“I don’t want to be ahead of the character and I kind of want to let them define it themselves.”
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An almost musical laugh leaves her lips, a sparkle in her eyes as she leans over the table, her hand on her can of San Pellegrino, her amber hair falling in front of her eyes. Her soft voice has that traditional Irish accent as she talks enthusiastically about her debut book, eyes sparkling as the words leave her lips. Although there’s gentle chatter all around, it’s impossible to not be tuned into everything she has to say about how she brought her characters to life.
Being from the land of magic, leprechauns and pixies, it’s no surprise that Caroline O’Donoghue decided to base her book in Ireland. Having grown up in Cork and going to University there to study English, O’Donoghue had the inspiration at her fingertips when it came to writing her debut young adult novel, All Our Hidden Gifts. We see the world through the eyes of 16 year old Maeve Chambers as her world is turned upside down upon the discovery of tarot cards, leading her into the world of spirituality and changing everything for her.
“Maeve has a little more of my DNA,” says O’Donoghue, talking about how she formed the narrative characters of her novel. “I think I just remember very vividly what was like to be 16 and being a bit difficult and being a bit much you know?”
One real important thing O’Donoghue said about her journey through this novel was the
representation. She wanted to provide an accurate and wide representation through her work of different backgrounds, an element that she believes is missing in Y/A Fiction culture.
“I don’t think it’s good enough to just be like, here’s my Asian character, or here’s my gay character o whatever, you have to have deep reasons for specific cultural nations and where they’re from and why they’re why there. For Fiona, the Filipino stuff was important to me,
because they’ve got a deep technical driven by deep mysticism culture there. And there’s a lot of comparisons between Irish culture and Filipino culture that I find really exciting,” says O’Donoghue, before going on to talk about gender representation.
“I guess we call jet gender fluid or non binary. I’m being vague because this character he like, goes on a journey through as the books I sort of don’t want to be ahead of the character and I kind of want to let them explore it and define themselves,” she says, expressing the importance of letting a character develop. “But the challenge is that like, I wanted to get everything right and sensitively read and so I knew I would have to collaborate with somebody who is non binary, and who is gender fluid.” O’Donoghue could see her characters as living breathing people, which was incredible to witness when she spoke about them.
Caroline O’Donoghue definitely brought the magic to the page with her first debut novel, All Our Hidden Gifts.
Be sure to check it out and pre-order the second novel in this magical trilogy – The Gifts That Bind Us.
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