For this month’s book club, we had the honor to have the author with us. We welcomed Natasha Ngan in our tiny club, and it might be one of the coolest thing I’ve done.

As you already know, I absolutely adored Girls of Paper and Fire.

Natasha answered all of our questions, here they are.

There are a lot of oppressions in Girls, and Natasha said it was important for her, because in her books she can fight the oppressor, while in real life, she’s not always able to.

She found the inspiration for the different castes in anime and Chinese mythology. She grew up with fortune telling, so she included it in the form of the necklaces.

As for the book, her inspiration was a scene that came to her, of a girl in a Chinese gown, kneeling in front of a demon king.

She then started to question everything. How did they get there? Who is this girl?

An important thing for Natasha to start writing is that she has to have the first line of the book. For Girls, it came to her in yoga classes, and she rushed home and wrote the prologue.

Natasha thinks that writing about traumatism must come from a place of understanding. 

She wasn’t aware of the own voice movement when she wrote Girls, because when she was looking for a publisher, the movement hadn’t begun yet. Though it always had an importance to her. 

For the different castes, Natasha says that their form reflects who they are. For exemple, the demon king wouldn’t be anything else than a bull.

She tried writing the first chapter of Girls in various point of view. She stuck with Lei, because she showed us a different way to be strong.

In book three, we might have different point of views all throughout the book.

In book two, she will address the question of how far will her characters go in the fight for something they believe in. How much of themselve they are willing to lose.

Book two will be out in November, and I simply can’t wait!