The world doesn’t make sense even when adults explain it, but you take their word for it. With middle grade, though, everything is arbitrary when you’re a child the rules are just the rules because somebody says they are. I love to lean into absurdity, and absurdity is not something that there’s a big market for in YA. No offense to my YA series but it’s so much more fun! It’s just so joyful. How did the writing of this compare to developing the YA series that you’ve done in the past? That led me to the Sinister-Winterbottom children and the idea of taking typical summer vacation activities and twisting them into the absurd. I kept coming back to that idea and how I could use it in a children’s series. Then a few years ago I misread a tweet as being about a ‘gothic waterpark’ and I was like, “ A gothic waterpark?!” I couldn’t get the idea out of my head because are kind of opposites: waterparks are colorful and tropical, and gothic sensibilities are not those things. I had wanted to write a middle grade series for a really long time and I couldn’t figure out my way in. What made you land on the quasi-Victorian imagery present in the first book of this series? I loved the cleverness of and figuring things out alongside the kids. The first series I ever loved was The Boxcar Children. Yeah! I love mysteries because I like scary things, but horror was too much for me so some mysteries served a parallel purpose. Were you an avid mystery reader when you were younger? Wretched Waterpark reads like an old-school caper.
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