By Clare B. Dunkle. New York: Henry Holt, 2004.
Readers have written me to ask questions about the book. Here are some of those questions and their answers. Although I still answer reader mail about this book, I no longer add questions and answers to this page because I wrote this book over five years ago, and I no longer trust my memory about its details.
WARNING: If you have not read the book, please DO NOT read this page. The questions won't interest you, and they will ruin some of the book's best surprises.
ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE ANY MORE HOLLOW
KINGDOM BOOKS?
WILL THIS BOOK EVER BE A MOVIE?
DID KATE EVER FIND ANYTHING (OTHER THAN
KILLING PEOPLE) THAT SHE WAS GOOD AT MAGICALLY?
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO CONSTANTINE?
RUBY TELLS RICHARD THAT MARAK WILL WANT
TO START HEALING HIS BACK RIGHT AWAY. THE KING IS DESCRIBED
AS HAVING A TWISTED SHOULDER—COULD HE NOT HEAL HIMSELF?
WHY DOESN'T EMILY HAVE ANY MAGIC
ABILITY, WHEN KATE IS HALF ELF? THEY'RE SISTERS.
WOULD YOU WRITE A BOOK ABOUT LIM AND BLACKWING?
WHAT'S GOING ON WITH TIL IN THE BOOK?
I PERSONALLY FELT THE OL' GIRL HAD A LOT OF PENT-UP
ANGER.
WHY WAS MARAK WORRIED ABOUT SABLE'S EYE COLOR AND SAID
SOMETHING ALONG THE LINES OF "HER LINE MUST HAVE WEAKENED"?
WHO IS ON THE COVER OF THIS BOOK?
IF SAY EMILY OR KATE CUT THEMSELVES WOULD
THEY SEE A MIX OF WHITE AND RED BLOOD OR WOULD A PARTICULAR
SPELL HAVE TO BE SAID TO SEE THEIR DIFFERENT BLOODS?
DO KATE AND MARAK HAVE TO DIE SO THAT CATSPAW
CAN RULE?
DID THE PRIEST SEE THORN AND SABLE?
DOES CATSPAW END UP KILLING TIL?
YOU SAID "THERE MUST HAVE BEEN
AN ELF WOMAN MARRIED TO A HUMAN MAN BECAUSE AN ELF MAN MARRIED
TO A HUMAN WOMAN COULD NEVER HAVE HAD A CHILD", BUT
WHAT ABOUT SEYLIN AND EMILY? SEYLIN IS MOSTLY ELF, EMILY IS
MOSTLY HUMAN.
I WAS WONDERING WHY THIS BOOK WAS CALLED
CLOSE KIN BECAUSE I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT
KIN MEANT.
WHEN WILL CLOSE KIN COME OUT
AS A PAPERBACK BOOK?
HOW COULD RICHARD HAVE BEEN FOUND OUTSIDE
THE KINGDOM? DID HE ESCAPE?
LIM DIDN'T DECIDE TO STAY UNTIL SHE
HEARD ABOUT HER FATHER'S RELEASE AND BLACKWING'S
LOVE. BUT BEFORE THAT WAS WHEN SHE WROTE IN THE BOOK THINGS
SHE FORGOT THAT WERE IN ESSENCE SAYING GOODBYE TO HER OLD
LIFE. WHY THE DISCREPANCY IF SHE STILL FULLY INTENDED TO LEAVE?
WHY DID THE ELVES THINK IRINA WAS UGLY?
WHAT REQUIREMENTS DOES CHARM HAVE WHEN
IT PICKS FAVORITE KING'S WIVES? AND WHY WASN'T
LIM A FAVORITE WIFE?
WHEN MARAK FOUND HIS SON ON AGATHA'S
LAP AND ONLY ONE OF THEM WAS SLEEPING, DID THIS MEAN THAT
SHE HAD DIED?
HOW ARE CLOSE KIN NAMES PRONOUNCED?
IS YOUR TRILOGY BASED ON THE FOLKTALE, TAM
LIN?
DON'T YOU THINK THAT THE DESCRIPTION
OF SABLE'S CUTTING HER FACE IS TOO GRAPHIC FOR A CHILDREN'S
STORY?
WHEN DOES THE STORY TAKE PLACE?
IF RICHARD USES SUCH LONG WORDS, WHY DOESN'T
HE KNOW WHAT THEY MEAN?
WHO WAS KATE'S ELVISH ANCESTOR?
IF THE ELVISH MEN WHO LOST THEIR WIVES
SPOKE ELVISH AND THE HUMAN WOMEN THEY STOLE TO RAISE THE CHILDREN
SPOKE ENGLISH, WHY DOESN'T SABLE'S BAND OF ELVES
UNDERSTAND BOTH ELVISH AND ENGLISH?
YOUR ELVISH IS DIFFERENT FROM TOLKIEN'S ELVISH. WHY?
I appreciate the desire to see more books about this world, but I hate to repeat myself. For three books, I was able to use this world to say new things and to take you readers to new places, but I think that by the fourth book, I would be in entirely familiar territory. You love the first book because it surprises you. Don't you still want to be surprised? I can do that by taking you to new worlds, like the one in By These Ten Bones. I don't plan on writing any more books in this world.
I doubt it. Not every good book makes a good movie. The Hollow Kingdom are all about ambiguity, prejudice, and perception. No one in the trilogy is completely good, and very few people are thoroughly bad, either. I wanted to make readers think about that. I didn't want to give you easy answers about who to like and who to hate.
Movies work best with simple characters and lots of action, but that isn't why I wrote the trilogy. I won't let a movie director turn my characters into something they aren't just to make a more exciting movie.
Alas, no. Warfare was in her blood. All the rest was education, and while she proved a sharp pupil, she could never fully undo that early education she had received as a human girl, when she learned (and rightly so) that magic is improper to our race. Thus, she and Sable could battle it out in class to see who could do the magic assignment best, but whereas Sable had no qualms about floating objects around with her so that she didn't have to carry them, Kate just couldn't do it. She felt embarrassed working spells for casual use. She did work the occasional spell to undo magical trouble caused by her feuding children, but she never overcame her scruples about working magic in general. Marak, of course, found her irrational behavior a constant source of amusement.
Dog was in Close Kin for the first draft, sleeping outside the workroom along with Helen, but the presence of two dogs was distracting there, so I removed Dog from the text. Not to worry: Dog lived a long and happy life, tagging around after Marak and then young Catspaw. But he was long dead by the start of Book III.
Yes, the King can use his magic on himself (or, more likely, his father the King can use magic on him when he's young), but he doesn't use it to correct deformity that is harmless: the goblin King finds such deformity attractive, as do his subjects. Richard, however, is losing quality of life. His deformity is producing a serious hunchback that has bent him over so that he can't straighten up anymore. In this case, goblins work magic to repair, not the deformity, but the effects of the deformity (the uneven development). In fact, Marak has had this series of magical operations himself. He, too, had an uneven spine that would have resulted in a hunchback, but he can stand up straight. All that is left of his scoliosis is a high shoulder, and that's all Richard will be left with, too.
Do you have a sister? If you do, you know how different the two of you are. She may look exactly like your father, while you look exactly like your mother. While we all inherit 50% of our traits from each parent, those play out in combinations of dominant and recessive genes to produce tremendous differences in how strongly we favor one side or the other. And this has happened to Kate. She has inherited the elvish side so strongly that she is more elf than her mother was—she is a throwback to her ancestor Elizabeth. But Emily has strongly inherited traits from her father. She both looks like him and responds to magic as he would because he is a human.
I'm happy you liked that story enough to want to see it as a book: it's my favorite piece of my own writing. I won't write a book about them, though, because the most interesting part is already written. Besides, this way readers like you don't have to go to the bookstore and pay for their story. You can enjoy it right here on the website.
Til's behavior makes sense to me. She's a very ambitious, headstrong girl, and her foster parents haven't handled her very well. One of them (Kate) shies away from conflict, so she never confronts Til. The other (Marak) is so emotionally callous that he finds emotional displays amusing. This isn't the parenting Til needs.
To make matters much worse, an accident of "birth," if you will, has made her the powerless older sister to an extraordinarily important and powerful little brother. If Til had a docile temperament, this wouldn't matter, but Til has just as much ambition as anybody, and she's frustrated to find that she is not only socially inferior to Catspaw but physically inferior to him as well, being one of the few people in the kingdom unable to perform magic. Moreover, she is surrounded by peers who are both tractable and brutal, which is an odd combination: their callous temperament makes goblins fairly easygoing, but given to displays and tests of strength, which means that goblin childhood is essentially one long hazing process. Even good-natured Emily has been damaged somewhat by growing up among goblins. Small wonder that Til doesn't do so well.
Seylin has just told Marak that, although Sable is a camp lord's daughter, she has blue eyes. Marak knows that pure-blooded elvish aristocrats always have black eyes. This leads him to suspect that, in the absence of sufficient choice, Sable's ancestors have married commoners, a disappointment for the goblin King since commoner elves are not so strongly magical.
This is true. In spite of the strong prejudice among the elves which led aristocrats to marry only members of their own class, Sable's father has been driven to choose for his second wife a common elf woman. Sable's mother had blond hair and blue eyes. Sable has her mother's eyes, but her father's hair (Marak has noted the black hair and hopes for the best). Fortunately for Marak, Sable has most of her father's magic as well.
Emily holds the mirror, and Sable is looking away (retreating from life). Seylin is in the mirror, cracked, because the artist liked the mirror ideas in the trilogy and the way that mirrors played into the theme of changing ideas of identity. The artist's comment gave me an idea for Book III, in fact: I worked one last mirror reference in at the end, when Nir rejects the idea of studying his own appearance in a mirror in favor of seeing Miranda's happy face instead.
Kate's and Emily's blood looks normal because the elves are more like us than the goblins are. Otherwise, Marak would have noticed a difference when Kate's forehead was bleeding so heavily. Goblins don't ordinarily have black blood, even though the spell on the color disk reveals goblin ancestry as black; like Marak's, their blood is often dark brown if it isn't red. The spell just analyzes the blood and gives back what scientists would call a graph, showing the strengths of the different races in an individual, and assigning colors to those races that are easy to distinguish from one another. Dwarf ancestry shows up as yellow, but that isn't the color of their blood, either.
Emily's disk is almost entirely red with a tiny bit of white. Kate's would look the opposite: mostly white with a little red.
Marak does, but Kate doesn't. She just loses her protective snake when Marak dies: Charm turns back into a sword.
No. This incident took place years earlier. The priest saw Sable's father (much handsomer than Thorn because he was a lord) with Sable's mother.
No, he doesn't. She's part of his family, so the rules of goblin revenge forbid him to take drastic action.
Seylin's feeling that he truly is an elf amuses Marak at the beginning of Close Kin because Marak knows perfectly well that Seylin is actually a goblin. Therefore, when the elf quest is over, Marak proves to Seylin that he isn't an elf man at all. He's a goblin man, even though he has a great deal of elf blood in him. Marak points out at the time that lots of elf blood doesn't make someone an elf. The goblins like to call Kate an elf because she is such a powerful elf cross, but Marak notes that even though Kate has a great deal of elf blood, an elf man couldn't have a family with her. But, because Seylin is actually a goblin man, he and Emily can have a family.
"Kin" means the people who are related to you, and if they're close kin, then they're close relatives. I named Book II that because many people in the book have to think about who their "kin" really are. For instance, Seylin thinks he's related to the elves because people have made fun of him for looking like one. But he's really not an elf at all; he's really a goblin, and he has to find that out the hard way by learning that he doesn't really want to live the way elves have to live. And the goblin teacher, Ruby, has always thought that her people, the goblins, are much better than everyone else, but she has to learn that all rational people share a common bond and have to learn to live together. She learns that she is "kin" to the two little human children who need her. And Sable learns to trust goblins, whom she had always thought were horrible monsters. So that's why the title is Close Kin: we have to see brothers and sisters everywhere we look, no matter what religion or color or nationality they happen to be.
In late December of 2006.
Richard was born in Portsmouth, England, to a human mother who was a prostitute. His father was one of the goblin men who made the trading journeys. This goblin had gotten drunk and accepted the invitation of the street-walker to have a good time. That's what made the King so angry: no goblin man should have behaved so badly as to have had a child with a human woman outside the kingdom.
Because the strange-looking Richard was abandoned by his human mother immediately after birth, he had no knowledge of his mother or father. He grew up under the "care" of a man who was only interested in using this child as a freak-show exhibit. Mr. Simmons told Richard that he had no parents, so Richard thought he was not an orphan at all. He probably half-believed the stories that they made up to tell the people about him, that he was some sort of devil.
Richard, therefore, never had left the goblin kingdom; he had never been anywhere near the goblin kingdom. He had learned only frightening things about those in authority from his lawbreaking friends. All his life, no one had really wanted him around. Consequently, he was terrified of facing the goblin King and being judged "not good enough" to have a real home.
Lim does not have to make her real decision until the last minute, and so she hides from herself the decision she will make. Her mind blocks this, in the way that a traumatized child might block the memory of a horrible episode: she protects herself as best she can from the impending decision; or, rather, from her own foregone decision. Lim has actually already realized that she must marry Blackwing at least before that last day, and very probably during that last week. She is saying her good-bye on paper but not letting herself see or understand it.
Blackwing works no magic to keep her writing from her; she genuinely doesn't read what she writes, or simply isn't aware of it. She is writing for the sake of writing, in order to give herself an occupation—filling up the time so she won't think. In doing that, she is performing what psychiatrists call "automatic writing," and this very often is a way of letting the subconscious mind speak (sometimes in surprising and upsetting ways, similar to the results one gets under hypnosis). Since she never goes back to look at the book, she never does learn what she has written.
Thorn always called Irina an ugly puppy because of classic family dynamics: he was just like a big brother to her—a very mean big brother. Irina grew up with no adult women, two adult men (Sable's father and her father, both dead by the time she was about six) and all the other children, of whom only Willow was younger. Thorn and Rowan were near in age, and their relationship was pretty close; Sable and Laurel were only a year apart, and they were best friends. But Irina was six years younger than Sable. She was the tagalong little sister, teased and snubbed. Imagine growing up without mothers—imagine being raised by careless older siblings. And then imagine having to marry one! Marrying the same guy who shoved you into the mud puddle and snapped the heads off all your dolls ... now, that's a miserable existence!
Thorn would have had his eye on Sable pretty early, so he would have been more considerate to her. With Irina, he never would have seen any need to be nice. He and Willow made fun of Irina as "ugly" because that's the meanest thing you can say to an elf. (Rowan just teased her for being stupid.) We often have to leave home to learn the truth about ourselves, and Irina is a case in point: she never knew that she was pretty because she had never left her "family" before.
Charm's criterion for a favorite King's Wife is a bit different from what the Kings care for—or even from what the Wives care for! Charm likes to be needed. Its favorite Wives are usually either those who have lived through the most dangerous ordeals (as Kate did), or simply those who have given the snake the most trouble (as Adele did). Lim never gave Charm a minute's grief—or, for that matter, a minute's exercise. It slept right through her life. She might have been tremendously heroic, but she didn't give Charm a single interesting statistic.
Yes, old Agatha had died. And at the end, she had been mentally traveling, as the elderly often do before death. She had mistaken Catspaw for her own Marak, many years before.
English names are pronounced normally. Goblin and elf names are pronounced in typical American style, with unaccented vowels generally falling into schwa sounds. (My Webster's New World Dictionary defines the schwa as the sound of the a in ago, the e in agent, the i in sanity, the o in comply, or the u in focus.) Although all elf and some goblin names are based on actual foreign words, I have changed their pronunciation to suit myself.
Seylin: SAY-lin
Second syllable rhymes with thin.
Thaydar:
THAY-dar
Soft th, as in thin, and first syllable rhymes with
flay. Second syllable's vowel is not a schwa sound,
but rhymes with car.
Jackoby: JACK-oh-bee
Marak: MARE-ik
Second syllable vowel is a schwa; vowels rhyme more or less with vowels
in garret or parrot.
Nameshda:
Nuh-MEZH-dah
The a in the first syllable is a schwa. The sh
in the middle syllable has the sound of z in azure.
The vowel in that syllable sounds like e in met,
and the last syllable has a schwa sound.
Aganir Immir:
A-guh-near IM-mer
The first word means king in elvish; the first syllable has
the sound of a in bag, the second is a schwa, and
the third syllable rhymes with fear. The first syllable of
the second word has the sound of i in in, and the
second syllable rhymes with her.
Lim: rhymes with him
Aganir U-Sakar: A-guh-near
oo-sa-CAR
The middle syllable of the second word has the sound of a
in sack, but when said quickly, it tends to become a schwa
sound.
Sabul: sa-BOOL
The a in the first syllable of Sable's elvish name
is like the a in father, but when said quickly,
it tends to become a schwa sound. The second syllable rhymes with
pool.
Katoo: ka-TOO
First syllable vowel sounds like cat. The two syllables have
almost equal stress.
No: although my trilogy is based on British folklore, it isn't based on Tam Lin at all. There are many abduction folktales in the British tradition that come much closer to my trilogy than Tam Lin does; properly speaking, Tam Lin is not an abduction tale at all, even though some versions allude to the abduction of the human knight before the story begins.
Childe Roland is a much closer antecedent to my trilogy. Concerning that tale, some scholars assume that Burd Ellen has been stolen to pay the fairy teind, but there is no evidence for this in the story as I learned it. And I find it interesting that while the most famous retelling calls Ellen's captor the King of Elfland, one scholar calls him a goblin king. This highlights the confusion in British folklore between the beautiful and the ugly magical races: sometimes "fairies" are described as misshapen.
If you are interested in the ideas that I took from folklore to build the trilogy, you may find them on the Creating Fantasy Worlds page under the Fiction Writing section of this website.
No, I don't, but then, this book is not for children: it is for ages twelve and up. During these years, teens are learning many harsh truths in history and sociology classes, such as the atrocities of the second World War, and they are reading such graphic stories as The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath, and All Quiet on the Western Front. Our schools teach these disturbing truths in the hope that history will not repeat itself—that education will bring about improvement.
I brought Sable's tragic decision into this book for a reason. Right now, millions of girls all over the world are facing exploitation and abuse. In Africa, there are women scheduled to be executed by stoning as soon as their children reach the age of two. In India, a busy slave trade exists, bringing girls from poor villages and locking them up in brothels, to face a lifetime of forced prostitution and almost inevitable death from untreated disease. In the Middle East just a short while ago, a fire broke out at a girls' school, and some of the girls rushed outside without wearing their voluminous veils. The police sent them back into the burning building to find their veils—and several of those girls burned to death. Here in our own country, sad to say, there are girls dealing with horrendous abuse. Some of them will fall into the trap of prostitution and even lose their lives as a result.
The best thing I can do as an author is to help teens develop a sense of empathy with these mistreated and oppressed young women. If a reader lives along with Sable through her difficult choice and the abuse that follows, I hope that reader will be more likely to take the plight of exploited women seriously. Awareness and concern are the first steps toward solving a problem.
This story takes place eight years after Kate's marriage to Marak, in the year 1822. Emily is eighteen, Seylin is twenty-two, Kate is twenty-six, Marak is almost seventy, and Catspaw is five and a half.
Most of Richard's childhood has been spent as the exhibit of a freak show. Mr. Simmons, the man who took him around Great Britain, was what we would call a sideshow barker. Everywhere the two of them went, this man would use his loud voice and impressive-sounding talk to try to bring together an interested crowd. Then, once the crowd had paid, he and Richard would perform their act.
Because of his trade, Mr. Simmons used long words to "dress up" his sentences. The young Richard fell in love with these glorious-sounding words, and he peppers his own speech with them whenever he can. He often doesn't know exactly what the words mean, but this may not be his fault. Mr. Simmons may not have used the words correctly, either.
Marak guesses in the book that Kate is descended from high-ranking military lords. In fact, Kate is a direct descendent of the last elf King's military commander, the highest-ranking military lord in the entire elvish kingdom. Thaydar is his equivalent in Marak's hierarchy.
The daughter of this elvish lord survived the last battle of the elf harrowing, the attack on the King's Camp, but her right arm was smashed, and she could no longer work magic. The goblin King, Marak Whiteye, healed her and let her go. He told her that he did this because the two of them were cousins: his mother and her grandmother were sisters. But in fact, Whiteye had read his mother's book by this time and had lost his taste for revenge. Ruby tells Emily that no one except babies survived this battle, but that's because Whiteye didn't record this episode in the Kings' Chronicles—it was just one more secret that this gloomy and guilt-ridden King decided to take with him to the grave.
Teaching someone else a foreign language is a lot of work; it's easier, if you know the other person's language, just to speak to him or her in that language instead. The elvish men got used to speaking English around the human slaves because they didn't want to go to the effort of teaching them elvish. The little children, then, grew up hearing much more English than elvish, and after a couple of generations, their own language was lost.
Exactly the same thing happened to the children of the Norman knights who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. These knights tended to marry English women, and it was the mothers who spent the most time with the children. It wasn't too many generations, then, before these proud "French" lords were struggling with their French, and around the reign of Henry the Fifth, they gave it up entirely. But, thanks to them, our language has many words derived from Norman French.
The Hollow Kingdom world isn't based on Tolkien's Middle Earth, and my elves are very different from his: for instance, elves living a normal elvish life die after a lifespan of about a hundred years, while Tolkien's elves never die of old age. (Sadly, the parents of the Close Kin elves were lucky to make it to thirty-five.) Because the two races and two worlds aren't related, it wouldn't make any sense for my elves to speak Tolkien's elvish.
My elvish is based on Sumerian, a real language spoken before the time of Christ in the land of Mesopotamia, and my elves come from that part of the world, as well. In the trilogy, whenever I translate an elvish word or phrase, I'm giving the meaning of a real Sumerian word.