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WORK TITLE: Girl in Snow
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: c. 1993
WEBSITE: https://www.danyakukafka.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.wmagazine.com/story/danya-kukafka-girl-in-snow-author
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL EDUCATION:
New York University, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Riverhead Books, New York City, assistant editor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Danya Kukafka became an aspiring author at age sixteen in her hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado. She honed her creative skills in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She was a twenty-something book editor when her first novel appeared in bookstores. Kukafka told interviewers that the story grew out of her memories of the adolescent experience, but the manuscript grew up along with her. Girl in Snow became a full-fledged mystery novel, as suitable for adults as it is for younger readers. It begins with a murder.
Someone killed high school freshman Lucinda Hayes, and the list of suspects is growing. The most likely culprit seems to be fifteen-year-old Cameron Whitley. The strange loner harbored an intense attraction for his popular classmate. He spent many nights outside her bedroom window, still as a statue, and turned his observations into skillful drawings of his muse. Cameron cannot remember what happened the night Lucinda died, but one of his drawings is a sketch of her dead body. Many people believe that Cameron is mentally ill.
Jade Dixon-Burns is another suspect. The older teen envied Lucinda for reasons that one might suspect from a schoolmate who is not beautiful, not popular, not the product of a happy family. Jade resented Lucinda for dating the boy she wanted to love and for getting the job she wanted for herself. Jade actually performed a witchcraft ritual to harm Lucinda, but she never expected it to work.
Russ Fletcher is the police officer assigned to investigate Lucinda’s death, but he may not be the ideal choice. His former police partner was Cameron’s father, Lee Whitley, who mysteriously vanished after an earlier criminal incident, leaving Cameron in Russ’s care. Russ guards other secrets and feelings so intensely that he can’t acknowledge them, even to himself.
A host of supporting characters have secrets of their own, any one of which could be connected to Lucinda’s death. In fact, there are hints that Lucinda herself might not have been the paragon of perfection that she seemed to be. None of this matters, in the long run, because Kukafka’s mission is not to reveal the truth. “It’s all about perception,” she told Julia Jenkins in an interview at Shelf Awareness, “the slender boundary between devotion and obsession, between appearance and truth.”
In an interview with Scott Butki at Mystery People, Kukafka observed that the line between love and obsession is especially tenuous for young adolescents, the age group that she chose for Lucinda and her peers. She specifically set the events in the years 2004 and 2005, a time before the social media explosion, a time when people were forced to rely on their own perceptions and interpretations of what they saw or think they saw. Katherine Cusumano commented at the magazine W: “Each narrator’s observations about the dead girl reveal far more about themselves.” The killer’s identity emerges, she wrote, but almost as an afterthought.
Reception to Girl in Snow was mixed. “This is not a traditional murder mystery,” Jenkins wrote. Unraveling the identity of the killer was never the point: “Girl in Snow is about the effects of Lucinda’s death on an entire town.” While Library Journal commentator Liz French called it a “smart, fast-paced novel,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor would have advised the author “to rein in the prose and crank up the plot.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly concluded, however, that “there is enough narrative muscle to compel the reader to stick with it.” D.R. Meredith observed in the New York Journal of Books that “Girl in Snow is a novel to be read on more than [one] level,” best suited, not for typical fans of high-speed mystery and suspense,” but “for fans of literary novels.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
California Bookwatch, September, 2017, review of Girl in Snow.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of Girl in Snow.
Library Journal, June 1, 2017, Liz French, review of Girl in Snow, p. 88.
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2017, review of Girl in Snow, p. 26.
ONLINE
Danya Kukafka Website, https://www.danyakukafka.com (April 27, 2018).
Mystery People, https://mysterypeople.wordpress.com/ (August 3, 2017), Scott Butki, author interview.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (July 31, 2017), D.R. Meredith, review of Girl in Snow.
PaulSemel.com, http://paulsemel.com/ (July 31, 2017), author interview.
Shelf Awareness, http://shelf-awareness.com/ (April 26, 2017), Julia Jenkins, author interview and review of Girl in Snow.
Tethered by Letters, https://tetheredbyletters.com/ (August 1, 2017), Dani Hedlund, author interview.
W, https://www.wmagazine.com/ (August 2, 2017), Katherine Cusumano, author interview.
Meet Danya Kukafka, the 24-Year-Old Debut Author Behind This Summer's Must-Read Teen Murder Mystery
by Katherine Cusumano
August 2, 2017 11:38 am
Cameron Whitley doesn’t know if he killed Lucinda Hayes. Like, he genuinely doesn’t know. Lucinda is a clever, beautiful ninth grader, a golden girl who resides in Broomsville, the fictional northern Colorado suburb where the new novel Girl in Snow takes place. She has been found dead. And the night in question, well, Cameron has blocked it out.
When she began writing this story five years ago, Danya Kukafka was 19 and finishing up her sophomore year at New York University. She had just read Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and had recently seen a particularly harrowing episode of Law & Order in which a suspect cannot remember committing the murders for which he’s eventually arrested. All of this led to the question: “How can you love somebody if you suspect that they’ve done something truly horrible?” Kukafka, now 24, said recently in Manhattan before the release of Girl in Snow, her debut novel out now. Put another way: How far can a writer stretch her reader’s empathy before it fractures?
An avid reader of novels that bridge the divide between adult and YA literature—like Julie Buntin’s Marlena, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, all of which feature teen characters and explore adult themes—Kukafka initially thought she had written a young-adult novel. And after she had developed Cameron’s narrative in Girl in Snow, Kukafka added in the alternate perspective of another teen: Lucinda’s classmate and foil, Jade, who loathed her.
A couple years ago, while she was working as an editorial assistant at Riverhead Books, on the advice of her agent she incorporated the novel’s only adult voice, that of Russ, the cop assigned to Lucinda’s case. “It became a novel once I added Jade in,” she said. “Russ just opened it up even more and pushed it fully into the adult sphere.” But Kukafka still hadn’t solved the murder.
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In late 2015, having spent nearly a year revising Girl in Snow, Kukafka sent the manuscript out on submission. At around 5 a.m. the next day, she and her agent received an email from Marysue Rucci, Simon & Schuster’s editor-in-chief. She had stayed up through the night reading the book—and she wanted to buy it. Now, two years later, Girl in Snow has finally emerged. And The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins, whose work is a blueprint for Girl in Snow’s literary thriller genre, wrote a blurb.
In concept, Girl in Snow has all the trappings of a pulp crime novel, but it also comments on those thriller tropes with playful self-awareness. “I knew I was using the trope of the beautiful dead girl,” Kukafka told me. She was “not particularly interested in” Lucinda, she added. “I was more interested in the things people project onto her.”
“A lot of this book is about perception and how we see each other—what we see versus what we think we know versus what is actually true about people,” Kukafka said. <
“We’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives,” Kukafka said. “The way we see ourselves is not the way other people see us.”
In this way, Lucinda’s own reality is almost a footnote; the resolution to her crime, when it comes, almost an aside. With Lucinda, Kukafka punctures the Laura Palmer mythology. (“In death, Lucinda exists much as she did in life, as a manifestation in other people’s minds, an artistic rendering, an object of both desire and jealousy,” wrote Jenessa Abrams in a Guernica review.)
Now, five years after Kukafka started writing as Cameron, the crime has been solved. Kukafka is about to embark on a multi-city book tour, including a return to her own Colorado hometown—and she's already started writing a new book. “It’s different, much different,” she said. “Some people have been like, ‘Is this going to be a series?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, my god, no. I am so done with this story.’”
nothing useful
Julia Jenkins
April 26, 2017
review:
The town of Broomsville, Colo., is rocked by the early-morning discovery of Lucinda Hayes's body, slung against the carousel in the elementary school playground. Lucinda was a freshman in high school, and the town's golden girl: beautiful, kind, smart, popular. In the days that follow, though, her secrets and those of her friends and neighbors will be expertly teased to light, old wounds reopened and a number of lives permanently changed.
Girl in Snow is Danya Kukafka's first novel, and its riveting narrative dives immediately into the impact of Lucinda's death through the perspective of her classmate Cameron, an unpopular, troubled teenager whose waking thoughts, dreams and artwork all fixate on her. "Cameron hated the word 'stalk.' He had other words for his relationship with Lucinda, but they were words no one else would understand. Words like vibrant, frantic, twinkling, aching...." He is an obvious early suspect. But there are others: the night janitor who found the body, Lucinda's ex-boyfriend, a homeless man, even her parents.
Then the perspective shifts, as it will throughout this stark and striking novel, from Cameron's to that of Jade, a junior at the high school, who finds it pointless to even pretend to mourn Lucinda's death. The third point in this triangulated mystery is Russ, a police officer of 17 years who shares an old trauma with one suspect, and is related to another by marriage. The reader's lens on the story rotates among these three characters as each struggles with the way his or her life has changed, and sooner or later feels compelled to investigate.
Objectively, Cameron is a stalker; he is certainly troubled. Jade is sullen and generally hostile. Russ, like the two teens, is haunted by his past. They are absorbing characters, with layers of secrets that overlap among them. Although Jade's chapters are told in first-person, and Cameron's and Russ's in the third, their distresses are all written with raw immediacy, and each character is complex, aching and ashamed, for different reasons. Kukafka drags these hidden injuries and infamies out of her characters slowly and by degrees. This measured pacing and withholding of information gives her novel an atmosphere of nearly painful suspense. <
Kukafka's meticulous details--like Jade's musical tastes and Russ's wife's background--enrich her characters and add to the sense of realism. Cameron is a skilled visual artist with a precise understanding of plant and animal anatomy. Jade is a loner, "eyes ringed in black; raven, greasy hair swooped over one eye," "two inches of pale stomach rolled over her waistband even though it was winter and she was probably cold," and even though her mother disapproves. Jade's little sister is their mother's Barbie doll, "a mannequin for Ma's regret about her worry lines and all those cigarettes she smokes."
Jade knows that "When people die, they become angel caricatures of themselves," and Lucinda was perhaps not so perfect as the news reports would have it. The reader has only the perspectives of Cameron, Jade and Russ to go on, and their opinions of her vary, but even in these glimpses the dead girl receives some nuance of characterization.
Secondary characters come just as fully formed. Lucinda's ex-boyfriend Zap, whose parents are French, loves astronomy. Cameron's art teacher has a history and loves of his own, besides his obvious passion for his work. Broomsville may be an "overgrown cul-de-sac," "like a cardboard town filled with paper people," but its inhabitants are as variously disturbed and troubled as any group of imperfect humans. One of them is a murderer, but it seems they are all guilty of something.
Kukafka's prose often leans toward short sentences and quick turns, but also pauses for beauty or metaphor. There is a poignancy to Cameron's observations of the physical world, as he kneads his eraser, noting "snowflakes kissing a windowsill, fingernails dug into the skin of a tangerine." He thirsts for beauty, and thinks there's "nothing worse than loving someone and mixing up their earlobes with someone else's." But one of the points of Girl in Snow is that appearances are often terribly misleading.
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interview:
Danya Kukafka is a graduate of New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She currently works as an assistant editor at Riverhead Books. Girl in Snow, due to be published in August by Simon & Schuster, is her first novel.
You began writing novels when you were just 16. What is different about this, your first to be published?
I was writing pretty straight YA before. I wrote my first full novel--it was very bad--for a 10th grade project, and I gave it to my mom for Mother's Day. And she said, "Honey, this is about a dead girl!" And after that I dabbled in some Peter Pan fan fiction, and then I wrote a paranormal YA novel when I was in college that was rejected by about a billion agents. And then after that I decided to go a little bit older. When I first wrote this book, I thought it was a YA novel until someone told me that it was not. So, I think as I got older my writing sort of naturally got older, too.
I had read a lot of straight YA when I was in high school, and a lot of it deals in the paranormal. One of my favorite series is Meg Cabot's Mediator series. It's about a girl who can talk to a ghost. I loved those books, and I took a lot of what I thought paranormal books could do from that. But I've definitely moved away from that, probably for good. I'm happy that this is the one that caught. Looking back, I'm glad it wasn't those earlier ones that published.
How did you choose this setting in (fictional) small-town Colorado?
I grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado. It's actually not a small town, it's a pretty large city; but surrounding it are all these really small suburban enclaves, and I think they're really interesting. They're so insular. And the landscape of that part of Colorado is also really interesting to me. It's the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, so you have these huge mountains looming over you, and to the other side you have open plains. You're just kind of tucked into the base right there.
Why three characters' voices? Did they all come to you at once, or did one come later than the others?
Oh, this is a good one. No, they did not. The first character that I had was Cameron, and I thought the book was only Cameron's book, when I started it. I wrote an entire draft of only Cameron, but I could not get to the end. None of the endings made sense, and I couldn't figure out what to do. I was taking a writing class at NYU with Colson Whitehead, and there was a story that I had written, that had a very, very early version of Jade's voice. It came out really naturally, and everyone in the class really liked it, and I sort of thought, well, what if there's a way to fit her into the story? So I had this draft, a full draft of the novel, and I went back and I wrote all of Jade's chapters into that draft in about six months. And I had what I thought was a YA novel in my hands. But then I signed with my agent, Dana Murphy at the Book Group, and she said, this is not a YA book. This is adult writing and about adult themes, so let's write in an adult perspective. (It was also very short.) So that was where Russ came in. We sort of thought up Russ together. And it was amazing how much he opened up the book for me: it felt so much bigger and richer and more expansive. But... I wouldn't do it that way again.
Why not?
Since I had basically fleshed out the whole plot from one perspective, it was actually pretty easy to go in and add these people in terms of structure, because I already had the opening and the middle and the end. I knew generally what needed to happen. So it was actually really fun to go in and find out the little ways I could put these characters into the world that I had built. It was definitely messy for a while, but at the same time I always knew that it was making this world bigger, which I really liked. But it was very accidental and--well, maybe I will end up doing it this way again! But I hope to go into it with a little more intention and a little more knowledge next time.
Do you have a favorite among the three protagonists?
Cameron has to be my favorite. He's the little dude of my heart, my little brain child. I love Jade for many other reasons--I loved writing Jade because she's so angsty and such a teenager, and that was really fun to write. And as Russ came along I got to be more of a grown-up, which I also really enjoyed. But yeah, my favorite's Cameron and I won't hesitate to say it. Sorry, guys.
How has your day job (as an assistant editor at Riverhead Books) affected your writing?
I think I've become much harder on myself, which is a good thing. Also, I'm reading all the time, which is really good for my muscles, I guess. Just being able to read other people's work as it's coming in, and see how even really successful and amazing authors need revision--that's been really inspiring for me, because I realize that everyone goes through this kind of horrible process of writing a book. But I've also had a really great experience learning to discern what stories I find necessary and interesting. Working for an editor and as an editor has helped me become pickier as a reader and a writer. Of course, I also find it a little bit scary sometimes, just seeing the volume of amazing work that is out there and knowing that you're going to have to fit into it somewhere.
And what's next?
I'm working on a new novel. I can't say much about it yet but I will say it's going to be set in upstate New York, about a family. I'm working on a draft, it's messy right now, but it's been really freeing to start something new and be out of the story I've been with for so long. I can play around now. I can do something totally different. --Julia Jenkins
Scott Butki
August 3, 2017
Interview
MysteryPeople Q&A with Danya Kukafka
August 3, 2017 mysterypeopleblogLeave a comment
Danya Kukafka’s Girl In Snow is an impressive debut, especially when you consider she was only 19 when she began the novel while at NYU and 24 when she finished it.The thriller, set in a small suburb of Broomsville, Colorado, begins with the discovery of the dead body of Lucinda Hayes, a popular high school freshman.
Suspicion immediately falls on Cameron, a boy known to be fascinated by her and to follow her around. Cameron also has erratic behavior and sometimes can’t remember important details. We all know Cameron can’t have done it because it’d just be too predictable…. But who did?
The book shifts from the perspective of Cameron to Jade, who went to school with Cameron and Lucinda and may know secrets about both folks, and Russ, a police officer who had a close relationship with his former partner, Cameron’s father. Cameron’s dad left the police, his family and the town during some suspicious circumstances, which may tie in to the town’s recent murder…
• Interview by MysteryPeople Contributor Scott Butki
Scott Butki: How did you come up with this story?
Danya Kukafka: This book began with the idea for Cameron’s character. I had just read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and also The Virgin Suicides, and I took so much from these books about tone and perspective. I started to wonder—what happens if you have a young boy who truly does not know if he has killed someone? Can you find it in yourself to love him anyway?
SB: Why did you want to, to quote the back of your book, “investigate the razor-sharp line between love and obsession, between watching and seeing, between truth and memory”?
DK: This is such an interesting topic for me—love vs. obsession. Especially in adolescent lives, the line between the two can become blurry, even dangerous. At that age, we feel so much, and in some sense we’re unable to distinguish what is true and what is not when it comes to our feelings, romantic and otherwise. It’s so volatile!
SB: What do you say to those marveling at such a mature novel written by a 24-year-old? And that you began it while just 19?
DK: Oh, people have been very kind about this. Some assume that I got lucky on my first try—which isn’t quite true. I wrote a young adult novel before Girl in Snow that was rejected by dozens of literary agents. So I am always very grateful.
SB: How did you go about researching this book?
DK: At first I didn’t research it, which was a terrible idea. My editor’s initial notes sort of said, “I don’t think this is how police systems work. Have you talked to any officers?” And I hadn’t! So I did the research far too late— I spoke with police officers from my hometown in Colorado about procedure and ways to get around it—then I had to go back in and rewrite all those details. I did do some research on childhood psychopathy, though, and mental disorders that people can mistake for psychopathy.
SB: What character do you most identify with and how?
DK: I probably identify most honestly with Jade, and her specific brand of teenage angst. I went through a phase in middle school where I wore fishnet sleeves and begged my parents for a skateboard and listened to a lot of Green Day. It was really fun to pull some of Jade’s character traits from this time in my life.
SB: In this book are you trying to say something about perceptions?
DK: I am— what we see is not necessarily true, especially now that social media exists. I set the book specifically in 2005, when perceptions in a small community were still based on what you physically saw about other people, in your world, every day. And even then, there is so much we can never know about the inner lives of the people around us.
SB: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
DK: There are varying levels of good and of evil, and nothing is black and white. None of us are “normal.” And— even once we understand that we’ll never know how it feels to be someone else— human connections still matter.
SB: To readers hearing about this book the topics may sound dark, deterring some. What would you say to readers wondering just how dark this may get?
DK: It gets pretty dark, yes, but not devastatingly so. It’s not gratuitous. I like to think I’ve been kind to all of my characters!
SB: What do you wish interviewers would ask you? Here’s your chance to ask and answer it.
DK: No one has asked yet about my immigrant characters, Ivan and Ines— I wanted to talk frankly about power, about race and social status, especially from what I observed growing up as part of a small majority-white community in the suburban Mid-west. It certainly was not easy to write about, but I tried to do so carefully because I wanted to recognize that privilege can make you blind to a certain type of domestic atrocity (as seen in the imbalanced relationship Russ and Ines have). I wanted to give Ivan and Ines power, and also to acknowledge how much harder it is for them to gain it.
SB: What’s next for you?
DK: Another novel! Eventually.
Dani Hedlund
August 1, 2017
An Interview with Danya Kukafka
by Dani Hedlund
DunyaWhat inspired you to write Girl in Snow?
There was no bolt of lightning—I was mostly inspired by things that I was touching. I loved the book The Perks of Being A Wallflower, which I was reading around the time I came up with the idea for Girl in Snow, because I thought it did such a great job of creating the voice of a troubled yet sympathetic teenager. The main character is messed up, but you understand why and you feel for him. Around the same time that I read that book, I had watched an episode of some show, Law and Order maybe, where there was a murder, and the person who committed the murder genuinely did not remember doing it. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve seen. Those two sources combined to create the character Cameron for me. I built the storyline around him and the idea that he could have done something terrible without knowing it, in the hope that the reader could still feel sad for him.
Girl in SnowI’m very interested in the structure of this book. You have three narratives: two in third person, and one in first person, with random interjections that the character would like to say but can’t. How did all those voices come together?
The story is told from the perspective of three characters: Cameron, Jade, and Russ. At first, I wrote the entire novel from Cameron’s perspective, but I could not find a reasonable way for the book to end. Around the same time, I had written a short story for a class at NYU. The story was well-received, and the character in that story was an early version of Jade, a teenage girl who is in love with this boy she’s known her whole life. I decided to try adding her in, and once I did that, it really opened up the whole story. I was finally able to have enough characters to get to an ending that made sense. Russ was the last character to come in, and I devised him with my agent. The book was very short, and my agent wanted to make sure that I was not publishing a YA book. She felt strongly that this was an adult novel and that an adult perspective was important. I’m very thankful that she pushed for Russ because his inclusion opened the story up even further. He was really fun and surprisingly easy to write in the sense that I felt like there was something missing. His inclusion made the book richer and more textured.
I’m always fascinated by the tenuous line between YA and other genres. I’m constantly reading really dark books in which very dark things happen, but all of the characters are under the age of 25, so it’s considered YA. I look at the publisher and think, “You’ve got to be kidding me. These people are eating each other.”
I have some fourteen-year-old cousins, and my grandma asked me, “Do you think they could read your book?” My honest answer was, “I don’t know.” That’s a really interesting line because my cousins are very smart, very mature readers, but I realized that I had not intended it for a fourteen-year-old audience. I had intended it for an adult audience.
There’s a lusciousness to your prose. It’s very literary, and I was intrigued by seeing that style bleed into a “murder mystery” book. What was it like to pay such close attention to narrative detail while writing in a genre that tends to cultivate a quick, easy reading experience?
I was aware of the genre that I was writing in, and I was aware that I wanted to do something different with it. I really intentionally messed with form, and wondered how I could do it differently. Jade’s screenplays are a good example of that. It’s been interesting to see whether people read it as a murder mystery or whether they hoped to read it as a murder mystery and were disappointed because it doesn’t flow like a thriller. Or whether they found something more in it, which was of course, my goal.
As a character, Cameron is fascinated by the little things, the details of living that aren’t very perceptible. You do a beautiful job conveying his worldview. Did you find yourself meticulously studying people’s actions in order to write this character correctly?
Initially, Cameron had many more tics that I ended up taking out with my editor because we felt there were too many. He had a real fascination with birds at one point and he made all kinds of lists. Cameron has a way of categorizing things and seeing them through an artist’s lens, but also a really boxed lens. He’s just trying to understand how he can perceive the world, and himself. I settled on his fascination with the human body, and I’m very happy that I did. He’s an artist, so that choice made a lot of sense. I’ve dabbled in art and drawing before, and it is by no means my thing, but it helped me to understand how he might see the world in that way.
I’m curious about the timeline. This book takes place in 2004-2005. Why set it back more than a decade?
I was a teenager during that time, so I remember what it was like to not be on social media when you’re in junior high. Well, I had a secret MySpace page that my parents didn’t know about. I was such a rebel. Actually, the decision to set it in that time frame came from thinking about how differently teenagers now must live. They’re on Instagram, they’re on Snapchat. They have all these ways to communicate who they are to each other, and back in 2005, that was sort of coming to the forefront. We were dabbling in it, but we didn’t have the tools for it yet. Facebook didn’t even exist then. It was a really interesting time to be fourteen or fifteen. I remember specifically having a cell phone that could only send or receive 50 texts per month. It’s so different from how things look now. I wanted to give my characters that sense of freedom. Especially since the book is so much about what you see versus what you think you see versus what is real, that I didn’t want to add the extra layer of social media in. Plus, I don’t know how it looks for fourteen-year-olds now. I don’t think I would have been able to communicate in their language.
I’m interested in why you chose this fourteen to fifteen-year-old range for your characters. Most novels like this feature characters who are a little older—characters who can drive, who have a bit more freedom in that sense. Why did you choose this earlier age?
It’s so interesting being on the cusp of being a teenager but not actually being there yet. Cameron and Lucinda are high school freshmen, and Jade is seventeen. Jade has a little more knowledge of what it’s like to be a person. She’s almost out of high school and has to think about what comes next. Cameron’s not even there yet, and he still has to figure out if he’s a child or an adult. That comes into play a lot when he’s thinking about his obsessions and this girl who died who he may or may not have loved. I think it’s a really volatile age, and that teenagers in books should be treated like real people more often, because they are. Their feelings are much more intense than our grown-up feelings. I think we all kind of dull out as we age, and teenagers have the most intense spark.
The press copy tells me that you started writing this when you were nineteen. Tell me what the last five years have been like for you with this book.
Each of the five have been very different from each other. I started this book when I was in college at NYU. I remember starting it in a dorm room, and working on it that summer while I was waitressing in the city. I kept workshopping little bits of it during undergrad, but it was hard to find classes in undergrad that wanted to work on a novel. I took one class that was really wonderful with an editor at Holt named Barbara Jones, and she taught specifically a novel writing class. I gave her the first thirty pages of this book, and she was so encouraging. She’s probably the reason I finished it.
I had finished a really messy draft by the time I was out of college, but after school I moved briefly to upstate New York. I was working as a diner waitress for about six months, and that’s when I added Jade’s chapters, and finished the first real draft of the book. Since then I’ve been working as an editor at Riverhead, so I’ve been working full time and writing. I wrote all of Russ’s character and did all of my revisions while I was at my job.
How has being an editor—working on the publishing side of things—changed the way that you write?
It’s changed a lot, in a very good way. The combination works well for me in the sense that I am much harder on myself. I see how much work goes into every single book that comes out, and that has been really encouraging for me. That has also really helped me to put in the work on my own in the sense that when I’m writing, I’m not thinking, “Oh, this is going to be published.” I’m thinking, “This is going to be thrown out and re-written twenty more times.” I know that going into it, which makes the writing process a lot less frustrating.
Obviously, as an editor, sales and marketing are a huge part of your job. You have to consider what demographics will read what content—whether or not a story will be marketable. Being both an editor and a writer, do sales and marketing influence the way that you write, or do you try to shove those thoughts away?
It probably does influence the way that I write, but I try to shove it away. I try to think more about the specific reader than the market. As an editor, my job is to fall in love with a book, and my goal when I’m writing is to make someone feel that way as well. Whether that’s because of the content or the sales angle or whatever, I try to let all of that go and just write something compelling that will keep people reading all the way through. I imagine an editor sitting at their desk, trying to ignore Twitter on the screen next to them, and really losing themselves in my book. That’s what I hope for.
In his book On Writing, Stephen King always talks about the ideal reader, the kind of person that he thinks will most love his book. What kind of person do you think this book will really touch?
Hopefully, people in my age demographic. I think there’s a certain nostalgia for adolescence in a sense. We all want to let it go, but we’re not that far away from it. When you’re learning how to be a person in the world, it’s easier to remember your roots when you’re closer to them.
I also hope that the general mystery readership will come to the book. The people who like big thrillers. That’s women of all ages, and some men too, I hope. We’ll see.
Do you only dabble in long form? Do you do short work? What is your writerly spectrum?
I’m very committed to long form. I’ve tried to write short stories, and I’ve kind of succeeded at it sometimes, but my heart is really in the novel. I really struggle with short form, and nonfiction is a mess for me. So just novels, at least for now.
What are you working on now?
I can’t say too much about it, but it is another novel. Everyone has told me that second novels are hard, but I’m decently through a really messy draft. It feels really good to be doing something new.
How does writing your first book over those five years of angst compare to this second book?
I feel much less alone in it. I work closely with my agent, and my editor. I have a lot of really smart readers who have read my past work. I also feel like it will be interesting to see how the process changes once my first book actually comes out. I also want to take my time with the next book because I know it’s important for the writer to do as much work as possible before you get other people involved. I’m really hoping to put as much of myself into it as I can before I bring it out to anybody else.
I have a writer friend who marks the success of his books by whether or not he was able to embody a single idea and relay it successfully to the reader. What’s the one thing you really wanted to say with this book?
The idea I was trying to explore was whether you can do a bad thing, but still be a good person. That’s really where Cameron’s character originated for me. If someone does a terrible thing, do they know that they are committing a crime, and if so, how do they grapple with that? I hope that, whether Cameron committed the crime or not, the reader can still love him anyway.
Spirituality & religion
Sandra Collins and James Wetherbee
Library Journal. 142.10 (June 1, 2017): p88+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
[...]
Kukafka, Danya. Girl in Snow. S. & S. Aug. 2017. 368p. ISBN 9781501144370. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781501144394. F
Newcomer Kukafka breathes new life into a common mystery trope by examining the life and death of 15-year-old Lucinda Hayes through the eyes of three residents of Broomsville, CO. Cameron, the disturbed son of a disgraced cop who abandoned his family, loved Lucinda from afar, often standing vigil outside her bedroom window. Jade, Lucinda's cynical classmate, hated her for stealing her babysitting gig and her best friend. Local cop Russ promised his former partner, Cameron's dad, that he'd look out for Cameron. But what if Cameron killed the girl? In alternating chapters, the characters harbor guilty secrets and reflect on Lucinda's impact on their lives. Mystery fans will most likely figure out whodunit rather quickly, but that's not the main point of this novel. Literary fiction readers will enjoy the occasionally overblown yet often effective language and layered characterizations. Jade's chapters, written in first person, contain "screenplays" (she's a budding writer) that overplay the teen angst angle. VERDICT This <
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Collins, Sandra, and James Wetherbee. "Spirituality & religion." Library Journal, 1 June 2017, p. 88+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494891734/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=165b30ca. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494891734
Girl in Snow
Danya Kukafka
California Bookwatch.
(Sept. 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Girl in Snow
Danya Kukafka
Simon and Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas, 14th fl., New York, NY 10020
9781501144370, $26.00, www.simonandschuster.com
Girl in Snow is a thriller set in a small Colorado town and tells of high school freshman Lucinda, who is
found dead in a playground. Her murder leads to accusations, questions, a loner's odd behavior which would
seem to indicate his guilt, and long-held secrets that may have led to her death. Officer Russ Fletcher is
charged with solving a case that would seem to involve his ex-partner's son, and his efforts to solve the
puzzle will lead to his own challenges in this engrossing story.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kukafka, Danya. "Girl in
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Girl in Snow
Publishers Weekly.
264.23 (June 5, 2017): p26.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Girl in Snow
Danya Kukafka. Simon & Schuster, $26
(368p) ISBN 978-1-5011-4437-0
Kukafka's debut is set in 2005, unspooling in the days after 15-year-old Lucinda Hayes is found murdered at
a playground in her Colorado suburb. Suspicion immediately falls on Cameron Whitley, an artsy loner who
spends his nights wandering the neighborhood, watching Lucinda and her family from their front yard. But
there are other suspects, too, like Ivan, the ex-con school janitor, and Zap, Lucinda's ex-boyfriend.
Consisting of alternating chapters following Cameron; officer Russ Fletcher, who was once work partners
with Cameron's estranged policeman father; and Jade Dixon-Burns, a gloomy teen dabbling in the occult
and aspiring to be a writer, the novel digs into each character's history while offering up a fair number of red
herrings regarding the identity of the murderer. These histories occasionally distract from the mystery of
Lucinda's killer, yet Kukafka's clever narrative tricks, like Jade's tendency to imagine conversations in the
form of screenplays and Cameron's inability to remember large swaths of time around the murder, propel
the narrative forward. And while the novel employs a full checklist of teen tropes throughout, from abusive
parents to fractured love triangles, <
until the end. Agent: Dana Murphy, the Book Group. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Girl in Snow." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 26. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538293/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b88748e3.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495538293
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Kukafka, Danya: GIRL IN SNOW
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kukafka, Danya GIRL IN SNOW Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 1 ISBN: 978-1-5011-4437-0
When lovely 15-year-old Lucinda Hayes is murdered on a playground in a placid Colorado town, the prime
suspect is one of her classmates.The first of three narrators in Kukafka's debut is the perhaps mentally ill
ninth-grader Cameron Whitley. Utterly obsessed with Lucinda, for years he has spent all his time stalking
her, drawing her, and thinking about her. He saw her the night of her death, and now he somehow has her
purple suede diary, which he puts in his closet along with his Collection of the Pencil Bodies, his Collection
of People Who Did Terrible Things, and others. "The only one hidden in his head was the Collection of
Statue Nights"--his peeping-Tom forays--"this was his favorite Collection, because it was full of Lucinda."
Well, we readers weren't born yesterday, so clearly it's not him. The second narrative perspective belongs to
another classmate, Jade, who hates Lucinda for all the reasons any overweight, unhappy, smart teen with an
abusive drunk for a mother would hate the most popular girl in school and her Norman Rockwell family.
Hopefully that voodoo ritual she performed didn't actually work. Third narrator: a cop named Russ, who is
obsessed with Cameron's dad, his former partner, not around anymore for some ominous reason which is
withheld from the reader for far too long considering it turns out to be irrelevant. Though section titles
indicate that the bulk of the action happens over a three-day period, with a denouement weeks later, it feels
like much longer. Once you've got a murder mystery plot, you can only spend so much time inside people's
heads, going over the same ground. This 24-year-old writer needs <
We'll be watching.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kukafka, Danya: GIRL IN SNOW." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329358/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4b9772a1.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329358
D.R. Meredith
"Kukafka eloquently describes the self-destruction that ensues by allowing others to define us."
Not a mystery nor a thriller in the classical sense, Girl in Snow, Danya Kukafka’s debut novel, focuses less on the search for the murderer of high-school student Lucinda Hayes, as it does on the reactions of three dissimilar individuals to Lucinda alive as well as Lucinda, murder victim.
When fifteen-year-old Cameron Whitley learns of Lucinda’s death he “thought of her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs.”
Cameron draws and paints almost obsessively, and Lucinda is frequently his subject. Not that Lucinda ever purposefully posed for Cameron, but he watched her without being observed, mostly at night.
“Cameron had started playing Statue Nights when he was twelve years old.” That is when he discovers he can push out the window screen in his bedroom and sneak out at night. Standing perfectly still like a statue he watches his neighbors: the Hansens next door, the Thorntons down the block, but most all he watches Lucinda. As long as he stands without moving he believes no one sees him.
Cameron does not consider his Statue Nights to be stalking. “Cameron hated the word stalk. He had other words for his relationship with Lucinda, but they were words no one else would understand.”
Lucinda’s father doesn’t understand. One night he warns Cameron: “I know you don’t mean harm. But you need to leave. If you come back, I will call the police.”
Cameron knows he cannot tell the police about his Statue Nights, but he can’t lie either, because he is a terrible liar. “. . . he found people fascinating when they thought no one was watching.”
What frightens Cameron the most is that he can’t remember the night Lucinda was murdered, but he drew a picture of her dead.
Jade Dixon-Burns is a classmate of Lucinda’s, although Jade’s standing on the high-school food chain is the polar opposite of Lucinda’s. Jade is overweight, with greasy black hair, body piercing, and a fake tattoo she draws on her arm every morning. She is writing a screenplay in which she records conversations with others as she wishes they had occurred but didn’t.
Jade hates Lucinda because the popular girl had dated Jade’s best male friend, Zap, and effectively ended the outcast’s friendship with the boy she believes she loves. She and Zap have been companions since childhood, but Zap as a popular boy is subjected to ridicule for his relationship with Jade.
Jade also blames Lucinda for taking away her babysitting job with the Thorntons, forcing her take a part-time job as a maid at a local hot sheet motel. She observes a young Mexican woman named Querida who meets a man every week for an hour or so at the motel. “. . . how does it feel to be loved like that? Like you and the guy upstairs?” asks Jade one night.
Jade really wants to know, but Querida doesn’t have an answer. Neither does Jade because as Cameron observes “she is always alone.”
So strong is Jade’s hate for Lucinda that she cast a spell she found in a library book on witchcraft. It is supposed to bring misfortune or death, but Jade knows her spell did not murder Lucinda. But someone did. “For the first time, I wonder if I’ve spoken with him—Lucinda’s killer, whoever he is. If I’ve sat across from him and had casual conversations, both of us ignorant to the dark in each other.”
The third person on whom Lucinda’s murder has an impact, awakening memories he would not remember is Russ Fletcher, a police officer in the Bloomsville, Colorado, police department. Russ is assigned to investigate the murder, but he is more concerned about his relationship with Cameron Whitley, the son of his former partner.
“Even the sound of Cameron’s name brings Russ places he’d rather not go The name said aloud: Whitley.” Lee Whitley, Cameron’s father, Russ’s old partner, who vanishes immediately after he is found not guilty of assault by a jury of his peers, but not before asking Russ to look after his son.
No, Russ does not want to remember Lee Whitley for a number of reasons, yet here he is investigating a murder that may have been committed by Lee’s son. All of his secrets are pushing outward from his mind, threatening his peace of mind.
Girl in Snow explores individual identity as seen by others as well as one’s self. Kukafka eloquently describes the self-destruction that ensues by allowing others to define us. Cameron, damaged by his father’s trial and his subsequent abandonment of his wife and son, becomes obsessed with watching others to learn of their secret lives. Jade, who happens to be a gifted writer, allows others to define her as an unattractive, unloved loner. Russ, who refuses to recognize or admit his own feelings, allows his fellow officers and others to pressure him into denying who he is.
Although Kukafka describes her setting in meticulous detail, it is the least successful part of her narrative. It doesn’t have quite the ring of authenticity one expects. The author is very successful at describing the interior lives of Cameron, Jade, and Russ.
Although Cameron’s and Jade’s self-reflections are more verbally detailed (and eloquent) than what one expects of the average teenager, <
Girl in Snow is <