“Russ just opened it up even more and pushed it fully into the adult sphere.” But Kukafka still hadn’t solved the murder. “It became a novel once I added Jade in,” she said. 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.Ī 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. Put another way: How far can a writer stretch her reader’s empathy before it fractures?Īn 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. 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. 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. When she began writing this story five years ago, Danya Kukafka was 19 and finishing up her sophomore year at New York University.

And the night in question, well, Cameron has blocked it out. 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. Cameron Whitley doesn’t know if he killed Lucinda Hayes.

Kukafka danya