Opal Summerfield & The Battle of Fallmoon Gap (416 pages, Samurai Seven Books) is the first in the young-adult fantasy series "Opal of the Ozarks" by Mark Caldwell Jones.
Sixteen-year-old Opal acquires a magic necklace. This strange power leads her into a parallel world that still resembles Northwest Arkansas. She encounters not only a cave, but also pigs in the woods -- fearsome "wereboars."
Jones is at work on the second volume at home in Los Angeles, where he took time out from Opal's adventures to tell about some of his own:
Question: How was it that you spent summers in the Ozarks?
Jones: My father and grandfather would take me to the White River to fish for trout every summer. We stayed at Jack's Resort in Mountain View.
To me, all of those experiences combined to form this sense of that area being magical.
Q: Did you consider any other setting-- or think of the Ozarks as integral to the book?
Jones: It's absolutely integral to the story. In a way, the Ozarks are a secondary character.
Q: Kirkus Reviews finds "an undercurrent of racial tension" in your choice of a blue-eyed black girl as the heroine. Is this what you intended? Or just a striking appearance?
Jones: The racial issues are there because they are part of the culture. It's unfortunate, but it's just that way. I don't think these undercurrents make the story inaccessible. They are just the back-story to Opal's adventure. To me, the theme is the enduring power of family love. Everyone can relate to that.
Q. How would you describe Opal to someone who had not read the book?
Jones: She is one of those kids that just doesn't quite fit in and knows deep down that there is another life waiting on her somewhere, but she hasn't quite figured out what that is or how to get there. ... Like any teenager, she is in the very beginning stages of discovering who she really is and what she will do with her life.
Q. Did it seem like a risk for you -- a guy writing a girl character?
I wrote the book in somewhat of a naive state. ... I wasn't aware of the current debates about the need for diversity in fiction and how writers feel you should not cross over into other people's cultures. I just don't agree with that. ... What I wrote was a story about a Southern girl, living in a Southern culture that I do know well.
Q: And the most dangerous question for last: Who would win a cage fight between a wereboar and the Arkansas Razorback?
Jones: How do you know they aren't one and the same? One of the wereboars in Opal is called Redboar for a reason!
Style on 06/08/2014