seven white pines, their heads thrust up, and stopped to get my breath back. The mist filled my lungs, peppery and also sweet, and the momentum pushed me forward, but I wasn’t about to go farther than where I could see from this cliff edge. I wouldn’t dare. Giddy, I dropped into a bed of moss, soft and slick in spots, and rolled in it, howled for no reason, felt close to an understanding of some kind, as if an eye inside me was peeling open. It was the first full moon after I turned thirteen, and I knew that whatever happened in this next stretch of hours would change me forever after.
I wasn’t wrong.
So begins #1 New York Times bestselling author Nova Ren Suma’s latest thrilling novel, Wake the Wild Creatures (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, May 6, $18.99). The book is divided into eleven chapters, including “Light in the Forest,” “Strange Land,” and “Monsters,” telling the story of a teenager whose life is upended when her mother is arrested at an abandoned Catskills hotel where a group of women have built their own community, away from society.
In the April 12 edition of her newsletter, “The Words Around Us,” Suma explains, “It was the height of lock-down, when I couldn’t leave my house except for groceries, when I became obsessed with infamous lost places. I found myself fixated on mysterious and often mythical places in the world that aren’t always findable on maps, places where people disappear, places where tragic things are known to happen, places that have been lost — the Bermuda Triangle, Aokigahara Forest, Roanoke, Lemuria. I collected urban legends about mysterious places that couldn’t be found a second time — such as a gas station off a highway where someone stopped in the middle of the night and yet swore they never saw on that same road again, no matter how many times they drove it. Or a part of the forest glimpsed down a hidden path that could never be reached afterward, no matter how many times someone went searching. These places fascinated me. (Writers who’ve worked with me know how much I love a list of fascinations!) But many of these legends have unhappy endings and frightening underbellies, and I didn’t want to write a horror story. I had it in mind to write about a place you’d want to find . . . because the world outside is the horror.”
Suma, the author of such other novels as The Walls Around Us, A Room Away from the Wolves, and 17 & Gone, read an advance excerpt from her debut YA novel, Imaginary Girls, at twi-ny’s tenth anniversary party at Fontana’s in 2011. As with all her work over the last fourteen years, it is clear in Wake the Wild Creatures how painstaking a writer she is; every word, every sentence has a potent immediacy, with nothing extraneous seeping in. She is a master storyteller who devises unique, surreal plots that are all too real.
(photo courtesy Nova Ren Suma on Instagram)
Suma told twi-ny, “Writing Wake the Wild Creatures changed and challenged me as a person in a different way than all of my previous books. Yes, this was a hard book to write and articulate in the way I thought the story deserved, and it took me more time than I ever imagined, but I mean beyond that. This was the book that faltered and re-found its footing during the pandemic. This was the book that made me face my own pessimistic ideas about humanity and our collective future and consider the ways my own small life could be approached in a different and more courageous way. In this story there is an off-grid community hidden away in an old abandoned hotel in the Catskill Mountains, and they have turned their backs on broken society below. Writing this place — the Neves — helped me find hope again and allowed me to see a way to the future. I most want the book to find its readers and perhaps help do the same for them.”
She added, “Everything feels different on the other end of writing this novel. I lost my editor while I was writing this book (don’t worry, she’s okay! She’s a literary agent now!), and I’m happy to say we did get to finish our editorial work together. But the tumult wasn’t over. I then lost two more editors. My longtime publisher, the beloved Algonquin Young Readers, was shuttered. I have since found a new publishing home in Little, Brown, and I’m completely surprised that I landed on my feet, yet I still feel so dazed about where I was when I started . . . and where (and who) I am now. I write these words from a train as I head out on my first-ever pub week book tour, a publishing dream I never dared allow myself to wish for because I didn’t think it could happen to me. But no matter what happens with this book out in the world, I know what I put on the page: the story I most needed to tell in this current moment.”
The book tour brings Suma to McNally Jackson SoHo on May 7, joined by Printz Award–winning author and playwright Libba Bray (Under the Same Stars, Going Bovine) for a conversation and signing. Admission is $5 for a seat or $18.99 for a seat and a copy of Wake the Wild Creatures.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]