Wonder Quinn plucks the heartstrings

A little bit sad, a little bit exciting, and incredibly beautiful, Kate Gordon’s latest children’s novel is quite literally a dream come true.

Author Kate Gordon has released her new children's book The Heartsong of Wonder Quinn. Picture: Zak Simmonds

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Kate Gordon is a podcast junkie. At just about any possible opportunity, she says, she will be ­listening to something that she finds intensely fascinating.

The Hobart author’s latest obsession is a ­series called Ologies, each episode focusing on a different niche or unusual speciality, something ending in “-ology”.

This constant stream of interesting info supplies her with a never-ending cache of fun facts that she can share with any willing audience — most often her eight-year-old daughter Tessa.

“I’ll pick her up from school and she’ll say ‘I suppose you have some new amazing fact you’re dying to share with me, mum,’ and I’ll say well, yes, actually, did you know …”

Every time Gordon discovers a new podcast series, she finds herself fixated on the subject, absorbing all of it before moving on to the next thing and, in some ways, her writing process is a bit the same. Every story, she says, will begin with a single character and she fixates on it, churns it over, waiting for the story to coalesce around it.

This is how her latest children’s novel The Heartsong of ­Wonder Quinn began. With a single mental image of a dark-haired girl sitting on the roof of an old gothic building with a crow beside her.

“I don’t really know where she came from, but that image just wouldn’t go away,” Gordon says.

“But from the first moment she came into my head, her name was Wonder Quinn. I could see her so vividly, perched on top of an old gothic school house called Direleafe Hall, talking to a crow. And the crow beside her was called Hollowbeak. He was just always going to be called that, right from the beginning, it’s just how it was.

“All I had to do was keep asking myself why was she there, what’s her backstory, and it started coming together.”

That wistful mental image first popped into Gordon’s mind a little over five years ago and the Heartsong of Wonder Quinn grew from that seed into an incredibly beautiful, dark and touching novel for children aged 8-12.

Wonder Quinn is an orphan who lives in the attic of Direleafe Hall, with only her crow Hollowbeak for company.

Every year she hopes to make a true friend with one of the new girls coming to the school, but it never seems to happen, breaking her heart every year.

One day, spirited new student Mabel Clattersham arrives and the two girls become best friends almost immediately, but Mabel has a secret, and curious list of things she wants to do.

The Heartsong of Wonder Quinn is Gordon’s 10th published book and marks a bit of a shift in style and tone for the author, who is best known for writing young adult fiction.

There is a distinctly Tim Burton-esque feel to the gothic-flavoured novel, something Gordon says is probably a subconscious result of her love of Burton’s films. The themes, such as the gloomy setting, are also a little darker than her usual teenage stories centring on love, romance and self-discovery — this time delving into themes of grief and loss alongside the deeply affecting story of childhood friendship.

“When I first sent the manuscript to my agent, he said this is a very brave new direction for you, it’s very dark, are you sure this is the direction you want to go? I hadn’t even thought about it but I said ‘yeah’.

“My previous stuff was all young adult, romance, fluffy, and he saw this as a radical departure, which I guess it is, but I feel it is very true to me. I’m not a very dark person — I’m a sunshine and flowers kinda’ person — but I do gravitate towards a darker aesthetic. I like Mary Shelley, Tim Burton, books about vampires, all that sort of thing.

“So Wonder Quinn feels like its me encapsulated, that dreamy whimsical quality with dark gothic sensibilities as well. And we live in Hobart, but have family on the North-West Coast, so we drive up and down through the Midlands a lot and there’s something so beautiful but sinister about that region that it ­always gives me goosebumps, I wanted to capture that.”

The Heartsong of Wonder Quinn, by Kate Gordon, published by University of Queensland Press.

Originally from Wynyard on the North-West, Gordon’s experiences of small town life are still a strong influence on much of her work. She later moved to Launceston to live while studying to be a librarian at the University of Tasmania and it was there that she met her future husband Leigh.

The pair moved to Hobart for a while when Gordon was working as a librarian, later relocating to Launceston to be closer to their families.

But after realising how much they missed the capital, they moved back to Hobart, where Gordon finds herself constantly inspired by the history, architecture, scenery and life of the city.

Her first young-adult novel, Three Things About Daisy Blue, told the story of a young Hobart girl and her unwilling trip to Bali, and she followed this with two paranormal fantasy books, Thyla and Vulpi, about a Tasmanian girl who is a “were-thylacine”, and other shapeshifters.

More young adult novels followed: Writing Clementine; Twenty-five Memories of Viggo MacDuff; and Girl Running, Boy Falling.

Juno Jones: Word Ninja and Juno Jones: Mystery Writer marked her shift towards a slightly younger audience, followed by her first picture book, Bird on a Wire, published last year.

And The Heartsong of Wonder Quinn is her first foray into the middle-grade audience, for kids aged 8-12, a place she says she feels quite at home.

“I think partly that shift just comes from having a kid in that age group and not wanting to have to wait 15 years for her to read my YA books,” Gordon says.

“And also middle grade is such a fascinating sector of the market, I feel some of the most fascinating books on the market are in that group.

“About 10 years ago I remember talking to [children’s author] Lian Tanner about authors getting stuck in writing for certain ages. She said to me ‘I’m still eight years old on the inside’, and said I think I am too, but I was writing for 16-year-olds. I can still connect to 16-year-old Kate quite easily, but it felt very easy to connect to eight-year-old Kate as well.”

Gordon says she wanted to create an emotionally complex story for kids in her target audience, as well. In a market with ple nty of lighthearted material already on the shelves, shethought that it was important to create something a bit more weighty.

“Stories for this age group are so often nice, light, twee stuff about fairies or superpower action stuff — all of which I love and I’m totally OK with! But I feel that publishers are now seeing kids wanting stuff with more complex issues, emotions, themes. If you talk to kids in that primary school age group, they think about that stuff a lot at this age and process complex stuff and are hungry for stories that pack an emotional punch.”

The Heartsong of Wonder Quinn certainly pulls the heartstrings, too. It may be aimed at primary school kids, but it made this 42-year-old dad cry three times in its 172 pages. And Gordon says we should not be afraid of letting children experience this in their reading.

“Kids can handle it. It’s important to have dark stuff in kids’ books, it’s a kind of practice for real world, where challenging things will happen, especially in the world as it is at the moment, where it’s kind of scary right outside the door.

“I remember reading Bridge to Terabithia when I was a kid and I was so deeply moved by it, I can still feel the emotion from it 30 years on. I feel that was important for me, as a white middle-class kid, to see that there is darkness, pain and sadness in the world, but people survive it.”

And Wonder Quinn is just the first book in a Direleafe Hall ­trilogy, with the second book currently in the editing stages, and the third waiting in the wings.

“The sequel is about a new girl coming to Hollowbeak for help, called The Ballad of Melodie Rose,” Gordon says. “Melodie is Wonder’s opposite, bright red hair, freckles, loud and in-your-face. And the third book will be a prequel, telling Hollowbeak’s story.”

As exciting as it always is to see your book published, Gordon says she was especially thrilled this time to see the cover art and illustrations by Rachel Tribout, as she has been a fan of the author/illustrator for a long time.

And Tribout’s illustrations turned out to be the final stage in Wonder Quinn’s evolution from mental image five years ago, to something quite real.

“I am an enormous fan of Rachel’s, Tessa and I have been huge creepy fans of hers for years, buying her books, we love Captain Blueberry.

“So when the publisher said they’d found this artist named Rachel Tribout and wanted to approach her to illustrate my book, I just completely lost it. It was like a dream come true, I said you do whatever you can to get her to do this book!

“And seeing the cover for the first time, it’s exactly how Wonder looks in my head. Every time I see that cover, I wonder how she knew what was in my head and now I can’t extricate Wonder from those images Rachel created: that’s who she is, that’s the girl I saw.”•

The Heartsong of Wonder Quinn, published by University of Queensland Press, is available now, RRP $14.99