In partnership with the Madison Public Library Foundation, the Wisconsin Book Festival’s 23rd Annual Fall Celebration welcomed over 50 authors to discuss their books Oct. 17-20, including New York Times bestselling author Nicola Yoon.
Yoon is known for her young adult novels, “Everything, Everything,” “The Sun Is Also a Star” and “Instructions for Dancing,” two of which were made into successful movies released by Warner Bros and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the late 2010s.
The Madison Central Public Library hosted a discussion with Yoon and author Lauren Myracle about Yoon’s new adult thriller, “One of Our Kind,” on Oct. 18.
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One of the things Yoon shared during this event was her inspiration for the novel — part of the idea struck her during a conversation with a friend at dinner when he asked if she ever wondered where she’d be if it weren’t for the specter of race and racism. The other bit hit her in 2020 while listening to the podcast “You’re Wrong About” in the shower, Yoon said.
The story follows the main character, Jasmyn, as she and her husband move their family into the planned Black utopia of Liberty, a wealthy neighborhood set up for similar families to form a sense of community. As the book progresses, Jasmyn is disheartened by the lack of care the people around her have for pressing current events involving racism. Suddenly, everyone seems strangely obsessed with the local spa — which leads to a discovery that makes her question everything she thinks she knows about Liberty.
This was Yoon’s first thriller, a fact she discussed in detail. According to Yoon, while “typical” thrillers tend to have a bad guy and a good guy, she wanted to make things more intricate than that.
“We live in a complicated world,” Yoon said. “There are clearly villains and those villains are victims as well, of a larger system.”
Something, though, that stuck with her deeply while authoring the book was the murder of George Floyd. The complexity of modern society was a big talking point with this. Sometimes, Yoon said, it’s easy to just feel like turning away and going to the spa.
When asked about what the correct interpretation of the book was, Yoon was focused on the current systems in place allowing for violence to happen.
“The book is definitely not meant to be prescriptive,” Yoon said. “It genuinely is [about] why we made our society this way … it makes you think about why we built our structures this way and can we fix it … is it worth changing?”
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