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Miller wrote for the 12-year-old she once was
Attention regular readers of The Sylva Herald: We have another member of the Smoky Mountain High School Class of 1990 who is achieving national recognition.
First-time author Kirsten Miller, whose debut novel “Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City” (see related story on page 1C) is winning rave reviews on the young adult literature circuit, is a member of the same Mustang class that produced former Homeland Security Advisory Council Director Dan Ostergaard and 1993 Jeopardy! College Tournament Champion Phoebe Juel, who returned to the popular game show last year for its Tournament of Champions.
Alert former classmates should not think us guilty of a typo with regard to Miller’s first name. If you remember her as “Kristen,” you are correct. The mistake was made on some college form or other when two letters in Miller’s first name were transposed. She decided she liked the alternate version so well that she began calling herself Kirsten Miller and decided to use that name professionally.
“It’s actually quite useful,” she said during an e-mail interview. “I always know whether someone’s contacting me for business or pleasure based on what name they use.”
Miller’s main character in her suspense-filled book also bears a derivative of her name. “Kiki” is a somewhat ironic nickname a friend bestowed on her.
“I didn’t have what (my friend) considered a ‘Kiki’ personality,” she said.
Miller describes herself as more similar to her novel’s narrator, Ananka Fishbein, than to the mysterious title character.
“As much as I would love to be like Kiki Strike, I’ve never been that cool,” Miller said. “Ananka and I are both bookish (not to mention a little strange), and we share a love of the same subjects – giant squid, carnivorous plants and New York history, to name a few.”
While she was an English major at Barnard, Miller didn’t set out to be an author. Instead, she stayed in New York after college and pursued a career in advertising.
“As for Kiki Strike, the book started as a way to amuse myself,” she said. “I’ve always written, but I’d never attempted to have anything published.”
All that changed after Miller showed the first few chapters to a friend who knew an editor at Bloomsbury. “No one was more surprised than I was when Bloomsbury bought the book long before it was finished,” said Miller, who spent a little more than two years writing the book while working full time at a job where “full time” can mean 12-plus hours a day.
The title character was in Miller’s head for quite awhile before she actually began writing Kiki’s story, she said.
“I was fascinated by the idea of a girl mastermind whose goal is to be ‘dangerous,’” Miller said. “I read countless adventure books when I was a kid, and I was disappointed to find that the girls in the stories were usually the ones getting rescued rather than the ones doing the rescuing. Either that or the books were of the Nancy Drew variety – good reads but a little too prim and proper for my taste.”
According to Miller, she sees “Kiki Strike” as a “book with girls in it – not necessarily a book for girls.”
While she had a heroine, Miller lacked a story until one day she read in the newspaper about the front yard of a nursing home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side collapsing during the night. When officials arrived, they found a room 30 feet underground with tables and chairs set up as if waiting for visitors to arrive.
“Eventually it was discovered that the room had been the hidden sub-basement of a building that had once stood on the site,” Miller said. “Apparently, the room was so well hidden that, by the 1920s, it was completely forgotten. When the building was razed to build the nursing home, no one thought to destroy it.”
After finding out about one hidden chamber, Miller said she was “quite keen” to discover what else might be under the city.
“After a great deal of research, I learned that New York is riddled with hidden rooms and tunnels. Some are even still in use,” she said. “Chinatown, which has taken over the neighborhood that was known in the 19th century as the Five Points slum, is practically hollow. This real underground world beneath New York inspired the fictional ‘Shadow City.’”
Miller said she’s long been interested in the history and hidden corners of the city that’s been her home for 16 years and had a fair amount of knowledge to incorporate into the book.
“I tried to paint a portrait of New York that was both magical but real,” she said. “I wanted kids to feel like they could visit the places mentioned in the book and be drawn into the same sorts of adventures. In fact, most of the bizarre locations in the book actually exist – there are tunnels under Manhattan, there is a castle in the middle of the Hudson River, and there are ‘hidden houses’ throughout Greenwich Village. I was very careful to always keep one foot in reality.”
The Cafe leaked a copy of “KiKi Strike” to the youngest adult available this past weekend – 24-year-old Elizabeth Hotaling.
“I liked it a lot,” Elizabeth said. “It felt so real I had to keep reminding myself it was fiction.”
The girls in Miller’s story are up-to-date when it comes to technology – they all have cell phones and are as familiar with cyberspace as with the subterranean world that’s the site of their adventures, Elizabeth said.
While Elizabeth has always enjoyed all books, whether set in the present or past, she thought “Kiki Strike’s” contemporary feel might encourage less eager teens to pick up a book and read.
If that’s the case, Miller, who will read and sign books at City Lights this weekend, will likely be pleased.
“I wrote ‘Kiki Strike’ for the 12-year-old I once was, and now I have the opportunity to introduce it to kids in my own hometown,” said Miller. “It’s a wonderful feeling.”
Miller will be at City Lights Friday, Sept. 22, at 7:30 p.m.
“I’m thrilled that City Lights has invited me to read,” she said. “I spent a great deal of time in the store when I was in high school. And I’m extremely proud to be one of the many authors who’ve come from the Sylva area.”
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