In RACHAEL KING’s new book, The Grimmerlings, she spins a spellbinding fantasy adventure about loyalty, courage, and that maybe you should being careful what you wish for …
ABOUT THE BOOK
The same evening Josh Underhill went missing, the black horse appeared on the hill above the house.
MEET THE AUTHOR – RACHAEL KING
Tell us about your beginnings in writing.
Going right back to the beginning, I loved writing stories as a kid. At intermediate, I won a short story competition run by a bank with the theme ‘banking in the future’ and my stories always had an element of the fantastic in them.
They often reflected the books I was reading myself at the time – I was a huge reader.
I always wanted to write a novel but it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I found the time and the confidence. My first two novels were for adults, and in 2012 I published my first novel for young readers.
Living in Ōtautahi Christchurch, how does the local culture and environment influence your creative process and the themes you explore in your writing?
Christchurch has a very strong arts community and I am lucky to have an office in the building of artists’ studios run by the city council. It’s like a big student flat but without quite so many parties. We had a couple of huge earthquakes here in 2010 and 2011, and so I think I have a lot to draw on when writing themes of resilience and danger.
Thanks to the city rebuild, we have the most fantastic new library which I love to spend time in: reading, writing and dreaming while looking at the views across the city to the snowy mountains.
How would you describe the main character Ella and what’s the inspiration behind her character?
Ella is 13, impulsive, messy, determined and (sometimes) brave. She has had some trouble making friends due to the fallout in the community from her grandmother’s environmental activism, so she is also lonely and hoping to make a new friend. At the moment her best friend is her pony, Magpie.
Although it is not stated, Ella also has ADHD, like me, which means she often has a jumble of thoughts in her head, and because of this, someone, or something, in the novel takes advantage of her. She is inspired by my own childhood love of horses and independence, and there’s a bit of my favourite character in the Jinny series by Patricia Leitch that I read as a kid in her as well.
What can you tell us about the black horse that appears on the hill above the house?
The horse appears on the same day that a local bully, Josh Underhill, goes missing – right after Ella has told him he is cursed. It comes in the ‘grimmelings’, which is the first and last gleams of light in the day, and seems to be watching Ella and her family. It’s a powerful, magnificent and slightly scary creature, and Ella’s task is to find out what it wants.
In your books you incorporate a lot of mystical creatures, nature, folklore, and old magic. Where do you get your love of fantasy and magic from?
From the books I read as a child, starting with the Narnia series by CS Lewis, right up to The Dark is Rising series by Susan Coper, which is about the Dark, the Light, and the Wild Magic. It draws on ancient British myths and I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that there is magic hiding just out of sight, that it is elemental and comes up from the earth or the ocean, reaching backwards and forwards through time. You just have to be attuned to it.
I still read some fantasy – Philip Pullman, Elizabeth Knox and David Almond are favourites – but I do prefer fantastical books that are grounded in our world.
What do you want your readers to take away from this book?
I hope that they will be excited and moved by the story, and that it will make them feel a connection to the land and to the magic that dwells there; that they’ll see time as not linear but happening all around us. I hope they will fall in love with Ella and her family (and their horses!) the way I have, and that they will seek out all the wonderful words for nature that exist, starting with the words Ella’s grandmother teaches her.
I also hope to sow some seeds about caring for the environment and respecting the First Nations stories that already exist in our countries. But most of all I want them to come away with a powerful desire to read more books!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachael King is a writer, reviewer, former literary festival director and ex-bass player living in Ōtautahi Christchurch. She’s the author of two novels for children: Red Rocks, which won the Esther Glen Medal, and The Grimmelings,. Her adult novels, The Sound of Butterflies and Magpie Hall, were published in nine languages altogether. Red Rocks is currently in development for Sky TV by Libertine Pictures.
Rachael received a Waitangi Day Honour Award in 2020 from the New Zealand Society of Authors for her work at WORD Christchurch bringing Behrouz Boochani to New Zealand. In 2023 she was named Best Reviewer at the Voyager New Zealand Media Awards.
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