Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch is a YA dystopian novel, and today we’re exclusively revealing the cover.
We were also lucky enough to chat with Hirsch about the idea behind his book and how his main character falls within the movement for more diversity in books. Check out the interview after the reveal, below.
About ‘Black River Falls’
Seventeen-year-old Cardinal Odera has somehow escaped the virus that ravaged his town, leaving its victims alive but without their memories. He chooses to remain in the quarantined zone, caring for a group of orphaned kids in a self-sufficient mountain camp with the help of the former school bully, now transformed by the virus into his best friend. But then a strong-willed and mysterious young woman appears just as factions within the town begin to agitate for greater freedom, and the closed-off world Cardinal has meticulously created begins to crumble. Soon, he is forced to deal with the trauma of all he has lost as well as a world beyond the quarantine fences that’s on the verge of a violent revolution. A thrilling, fast-paced work of speculative fiction for teens, Black River is an unforgettable story about survival, identity, family, and how the best and the worst of human nature are suddenly laid bare when disaster strikes.
‘Black River Falls’ cover
Interview with Jeff Hirsch
We also got to speak with Hirsch about what we can expect from Black River Falls.
Tell us five random facts about yourself.
1. If we’re friends, I will take great delight in making you any kind of cake you want, from scratch, for your birthday.
2. Before I wrote novels I was 100% a theater nerd. It’s what I studied all through high school, college and graduate school. At various times I was an actor and a playwright. I don’t write plays anymore, but I do act in community theater productions from time to time.
3. I’m pretty sure the coolest person in the universe is either A) Tom Waits or B) Prince. (It’s probably Prince)
4. My first concert ever was when I was little and my mom took me to see Barry Manilow because no one else would go with her. To this day, I have vivid memories of Copa Cabana.
5. I know how to escape from a strait jacket.
Explain your book in 10 words or less.
That’s tough. How about a haiku instead?
Plague of amnesia
Feds quarantine a small town
One boy can’t forget
What strikes you most about the cover?
How much it feels like the book I wrote. It really captures the mood, I think. Tense. Thoughtful. Threatening.
What inspired you to write this story?
For some reason or other (so many of these things are a little mysterious) I got to thinking about memory and how it effects who we are. Like, if one day, the school bully forgot that he was the school bully, and every experience he ever had that made him that way was wiped out of his memory, would he still be the bully? In short, what’s left when we’ve forgotten who we are? Who are we then? Black River Falls grew out of me being kind of obsessed with that question.
What makes this book different than your previous novels?
I think it’s actually the most personal book I’ve ever written. In my other books the characters are living in far flung futures, fighting wars and restarting societies. While the stakes of Black River Falls are just as high, it sits more close to home. It’s in the here and now. I think that enabled me to have the main character, Cardinal, be a little bit more like me, and to be concerned with the kinds of things that I’m concerned with. Family. Loss. Friendship. The feeling of being an outsider. Oh, and comic books. Cardinal and I are both very, very concerned with comic books.
Your protagonist is a person of color; what drove that choice to include this angle in your novel? Were you influenced by the call for more diversity in books?
You know, I was pretty sure I was going to be asked this question a lot, so you’d think I would have come up with a far deeper and more insightful answer than I have. But the truth is, very early in the process, I imagined a scene between Cardinal and his family and I noticed that his Mom was black and his Dad was white. Now, I’m sure I could come up with all kinds of analytical reasons why Cardinal is bi-racial, how that relates to the story or how he feels like an outsider, but the truth is that when I met him and his family that’s just who they were.
That said, I think something like the [call for more diverse books], which is super important, may have played a subconscious role in that. Too often, writers like myself (white, straight, cis-male) default to characters that look like us. In fact, we’re so used to doing it that we don’t even realize that it’s a choice we’re making. I think one of the many things that movements like [this] do is to help writers see their defaults for what they are. Once you do, and you see how silly they are, I think you almost can’t help fighting against them.