Lynn is joining us today to talk about her novel, Haroun and the Study of Mischief. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Venerable Haroun, the blind saluqi priest of the dog-headed god Yepuet, has come to the wild and collarless Tel-Bastet, the City of Cats, for an education in mischief.
And Haroun has never met a crime of fashion he wouldn’t commit.
Shai Madhur, the disabled human priest of Upaja, thought accepting Haroun’s leash meant being Haroun’s seeing-eye human. He wasn’t prepared for the political machinations… or for Haroun’s sense of humor.
When a kind prophet-prince goes missing, Haroun smells iniquity in the air. (Iniquity, it turns out, smells like kumiss spilled on a tomcat in dire need of a bath.)
The problem with everyone in Tel-Bastet knowing what a Good Boy their Shai Madhur is, is that people keep trying to rescue him, whether he needs it or not. Not that he’s complaining, exactly. But Madhur swears he is never going carousing again… no matter how soulful Haroun’s puppydog eyes are.
With a splash of Studio Ghibli, a sprinkle of Roshani Chokshi, and a dash of Terry Pratchett, when the cats and dogs need to learn to live together, Haroun and Madhur take on the difference between what is seen and what is true.
What’s Lynn’s favorite bit?
Haroun and the Study of Mischief was a passion project for me, quite literally. I’ve never had 50,000 words come out of my hands in two weeks of wild-eyed glee before.
I am a merry flipper of all the tropes: Instead of two buddy cops who are fantastic detectives and know exactly how to solve a missing-person case, here we have two Very Good Boys who think they might like to Fight Crime, if there has been a crime other than their fashion sense. (The jury is still out on that one.) And instead of a blind sleuth and his seeing-eye dog, we have blind dogfolk priest Venerable Haroun and his seeing-eye human Shai Madhur.
Madhur honestly does not wish to go sleuthing for more trouble. He’s busy enough with the trouble that the arrival of dogfolk priests has caused at the Temple of Bastet, in the city of catfolk. Not to mention the weaponized fiber arts, or the debate over how to become properly credentialed villains for the door check at the Den of Iniquity, or the gossip-hazards of leading a hooded person on a leash through the bath-house district while carrying what looks like a willow-whip. Especially if you haven’t noticed the cat-toy dangling from the end of it, because your appalled gaze has been distracted by Venerable Haroun’s blazingly striped djellaba. (Crimes of fashion were definitely committed.)
I haven’t always been low-vision. I used to be able to see well enough to spot single-pixel differences in designs and to work on fine embroidery. I loved all the fiber arts, when I could still see well enough to weave and dye and sew and knit and embroider. You may still hear me indignantly sputtering when particular greens in the clothing of a “historic” movie are impossible for that place and time. Or rhapsodizing over the design of a Bollywood cast-of-thousands movie where, even without clear vision, I can still tell which group a character belongs to when one group wears earth tones and another wears jewel tones and two more both wear white but their angled collars lap differently.
So part of this book is a love-letter to an old blind weaver who is braver than I; Varsha-auntie keeps crafting her fiber arts by touch, never mind that she can’t see what she’s doing. She picks her weft threads by feel, and she makes her art for herself, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
(Unfortunately, her color choices mean that sighted people don’t usually appreciate her art like she does.)
Venerable Haroun is absolutely delighted by the texture of her weaving, and the mischievous salescats who sold it to him were just as delighted to get that garment out of their inventory. So Haroun wants to thank Varsha-auntie personally. And that means kind-hearted Shai Madhur has to find some way to lead a visiting dogfolk priest wearing that djellaba through the city of cats… without letting anyone hurt Haroun’s feelings on the way.
Haroun and Varsha’s blindness isn’t just a disadvantage; it’s also a part of their personal strengths. They are both entirely immune to glitz and glamour and visual performances of rank and status; one of the recurring themes is the difference between what is seen and what is true.
So one of my two favorite bits is how Haroun uses his distinctive immunity for his own advantage when he’s learning how to make mischief right along with the cats. (Particularly the reveal! I can’t say more without spoilers, but you’ll know it when you see it.)
Later, traveling the city after dark, Madhur hesitates at the shadows because he’s dependent on his sight; Haroun walks just as confidently at night, because he’s needed to perform that confidence for his own priestly role, and the dark makes no difference to him.
Haroun’s blindness isn’t a superpower like Daredevil’s; he still benefits from a sighted guide to navigate an unfamiliar city, and he uses techniques I’ve also used to make sure I don’t overfill a mug, or to know what’s under my feet when I can’t see them. But also, it’s not an insurmountable barrier, and not his A-plot; no one here is on a life-quest to be cured by a white-coated knight with a medical degree.
I sometimes joke about Chai and Cat-tales that I hadn’t wanted “the smart, funny, capable brown woman wins” to be the most unrealistic part of a book with shapechanging cats, but here we are. My equivalent joke for Haroun is that I hadn’t wanted “disabled people get their needs appropriately accommodated and get on with their lives” to be the most unrealistic part of a book with flying carpets. But sometimes, out here, it feels like it.
That’s my own wish fulfillment as a disabled author: Haroun and Madhur both get the assistance they need to go have their adventures, and that wasn’t the hard part.
I want to read more stories about disabled people where “fighting to defeat the disability” isn’t the A-plot storyline! So I write them. (I also love many of Celia Lake’s books for that.)
At its heart, Haroun is about two people discovering how to be the heroes of their own story, not a missing prince’s. Being disabled is just a normal, everyday piece of who they are. The other end of that favorite-bit thread is when Madhur gets the best of a bargain with a nobleman, not because he was trained in diplomacy, but because he knows how to haggle in the marketplace and how to poise the bargain on his trade partner’s good behavior.
In both Haroun’s favorite bit and Madhur’s, their shining moment of glee comes from knowing themselves well enough to use others’ expectations to their own advantage. And writing it was a joyful romp.
(I… may have gone overboard with 50 pages of bonus recipes. But how could I not include delightful historic recipes like the mad alchemist’s boiling-acid cheese? That might be another favorite bit, hmm…)
LINKS:
BIO:
Lynn Strong (MLIS) is a professional information designer, an amateur but enthusiastic trope flipper, and a questionably recovered wordaholic who used to be paid by the column-inch. It likely still shows.
Lynn is also a queer and disabled person who has lived on three continents, speaks six languages with different levels of fluency, has studied (and taught) medieval Japanese dye techniques, and at one point semi-professionally burned Kool-aid while studying for a degree in theater tech.
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