Welcome, friend! A few backs back Cassondra Windwalker had shared about YA novels for the adult audience. Today, I am chatting with her about her YA magical realism novel, Love Like A Cephalopod, aimed for adults with a 60 year old main character. Let’s welcome her.
Get to know the author: Cassondra Windwalker
Welcome back, Cassondra! Tell my new readers a bit about yourself!
Thanks so much for inviting me into your space, Kriti. In terms of sea creatures, I’m kind of like a sponge. I attach myself somewhere semi-stable to watch and listen, and I let all the sea (and stories) pass through me. Every now and then I wash up on shore in the form of a book, my own shape and colors changed by all I’ve absorbed. And then the tide takes me back out again, and it all starts over.
That’s a silly way of saying I’m just not nearly as interesting as the stories I try to tell.
What inspired you to write this book?
I became fascinated by octopuses, and by extinction, cephalopods in general, a couple of years ago. A creature so intelligent, so curious and so clever, whose life is so brief and with whom we interact so little, a creature whom evolution has dictated solitary but who is incredibly social given the slightest chance, a creature without parents from the instant they hatch that nonetheless sacrifices everything for its own offspring – who wouldn’t be fascinated? All I knew was that my next book would be about octopuses. So I read and watched and researched everything I could, and somehow witches and executioners and cat-sized dragons elbowed their way into the story, too.
What makes your story unique?
Love Like A Cephalopod is basically YA fantasy but for grownups, with all of the grittiness, cynicism, and stranger magic that entails. Dragons are a key part of Grenda’s world, which is also our world, but they’re not enchanted beasts – they’re just another exploited species driven to near-extinction. They’re also cat-sized pacifists, which I’m pretty sure hasn’t been done.
Who would enjoy reading your book?
Readers of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and anyone looking for a dark female anti-hero.
What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?
The main character has lived her whole life – she’s fifty-six years old – under certain assumptions she’s never questioned, assumptions that leave her with complete moral certitude. Examining our assumptions can come at a terrible cost, but it may also be the only path to otherwise impossible beauty. And of course, I hope they learn to love like a cephalopod.
What’s the best piece of advice you have received related to writing?
Writing may be cathartic, but being a writer is a craft, not an indulgence.
If you could give a shout out to someone(s) who has helped in your writer journey, please feel free to mention them below!
My fourth-grade gifted ed teacher, Carol Hamilton, herself an author, was the first person to convince me life as an artist was an entirely achievable goal.
Love Like A Cephalopod
Magical Realism, 2023
To death and to the dragon born.
Being an executioner for the state is exhausting, but after a lifetime of dispatching the criminal
and the inconvenient, fifty-eight-year-old Grenda finds it does have its compensations. Her cat-
sized dragon Bjartur and the dragon eggs she tends are all the friends and family she needs. Completely cut off from the outside world, she happily accepts the luxuries owed her status – including a pet octopus named Morrigan – without the faintest twinge of conscience or doubt.
All that changes when she encounters the most unexpected nemesis: a young refugee girl whom Grenda is incapable of executing. Against her will, Grenda finds herself shifting from killer to caretaker, risking her life to defy the state she’s never questioned and help young Allora to freedom. Everything Grenda thinks she knows about her world, her life, and even her own identity cascades out of her control—including the dragon-bond she holds dearer than life itself.
Content notes: The main character is an executioner, and although the method and descriptions of the executions are not at all graphic, several people, including children, are killed in the course of the book.
Book Excerpt from
Love Like A Cephalopod
If you understand that for centuries, dragons and people lived in the friendliest of company, the dark truth lurking under the fairytales becomes clearer. Humans are treacherous creatures in any period of history. When they decided to betray that friendship in order to rob the dragons of the resources of their dens, humans wrote those histories with noble men and immense, vicious vipers. In reality, stunned and traumatized by the brutality of people who had been their friends, the tiny dragons simply took to the air and left their lairs to the degradations of man.
The infant dragons sleeping in these eggs in my sitting room weren’t that different from a human baby in its mother’s womb. If I laid a warm hand on their shell, the baby dragon would shift and turn, pressing a knobby little head or as-yet-untaloned foot against my palm. They liked to be talked to, to be sung to, to generally be in company. The colors and songs of the eggs changed according to the moods and activities of the infant. When they slept, their colors dimmed to shades of violet and gray, and only the faintest of hums rose from the shells. When they were active, rainbow hues rippled ceaselessly over the surface, and all sorts of discordant melodies, still somehow pleasing in their strangeness, rose from the clutch.
They had to be kept warm, and they preferred the darkness. So a blazing fire on cold nights and small table lamps were my only illumination in this room. I’d draped their manger in a brown velvet canopy, to keep the sunlight at bay.
Bjartur accompanied me to the manger, laying his emerald head against the shells as if listening and fluffing up the straw around them with a delicate talon.
The gestation of dragons being so long, this was only my third clutch. The first time, I’d made the mistake of naming the little fellas, which made parting ways so much harder in the long run. Since then, I tried to think of them like blackberry bushes or wild grapevines, beautiful living things that immeasurably improved my life but existed to be eaten. Eventually, when the glowing shells became veined with gold, they’d be distributed to the executioners on whom they’d imprint. When new eggs became available, I’d make room for them, like digging out a fresh bed in the garden.
Bjartur sang over the eggs while I fixed my supper, his song a low rumble that evoked mountain thunderstorms or rolling breakers. The eggs added their much higher voices to his, and I felt complete contentment as I added cream and cheese to my soup. Later, while he hunted, I would read my ragged copy of The Books of Earthsea aloud from my rocking chair near the manger.
The evening passed without the slightest disturbance. As darkness fell and the day’s heat slowly subsided, fireflies rose in glowing clouds above the meadow. The summer song of the southern wood joined the melody of the eggs. The wooden rockers creaked beneath me. Tea steamed from a forgotten cup.
I don’t know why I dreamed about octopuses that night. With my eyes closed against the darkness, the sea itself streamed through my veins, and I drifted fearlessly with those mysterious aliens, tangled in their tentacles, attendant on their destination.
But when I woke, with Bjartur curled as always on my feet, disquiet rushed through me. It had been a long time – so very long – since I had tasted the sensation, but my tongue told me it was terror that trembled on my lips.
Interested?
Find Love Like A Cephalopod on Goodreads and Amazon.
Thank you for hanging out with us today. Connect with Cassondra on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
If you are an indie author and would like to do a book excerpt, check out my work with me page for details. Check out other book excerpts here.
Cover Photo on Unsplash
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