Interview: Cynthia Hand, Author of 'Unearthly'

by The Ology Team .

On Feb 28, 2011

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Check out our interview with another HarperCollins Dark Days author, Cynthia Hand, whose novel Unearthly takes on a less-buzzed-about supernatural being: Angels. In the book, half-angel Clara receives her purpose, or what she was put on Earth to do, in the form of visions of a forest fire and a boy she must protect. This forces her family to relocate to Jackson, Wyoming, where Clara must decipher the clues in her visions while maintaining her cover as a normal 16-year-old.

I was especially impressed with how the book handled Clara's spiritual background without commenting on a specific religion. I spoke with Hand about this aspect of the book, as well as adolescent characters and how angels stack up against the current vampire obsession.

Geekology: Did you have any sort of religious upbringing that influenced the content of this book? If not, what was the research process like?

Cynthia Hand: I was raised Presbyterian, and there is a bit of discussion of pre-destiny in that religion (since it has Calvinist roots), and it was something that I was always interested in and troubled by growing up. When I was twenty-two I joined a very-active non-denominational Christian church, which was so good for me and eye-opening at that time in my life, and there are things I learned in those years about the struggle with self, and doubt, and the idea of a plan for my life that definitely filtered into my consciousness when I was writing Unearthly. But I didn’t mean for Unearthly to be a religious book, or preach any one set of theological principals. I wanted it to be equally friendly to all readers, no matter what their religious beliefs are.

That said, when writing the book I did a lot of research on angels and their history, which was incredibly interesting and thought-provoking stuff. But I also gave myself permission to take the pieces of information that lit up my imagination and leave the rest—to create a world that was fully Clara’s own. I wanted this to be a story about Clara—one girl, not a story about angels.

Your characters, especially Clara, seem to be jaded about their supernatural status. Is this book a reaction to our society's obsession with the paranormal?

I wasn’t really thinking about our society’s obsession with the paranormal when I wrote Clara, but concentrating on how she might really feel, as a real, normal teenager, finding out that she was part of this divine mythology. I think in reality any of us would have a certain sense of incredulity and doubt about the situation she’s faced with, and Clara especially feels like this part of her life is suddenly thrust upon her, whether she likes it or not. Clara has a deep desire to feel normal, which is very hard for her to achieve, given her heritage.

Are angels the next vampires--why or why not?

[Laughs] I want to say yes! I think in some way this angel sensation could be a backlash from vampires, people not wanting the world to be quite so dark, but actually a lot of the angel books out there are very dark. I think they can often go to a sort of dark, apocalyptic place. There's a certain beauty to angel mythology--the flight, the wings, the use of light--that are unique among the paranormal situations. But I think the reason that the paranormal genre has gotten so big (in young adult books) is that it mirrors the teenage situation, where you feel like you're becoming something different and something special. There’s something dark about that time, so the vampire thing and the werewolf thing takes off of that--this sort of change. Maybe the angels have a little bit different twist on that since, while angel stories can get very dark, there’s almost always a hope for redemption, implicit in the mythology of angels. Forgiveness. Falling and rising up again. And maybe our society, in the darker times we’ve fallen upon, really yearns for stories like that. Stories with hope.

One of the things that's always sort of bothered me about some angel books is that it feels as if the writer are simply writing about vampires with wings. It feels like the same thing, the same elements, but they've just changed the signals. So instead of having fangs and drinking blood, you have wings and can fly. I really wanted to get away from that. I also did not want to write about the Apocalypse, I didn't want to write about a terrible battle between good and evil. Like I said before, I wanted to write about one girl and her own, personal battle.

Why did you decide to have the angels not be affiliated with a specific faith?

In a nutshell, because I had no desire to preach. Also, I wanted my story to be about a normal girl in as many ways as I possibly could, and how she deals with the idea of the divine and the spiritual. If Clara and her family had been super religious or people were trying to “convert” Clara to a certain way of thinking, it would have alienated her, I think, not only from many readers but also from some of the bigger issues at hand.

I love how Clara's story is tied up in fate (her purpose). Why did you decide to make that a theme of the book? Did you draw from the trope of "star-crossed [teenage] lovers"?

I didn’t ever “decide” to make Clara’s purpose a theme of the book. I almost never write with a specific theme in mind; instead, I tend to focus on individual characters and see where they lead me. In the case of Unearthly, the book started with this character’s narrative voice, and she began to tell me about this vision she had about a forest fire, and how she thought she was supposed to save this boy from the fire, only she didn’t know who he was an she wasn’t exactly sure how or what she was supposed to do, and the idea of purpose and destiny unrolled itself from there. I didn’t consciously draw from the “star-crossed lovers” idea, although I knew fairly early on that Clara would have to make a choice, driven by love, about whether or not to defy her purpose.

Your book combines the high school caste system with actual socioeconomic conflict: the Haves versus the Have-Nots. Why did you decide to add that layer on top of Clara's angel story?

That choice came from the setting of the novel: Jackson, Wyoming, a place which seemed to me to have an enormous dynamic between the wealthy and elite and the more rugged and wild-western. This was even more apparent to me after visiting Jackson while I was in the middle of writing Unearthly. (I grew up near there, and wrote much of the book out of memory, but I gleaned so much from that one small trip I took to Jackson the summer I was writing, simply by wandering around the town and the high school.) It struck me as a wonderful dilemma to add to the mix, and I loved how the two boys involved in the story embodied these two different walks of life in that area.

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Unearthly is now available in bookstores. You can keep up with the campaign on the official Dark Days Facebook page, and stay tuned for our upcoming interviews with Claudia Gray, Courtney Allison Moulton, and Ellen Schreiber.

Follow me on Twitter: @nataliezutter

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