Kristin Cashore's marvelous new fantasy features a killer with a heart of gold

When readers of Graceling first meet Katsa, she's working as a hit man for her ruthless uncle, King Randa. That reminds me of the Corleone family, in The Godfather. That might have been my Sicilian roots coming out. My mother's family is a Sicilian family. So we like to joke about the Mafia now and then. You use the word "grace" to describe a tremendous talent or gift for doing things, like swimming or cooking or in Katsa's case, fighting. Is that a holdover from your Catholic upbringing? You caught me. It's so funny because I love reading fantasy novels. But one of the things I've never really liked about them is when they try to incorporate some kind of religion. I've never been comfortable with the spirit worlds that other writers make up. When I approached this book, I intentionally wanted to create a world with no religion. So what did I do when I was looking for the names of these gifts? I called them graces and didn't even realize what I had done until, literally, a year after I had written the book. You know, you can take the girl out of the church, but you can't take the church out of the girl.

Photograph by Jensen Hande

When Katsa was eight, she discovered her gift after accidentally killing a man who was making sexual advances. When you began working on the story, did you expect that to happen? I knew early on that she would kill somebody, but I didn't know it was because of a sexual threat. From the very beginning, I had this female character who was tough and who could defend herself from any threat physically. Also, in my mind there was always the Po character, who she fought with—and not just physically, but quarreled with and had real emotional problems with and just tons of tension with. Before you became a writer, what were you planning to do? I had thought about going to library school or getting a Ph.D. in English. What actually happened was that I was working as a legal assistant in New York and researching different grad school possibilities, and I stumbled across the Simmons program in children's literature. I read a description of one of their courses in young adult contemporary literature, and it talked about Catcher in the Rye and Cynthia Voigt and all these books and authors. I knew I had to go there. When I called my mother to tell her, she said, "This is the most impractical decision you could ever make. You know, what can you do with that degree?" But I didn't care. How could I not do it? And I wouldn't have written Graceling if it weren't for the Simmons program. Even though Graceling is your first book, it received tons of prepublication buzz. I absolutely did not expect that. I kept telling people, "Will you stop being so excited? It hasn't even come out yet." This book could tank, and everyone's acting like ohhhh! What have you heard from young readers? My publisher got a letter from a librarian who wrote about an 11-year-old girl who snatched the book off her desk. The girl came back a couple days later with this rapturous look on her face and said, "This book is really, really, really, really good." Honestly, of everyone who's written to me, that made me the happiest. Because I remembered when I was 11—oh, how miserable I was when I was 11—and how I escaped into books, and books got me through. And I thought, "Oh, I would love to be able to do that for young people."