Roshani Chokshi, the author of the Touched Queen duology and the Gilded Wolves trilogy, returns to the YA scene following her adult debut, The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, with her new romantasy, The Swan’s Daughter. In fairy tale fashion, Prince Arris of the Isle of Malys is under pressure to find a bride, even if any woman who manages to capture his hand in marriage and hold his heart in their hand (literally) can ascend to the throne. Arris enlists the help of Demelza, a young woman capable of uncovering the truth through her songs, to determine which of the potential brides gathered for a competition wants him for true love or for power. We spoke with Chokshi about how having her daughter influenced the direction of the story, our relationship to truth, and accepting that all love stories are potentially doomed.
This is your first YA book since 2021. Why was this the story that felt right for your return?
It’s so strange to think that much time has passed. This book came about in a really strange way. I was freshly postpartum, and I was in the midst of working on a rather bleak story. [But kids] put you through it. The first thing I felt when I held my daughter was terror, and the love came after that. It was the terror of wanting to protect her, of knowing that I couldn’t protect her from everything. And when I was reading aloud the draft [of this book], originally what I had written was cold and sad; everybody was lonely. And I thought, “This is just miserable.” It was like I was reading it aloud to my daughter and promising her a world that was very ugly, and I was like, “I can’t read this.” So I went back to reading Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, and Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier, and Which Witch? by Eva Ibbotson, and it was an attempt to claw back whimsy from a place that felt really frightening.
I think that’s what young adult and children’s literature best serves: a sense of reminding you how to tap into childlike wonder again, [and] to believe in anything the way only a child can. I wanted to write something that felt truly young, and I wanted to write something that was cheerful—but that doesn’t mean that it’s without darkness. It’s just that it took these things hand in hand.
There are a lot of fairy tale elements at play in this novel. Can you talk about your own relationship to fairy tales? Have you always been a fan? Did you find a different appreciation for them as you were growing up?
Fairy tales have been with me since the very beginning. My dad is from India, and my mother is from the Philippines. They did not want to confuse me or my siblings [growing up], and so we weren’t taught our parents’ native languages, and so our only access point to our heritage was through mythology, folklore, and fairy tales and superstition, all very common in immigrant and diaspora families. We can’t bring many things with us, but we can bring our stories.
At a young age, I loved those fairy tales simply because I found them beautiful and riveting. And the older I got, the more I would come across stories that interrogated them and refashioned them in new ways. Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted was my assigned summer reading when I was in sixth grade, and it was life-changing. And then as I got older I would notice that for all the fairy tale retellings that I saw on my favorite bookshelves, there was nothing where people looked like me or had names like mine. So then fairy tales almost took on a political sheen, in the sense of whose stories are we telling, whose stories are we leaving out.
I was a medievalist in college, and I loved the 14th-century Breton lai. I thought it was fascinating, this question of what purpose did they serve? Was it to explain the world that was unexplainable? Was it to offer moral instruction, or serve as a warning, or was it just pure entertainment, or all of those things? And then I think my love for fairy tales seemed to crystallize when I became a mom, because I saw how it could serve a thousand and one purposes. I saw how fairy tales both validate our fears and comfort us. They say that you can wander outside and you might get turned to stone, or a wolf might be there in the middle of the woods when you weren’t expecting it. But they also remind us that as much as there is darkness, there’s also light, there’s also hope, there’s also magic, and nobody is ever truly denied a happy ending.
Demelza holds a great power with her truth-telling song, but faces persecution for it. What did you want to explore about our relationship to truth via Demelza’s experience?
There’s so much myth-making that happens in our lives, and truth is rather stark. Truth can be a really stingy meat to live off of. A myth is something that can feed and nourish you forever. So for Demelza to know the truth is something that shatters her very happy family life, but it’s the myth-making around what she doesn’t know. There’s this idea she has of her father and mother that she can really get behind, that feels very safe to her. There are some things that are ugly and that we have to reckon with. It’s the sense of, yes, love can hurt you. And also there’s a truth in the vulnerability of love, which is really what her story is about. The idea of: this could all end badly, and really hurt me. And when you look at the truth, you still have to decide on the bravery of still pursuing something. Because the truth can be terrible, but that doesn’t deny a chance of true happiness at the same time.
The subtitle for this book is “A Possibly Doomed Love Story.” What made you want to lean into the potential of a not so happily ever after?
What parent doesn’t wonder or feel that way when they drop their child off at school? You’re always scared of headlines, you’re always scared of the phone call where someone can’t quite find the words on the other end. Every love story is possibly doomed, right? But for whom? And how do we recalibrate that sense of doom? Because right now, I see both halves of my heart wandering outside of my body, and this seems like a really awful way to live. I’ve gone gray overnight from fear, from the ecstasies of love. I know that love makes us deliciously selfish, so all love is possibly doomed. And that’s the trade-off of getting to feel something extraordinary and getting to tap into something sacred that is so much bigger than you. That’s the cost.
The Swan’s Daughter: A Possibly Doomed Love Story by Roshani Chokshi. Wednesday, $22 Jan. 6 ISBN 978-1-250-87310-1
