Engaging teen readers with a terrible future
Whether she’s writing about the lavish Manhattan parties of powerful fallen angels or in the mind of a young blackjack dealer in post- apocalyptic New Vegas, Melissa de la Cruz’s bestselling young adult fiction tackles questions of family, lineage and inheritance without skimping on magic, dystopia and myth. I spoke with her by phone from her home in California. This interview has been edited; it appears in longer form online at www. latimes. com/ books. You were born in the Philippines and live in Southern California, but have recently written about post- apocalyptic Las Vegas.
I’ve been going to Las Vegas since I was 7 years old. My book “Frozen” is set there, and it was kind of fun to imagine a worse- than- terrible future; it’s commentary on how we’re living now, what we’re eating now and what we’re doing with our trash — what if the world was covered in our garbage? Young adult readers are interested in that; it’s their future, and when we did the book tour they were interested in those environmental issues — they got it.
I liked writing from a boy’s point of view — I wanted to write about a couple that was equal, where the boy was as strong as the girl, they really complemented each other, and because I wrote this book with my husband, in a way it was a little bit about what we thought partnership should be. We wanted to show a love story that was a lot more equal instead of an all- powerful vampire boy and the young, weak human girl … not that there’s anything wrong with that, but those aren’t the stories that I get excited by. I’ve never been excited by the Cinderella story, and I like Jane Austen, but I wonder why Elizabeth can’t have what she wants without having to marry Mr. Darcy. I wanted to write what romance was like for me — I was a little burned out, and I wanted to get into fantasy and science fiction.