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.
“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.
“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.
