Kayla Olson's new young adult novel is The Sandcastle Empire.From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you create the world you describe in The Sandcastle Empire?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I created The Sandcastle Empire’s world by doing a lot of research, and by asking a lot of what if?
As far as the research goes, I stumbled upon an article similar to this one about how U.S. communities will face chronic flooding as sea levels rise, and started following the idea down a path of, well, how would those environmental changes affect the people who live in those areas? How would the ripples of those changes then spread into the rest of the country—and beyond?
It was the first time I’d thought about environmental change through the lens of what could happen in our world when sea level rise hits a tipping point, from a social standpoint, as opposed to simply how do we reverse environmental change, or prevent it from happening at all?
Aside from questions of those sorts, I watched numerous...[read on]