“The books you read when you’re young get into your head in a way that doesn’t usually happen later in life,” says Jaclyn Dolamore.
As a young reader, the author felt like she became a part of her favorite stories, and they became a part of her. “My love for them was so strong, and I took so much inspiration from them,” she told Cracking the Cover. “More than anything, I want to pass that feeling on.”
Jaclyn has passed that on in her own books “Magic Under Glass,” which was a Booklist Top 10 First Novel for Youth and a Junior Library Guild Selection, and her latest novel, “Between the Sea and Sky.”
“Between the Sea and Sky” is the story of Esmerine, a mermaid, and Alan, a magical guy with wings. Esmerine and Alan have been friends since childhood, when he would fly to the islands to collect seaweed. Alan loves to read and taught Esmerine to read and write. But as time passed, Alan stopped coming to the islands and their friendship faltered. Now grown, Esmerine comes across Alan while looking for her sister Dosia, who has transformed herself and run off with a human man. Esmerine’s only hope of saving her sister lies with a childhood friend she no longer knows.
The romance between a mermaid and a winged boy was a subplot in a novel Jaclyn wrote years ago. The novel wasn’t very good, but Jaclyn kept wanting to come back to it. “I loved the idea of two like minds having different bodies that belonged to different elements,” she said. “Many star-crossed romances deal with families who hate each other, or class differences, but I liked the idea that these two had the forces of nature conspiring against them!”
Once she settled on writing “Between the Sea and Sky,” Jaclyn took about a year writing a first draft. It was a longer process than normal, but she says, “Second books have to bear the weight of a lot of writer’s neurosis. ‘Will my editor be sorry she ever signed up with me? Will this book be as good?’ Etcetera. I loved the book but I sort of hated writing it just because I was stressed out.”
Creating a world where characters can fly was right up Jaclyn’s alley. She says she’s always wished she could fly and even gets jealous of birds when she watches them fly. “I was at the park the other day watching Canada geese take off like fighter planes and I was just like, ‘You lucky bastards,'” she said.
The idea for these flying people, or Fandarsee as they’re called in the book, came from a shape-shifting elf in comic called “Elfquest.” Jaclyn loved the comic as a child and loved that the elf’s arms became wings. She occasionally began writing into her stories a race of people who had bat-type wings instead of arms.
“I quickly deviated from ‘Elfquest’ a lot, in working out the logistics of things,” Jaclyn said, “and I had to come up with a culture for an entire race. Originally they were more tribal and primitive, but then, in thinking about the element of air in astrology and lore, I decided to make them intellectuals.”
Jaclyn’s mermaids, however, came from a mixture of researched lore and her own imagination. From the mer/selkie tales of the British Isles and sirens of Greek mythology to Hans Christian Andersen’s description of a mermaid’s ability to transform tails to legs, there are lots of fairy-tale “tidbits” in Jaclyn’s tale. The hard part, she said, was working out the logistics for everything, as fairy tales are rarely known for that kind of planning.
Jaclyn says there was a lot of room to grow after “Magic Under Glass,” and she believes she achieved that with “Between the Sea and Sky.” “I think every book I write is better than the last,” she continued. “So far it seems like readers as a whole agree, although of course some will prefer this book or that one, because everyone has their own reader quirks.”
Though Jaclyn says her style has been pretty evident from a young age, she feels she gotten much better at refining her writing, cutting out the stuff that she doesn’t need and adding things that make the book richer. If her books move her readers, then she has accomplished her task.
“I think a good book inspires a reader to create themselves,” she said.” If a reader comes away inspired, it’s the best compliment I can get.”
*Jaclyn took a lot of time and care to answer Cracking the Cover’s questions. Read a complete transcript of her interview. Also, read Cracking the Cover’s review of “Between the Sea and Sky.”
