E. Catherine Tobler is joining us today with her novel The Kraken Sea. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Fifteen-year-old Jackson is different from the other children at the foundling hospital. Scales sometimes cover his arms. Tentacles coil just below his skin. Despite this Jackson tries to fit in with the other children. He tries to be normal for Sister Jerome Grace and the priests. But when a woman asks for a boy like him, all that changes. His name is pinned to his jacket and an orphan train whisks him across the country to Macquarie’s.
At Macquarie’s, Jackson finds a home unlike any he could have imagined. The bronze lions outside the doors eat whomever they deem unfit to enter, the hallways and rooms shift and change at will, and Cressida – the woman who adopted him – assures him he no longer has to hide what he is. But new freedoms hide dark secrets. There are territories, allegiances, and a kraken in the basement that eats shadows.
As Jackson learns more about the new world he’s living in and about who he is, he has to decide who he will stand with: Cressida, the woman who gave him a home and a purpose, or Mae, the black-eyed lion tamer with a past as enigmatic as his own. The Kraken Sea is a fast paced adventure full of mystery, Fates, and writhing tentacles just below the surface, and in the middle of it all is a boy searching for himself.
What’s E. Catherine’s favorite bit?
E. CATHERINE TOBLER
My favorite bit in The Kraken Sea is the fact that everything I want to talk about is a spoiler. I’ve been writing circus stories since 2004, but have never before written the story of the man who made the circus, Jackson himself.
Every time I approach this piece, I think, “Oh, I can talk about X!” Then, the more in depth I think about X, the more I realize that no, if I really talk about X, everything unravels.
I keep thinking I would tell you about the bakery–because if you know me, you know I love all manner of baked goods. Cakes, and croissants, and cookies, meringues, and macarons. In this book, I included palmiers, because they look like hearts. Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade has always had a food element to it: Beth makes marmalades that are magically infused with specific times and places, and one can travel there with just a bite. This is either a blessing or a curse for the person eating the marmalade.
Having the opportunity to include a bakery was a delight–it fits the story universe perfectly. But if I go deeper and tell you that the bakery is part of a territorial dispute between two ancient, warring factions…we get closer to spoiler territory. Because that leads to telling you about the thing in the basement, and if I tell you about the thing in the basement–
Yeah, we can’t go there.
I also thought I’d talk about the girl on the fire escape–Mae. Mae’s path crosses with Jackson’s accidentally at first (or is it?), and then later with deliberation when she waits for him on the fire escape outside his room. Mae accuses Jackson of being no ordinary boy, but of course she’s no ordinary girl, either. Though Mae seems to work as a lion tamer within a genderbent burlesque show (hey, it’s a circus!), Mae is also an aspect of Fate.
This is probably also a spoiler, but maybe it’s the right kind–the kind that gets the reader excited for the work at hand? Mae is Lachesis, she who does not spin or cut the threads of life, but she who decides how long a thing will endure. She is not creation or destruction, but the calm between. She tends to infuriate people with her calm certainty, especially her sisters, who are all about making or unmaking a thing.
So…are her sisters also in this book?
They absolutely are. Fates! The threads of life! The beginning, the middle, the end, within Jackson’s own genesis story!
And are the Fates involved with the thing in the bakery basement?
Well, that’s a spoiler.
LINKS:
BIO:
E. Catherine Tobler was born on the other side of the International Dateline, which either gives her an extra day in her life or an extraordinary affinity when it comes to inter-dimensional gateways. She is the senior editor of Shimmer Magazine and lives in Colorado, which has a distinct lack of inter-dimensional gateways, but an abundance of mountains, which may prove mad indeed.
