Books By Heart: Su J. Sokol writes between the lines and outside the norm in her novel, Zee
Su J. Sokol always loved reading speculative fiction.
“I read everything. I read all kinds of fiction, but I really like speculative fiction because it leaves you very free,” Sokol said. “The tools of speculative fictions have a certain power others don’t.”
Sokol says her novel Zee belongs to a subgenre known as hopepunk.
“A hopepunk story isn’t all rainbows and unicorns and unrealistic Pollyanna. It’s usually about something heavy, but at the end of the story there is a bit of light and hope.”
Sokol said she embraced hopepunk because life is too complex to be entirely good or bad for either her readers, or her characters. In Zee, Sokol’s title character discovers hope and courage despite uncertainty.
“Hopeful endings are good, but things are a bit more complicated than Zee is letting on,” Sokol said. “You have to decide whether you’re going to move forward with cynicism and disbelief, or whether you’re going to take a chance on hope as a way of trying to make things better in the world.”
Sokol employs all the tools of speculative fiction in her exploration of the gulf between hope and despair.
“You can look at a social issue and you can try to write about it in a way that creates a metaphorical analysis, say, in a fantasy or science fiction world.”
Sokol uses utopias and dystopias as examples of philosophical thought problems writ large in speculative literature.
In the case of Zee, Sokol has created a character whose empathic superpowers hobble her during some of the narrative episodes in her story. This, according to Sokol, is her metaphor for the plight of sensitive people, and young adults struggling to establish a sense of identity.
Zee is able to hear other people’s thoughts, feel their emotions. She can see herself through their eyes. Sometimes, Zee is the precocious daughter of her four grown-ups. Other times, Zee’s a rough boy from Brooklyn, New York, playing basketball and getting into trouble.
When Sokol’s publisher asked her to write for the young adult market, she took the assignment seriously. She said the transition forced her to adapt her own sensitivity.
“What is YA, philosophically?”
Sokol said she explored that question as much as any other through Zee.
“It’s a fact that some of the preoccupations of the story are some of the preoccupations that young adults have,” Sokol said. “Identity. Fitting in with friends. What other people think of her. Who should she be and how to figure out who she is.”
Sokol said that it’s a hard time to be a teenager given the amount of content and noise that’s available to them. She said Zee’s ability expands the assault of information by several orders of magnitude.
“In this story, it’s kind of literally inside your head,” Sokol said. She said she hopes the book’s inherent warning is tempered with encouragement for sensitive people to embrace their gifts.
“It’s a good power. It could make you a better person,” Sokol said. “But in my own life it’s an issue as well. Really, I just get all twisted up trying to figure out what people want and what other people think of me. Sometimes it makes it hard for me to figure out what’s right.”
Sokol says her confusion is reflected in Zee’s “interstitial” and “liminal” story.
“There are a lot of different categorizations of what I write, so it all kind of crosses genres,” Sokol said. She said her work, like her characters, falls into both the cracks between traditional categories and in the gulf to either side of them. To make sure she doesn’t get lost in those uncharted waters, Sokol falls back on the writer’s failsafe. She writes plenty of what she knows into the pages of Zee to compliment the less conventional elements.
“I’m from New York, so it’s what I know,” Sokol said. “I also played basketball.”
The magic and the mundane
Sokol said her daughter inspired much of Zee, so the book is an exploration of her city, and her past, through both of their eyes.
Through balance between the real and the magical, Sokol establishes a world in Zee that rhymes with the real world but is strange enough to leave her free to explore identity, sexuality and familial relationships.
“I write about the things that I care about,” Sokol said. “It’s not a soapbox. It’s a story. At the same time, nothing is neutral and nothing is small.”
Sokol said she hopes her metaphors challenge reader’s ideas to defy categorization. She would like it if everyone and every element of her story fell into those interstitial and liminal spaces to either side, and in between, those conventions they take for granted. She hopes a few of them are inspired to forge a path and assume an identity, like Zee, on the road less travelled.
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