Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy by Karen Foxlee

It’s just the way I structure a book, and it’s a structure I enjoy reading myself. What’s the attraction of the multiple, non-linear viewpoint? You also employ multiple timelines, and stories-within-stories – something writers are often warned against, although it seems to work very well for you. Grief is devastating, but it can also give you the chance to change your destiny. I lost my dad five years before The Anatomy of Wings was published, and I was drawn to the idea of writing about navigating through the landscape of sorrow, of grief, and of being changed by the journey. Loss classically makes for a good story, a good jumping-off point. Why does loss weave itself into your work? In Ophelia and in The Midnight Dress, your main character’s mother has died in The Anatomy of Wings, it's her sister. As for the Snow Queen, she swept into the story, rather unexpectedly, coming from the North to destroy the world. Then I needed Ophelia to find him, Ophelia “who didn’t consider herself brave but she was very curious.” Her curiosity is her strength. I wondered why he was there, what his mission must be, how he was chosen. I kept getting glimpses of him imprisoned in the museum, and the story blossomed from there. Did your setting inspire the story’s Snow Queen motif, or were you inspired from the beginning by Hans Christian Andersen’s story? Your previous books are set in Australia, but Ophelia takes place in an unnamed, chilly northern city. I think I enjoyed writing about the museum the most. The guards are old women, sitting in the corners and knitting – and very suspicious of me, by the way – and I had to put them in the book.

It gives the impression of being very high up, away in the north of the world. I had visited the Hermitage in Russia, and it gave me many ideas – especially because it’s a bit dilapidated, falling apart, with windows open and paintings exposed to the elements, even rain. Did you base it on any particular museum? In Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy, a museum plays an essential role as a set piece, complete with exhibits one might find at an ordinary museum as well as ghosts and hidden rooms. Foxlee spoke with PW by phone from her home in Gympie (some 100 miles north of Brisbane) about haunted museums, navigating the landscape of grief, and an upcoming book about magic and puddles. Her new quasi-fairy tale, Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy, follows a girl who embarks on a quest within the confines of a uniquely fantastical and dangerous museum.

In the U.S., Knopf published Wings in 2010, followed by 2013’s The Midnight Dress. Australian novelist Karen Foxlee won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for an Emerging Queensland Author in 2006 for the manuscript of The Anatomy of Wings, enabling her to make a major career shift after returning to school for her creative writing degree.

Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy by Karen Foxlee