Christy Mandin, the author-illustrator of Millie Fleur’s Poison Garden (2024) and Millie Fleur Saves the Night (July), begins her PW phone interview with an apology. “If you hear baby chicks, they’re in my workspace and they think I’m talking to them,” she says. The workplace, she explains, is “half garden shed, half office,” and the chicks—Zombies (the breed, not the ghoul)—aren’t quite ready to hang out with the “big girls,” meaning the 20 or so other chickens that Mandin keeps at her home in a rural town south of Atlanta. Moving from her real-world menagerie to her fictional creation, Mandin talked about the origins of her protagonist who champions the ostensibly unlovable, the pressures of creating a book two, and the relevance of a protagonist who knows how to ruffle feathers in all the right ways.
Was it hard to sell a book about a girl who loves and grows poisonous flowers?
When I wrote Poison Garden, nobody was watching. I did have two books with HarperCollins and that contract had run its course. I was convinced the minute my agent, Adria Goetz [at KT Literary], saw Millie Fleur she was going to say “You can’t sell a book to the four to eight crowd with the word poison in the title.” But she loved it, right out of the gate.
Then I was convinced that no publisher would want a book with poison in the title, and that it would morph into something else—you know, you have to hold your creative babies kind of loosely. But it was welcomed with open arms—in fact, a lot of people wanted it. My editor at Scholastic, Katie Heit, was one of the first to show interest in it, and was such a champion of my ideas. What you see in Poison Garden is as close to straight out of my file into the book because Scholastic was so protective of my creative process.
When we sold Poison Garden, we sold it as a two-book deal, and we left as “an untitled picture book.” In picture book world on the creative side, we’re told never think in terms of series, because a series is a lofty goal. I never once thought that Millie Fleur would become a series. But before Millie Fleur’s Poison Garden hit the shelves, we started talking about book two, and there was no question that they wanted it to be a Millie Fleur book. And now you’re not going to be rid of Millie Fleur any time soon—there’s a lot coming down the line for her.
Where did Millie come from?
I actually stumbled upon an article about a real-life poison garden at a castle in England and that made my brain light up. Man, I would have loved that as a kid. It’s behind iron gates with a sign that reads “These plants can kill you.” It just started out as a title and vibes. I put it in a Google Doc and it kept coming back to me.
I didn’t set out to write about a kid like me. But it just kind of poured out of me like water. Millie Fleur is really important to me because I spent my school years feeling like a square peg in a round hole and trying to be normal. I learned through trial and error that normal is impossible—it’s a movable goal. If I had known that as a kid, I really would have leaned in instead of trying to build a box to sit in. Poison Garden was an ode to being wonderfully weird and reframing that word “weird” as something that’s great and necessary.
What did you think of the reviews that compared Millie to Wednesday Addams?
I grew up on original Charles Addams cartoons; I have a complete compendium of his work. So yes, 1,000% she was inspired by Wednesday Addams. But I wanted a Wednesday for a new generation. Millie is kind of a throwback to the original Wednesday—she was sweeter and gentler, but over the years she’s morphed into something a little more sharp. I wanted Millie Fleur to be a Wednesday for the four to eight crowd, spooky sweet. She’s an oddball, she loves the unlovable—but she doesn’t have a malicious bone in her body. She’s curious and interested in the people around her. She’s not a recluse.
That’s what is refreshing about Millie—she marches to her own beat but actually knows how to get others to follow. She’s got that rare combination of optimism and political savvy. Was that the goal?
She’s not a shrinking violet, pun intended. She doesn’t stifle her personality and try to be someone she’s not, but she’s not doomed to being a lonely outsider. Even though she’s literally and figuratively on the periphery, she doesn’t have to choose between her interests and having friends. She loves herself, and that makes her brave enough to share her interests. She may never win over that HOA group [in her community]—that’s not her target audience. She knows where to make the most impact.
In terms of the natural world, both Millie Fleur books seems to strike a balance between accuracy and anthropomorphic fantasy. How did you achieve that?
I have four kids—18, 15, nine and six—and a cartful of art supplies. We’ve had googly eyes in our house for 18 years and they get stuck on all matter of things, so my entire life is anthropomorphized. The lamp has googly eyes, the computer has googly eyes; one time I looked down and saw googly eyes on my arm. So it’s not a stretch to put eyes and mouths on things.
One thing that Scholastic felt strongly about was that the plants could not be real—they wanted to make sure we kept it in the fantasy realm. There’s a toothwart plant, but sore toothwart doesn’t exist. They didn’t want kids going out to try to find these plants.
But author me and illustrator me are often very much at odds. Author me writes things that I then have to illustrate. And curdled milk weed was one I struggled with: How do you draw it? For a long time that was a Post-it on my wall that haunted me.
Millie Fleur Saves the Night takes the fantasy element a step further by turning the dark itself into a character. How did that come about?
The first manuscript I sent to my editor for book two never made it to the light of day. We agreed that it was a great story, but it wasn’t a book two. Now everybody’s watching, I’m on a deadline—it is very romantic, this job, but it’s all business, too. So I panicked, and did what any writer would do: I made like George R.R. Martin and wondered, What if book one was it?
While I was in the yard, I came across a bug and it was rather large, and it was new to me, and I thought I should look him up. That’s what you do when you’re on a deadline, you go look up bugs. I find out that it’s a fire click beetle. I fell down a rabbit hole and I found that at night this bug makes its own luminescent headlights. If I’d been out in the pitch-dark, I would have seen something amazing. You miss so many things when you’re scared of the unknown and things that are different. That’s what Millie Fleur has been saying all along: How dull is life when you avoid things that aren’t in your realm of understanding?
Do you see a special relevance in Millie’s relationship to her rulebound community?
It was always really difficult for me as a kid. I like to ask why, and that put me at odds with the grownups around me. I’ve wondered how many kids are at that place right now, at odds with what they’re seeing. They’re born more accepting and over time, we teach them to sort and label. I think Millie Fleur is very much political in that way. She challenges those assumptions about our world. I’m glad about that.
Your fall book, Bittersweet: Based on the True Tale of the Berlin Candy Bombers [McElderry, Oct.], also explores themes of challenging authority. Do you see that as a theme in your work going forward? And what’s next for you?
Book three of Millie Fleur is pretty much done, but I don’t think you’ll see it until 2025, and then Book four will be 2027.
Millie Fleur unlocked something for me, and I have leaned fully into being a disrupter. The thing about any picture book is, you’re working years ahead sometimes and you don’t know what the climate is going to be like when this book finally hits shelves. It’s very interesting to me to write something two years ago and have it hit shelves at a time when it’s needed. It feels like catching lightning in a bottle. You never know if what you’re writing today makes a difference down the road, if it will stick like gum to the shoe. What I hope is that Millie Fleur is gum on the shoe.
Millie Fleur Saves the Night by Christy Mandin. Scholastic/Orchard, $18.99 July 1 ISBN 978-1-339-02337-3
