美国国家公共电台 NPR In 'Queen Of The Sea,' The Story Rides On Goatback（在线收听）

In 'Queen Of The Sea,' The Story Rides On Goatback

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Cartoonist Dylan Meconis has set her new book, "Queen Of The Sea," in a convent on a tiny island somewhere off the coast of a country that could be Tudor England but isn't, not quite. The story plays out in a mysterious, possibly magical alternate world just a few degrees off what you might have learned in history class. But it's packed with intricate, well-researched details. NPR books editor Petra Mayer caught up with Meconis in San Diego at this year's Comic-Con between panels and signing sessions.

DYLAN MECONIS: You're the winner in my mind.

PETRA MAYER, BYLINE: So the first thing you should know about "Queen Of The Sea" is that goats are very important...

MECONIS: It's about a young girl named Margaret. She's 11 years old, and she is growing up on an isolated island convent and secrets are revealed, unknown identities are uncovered, unlikely friendships are forged. There are a lot of goats.

MAYER: ...Because while the book is only loosely based on actual history, Meconis says she really wanted to get the concrete details of everyday life right. And the nuns in Margaret's convent keep goats.

MECONIS: So I had to look up what breeds of goat would have been native to England and to Scotland and to the Scottish islands so that I did not put in, like, a Nubian goat that only arrived in the 18th century. It was really fun looking around all these nerdy, like, historical goat breed websites (laughter).

MAYER: Meconis says she's drawn to history because historical details make great building blocks for a fictional world.

MECONIS: It's very solid, and it feels very real because it was. But it's also so hidden from view if you study the metahistory like we all do in high school and college.

MAYER: In school, we learned names and dates, 1066 and all that, but not, say, what kind of goat a 16th-century nun would raise or what its coat would feel like under your hand.

MECONIS: For me, it's really delightful to find those details rather than just totally inventing them on my own.

MAYER: Some of the details in "Queen Of The Sea" are a mix of real life and invention. For example, nuns and monks of that era kept silent most of the time. So how did they do something as mundane as ask for the salt at dinner?

MECONIS: Some monks developed this really elaborate sign language for the dinner table so they could say things like pass the salt or this fish is terrible. And we still have records of what some of those gestures were. So I took a bunch of those and had the nuns in this story use them. And I have my - my little main character Margaret is very familiar with them, and she gets to teach some new people the sign language. And some of them I invented on my own. But others are totally real.

MAYER: At one meal, Margaret teaches a new friend to put her fingers to her face and wiggle her nose like a mouse to ask for cheese.

MECONIS: I think I made that one up. The stuff for, like, salt and vinegar and fish, those are all genuine

MAYER: Meconis says she unearths a lot of those details online in high-resolution scans of original documents.

MECONIS: And being able to, like, zoom in on, you know, a single letter of Queen Elizabeth's youthful handwriting is really - it's a wild thing, and that's not something that even 15 years ago would really have been as possible to this extent.

MAYER: The best stories, she says, are inspired by something real.

MECONIS: And for me, there's so much joy in that treasure hunt of historical research and using it as a platform or as a setting for, you know, more intimate human stories is just really - it hits a perfect chord for me.

MAYER: And if those little historical details, the table signs and the right kind of goat fur, inspire readers to go off on their own voyages of discovery, so much the better.

MECONIS: If I trick somebody into getting a history degree with this book (laughter), I'll be so happy.

MAYER: Petra Mayer, NPR News, San Diego.