Author S. Hati tells us about the inspiration behind her romantic, time travelling fantasy, The Carousel of Forgotten Places.
I’ve recently realized that I love writing about ghosts. I could write an entire essay on the metaphor of ghosts, and how it can transform across genre and media. Ghosts mean different things to different people, and this can evolve over the course of one’s life. When I first conceived The Carousel of Forgotten Places, I’d been in a dark place, and all I’d pictured was a lonely woman at a haunted fair. By the time I got to writing the book, my life had changed, and so had the ghosts. They were funny, quirky, and lovable, but they brought a bittersweetness to the story that sums up the heart of the book: nostalgia.
The Carousel of Forgotten Places
Writing an essay on how your novel is inspired by nostalgia is tricky business, because it can easily turn into a piece on the author’s history. The Carousel of Forgotten Places is far from autobiographical but it is filled with everything I’ve learned about growing up and falling in love, as well as the questions I’m still seeking answers to. It’s shaped by all the things I love and the ones dearest to me. After all, the novel is dedicated to one of my best friends, and much of the story was born from conversations we’ve had about romance, ideal partners, and society’s inclination to place romantic love above all. Also, she asked for a golden retriever love interest, and so I wrote Everest.
The book holds the grief I’ve nurtured ever since I left home at the age of 18 and placed continents between myself and my family. It contends with the ache of growing apart from friends, finding new ones, and feeling life stretch around you until it feels too big to hold. There are ruminations on changing dreams, watching your parents grow older, reckoning with your sexuality and identity, and finding joy in change.
Fairytales, time travel, and conversations with friends
The setting and concept of the novel are inspired by childhood fairytales, the very ones that the main character Ryka grew up listening to, but I tried interrogating them through an adult lens. Ryka struck a Faustian bargain, a motif that occurs through many forms of media, and ended up being stuck at this magical fair as a timekeeper in order to save her best friend’s life. The fair itself has a Neverland quality to it, in my opinion. It’s an isolated pocket of time, separate from reality, where no one ages; the ghosts present the way they always were, Ryka and Everest still look young, despite being hundreds of years old, and the spacetime dimension itself bends around the fair.
The ending of these tales from childhood are almost predictable: the bargain results in the downfall of the dealmaker, Wendy leaves Neverland to go back home, and everything returns to the way it was supposed to be. Magic in its purest form doesn’t always stay.
But how do we know how things are supposed to be? While the morals of these stories were important to absorb as children, growing up quickly exposes the grey areas in these lessons. We make bad calls, intentionally or not. We leave behind our homes to pursue new adventures, ending up across the country or the world, surrounded by people we never would have expected. We speculate over possible futures over glasses of wine with friends, and we lie awake at night wondering how we ended up at a precise moment in time.
The Anxieties of Time
And that’s the next thread that travels through this book: the anxieties of time. The way the past haunts us and shapes us and limits where we can go. Threads of time wind around the carousel and make it so that time is not a linear dimension, but a circular one. Ryka, unlike us, has the option of returning to different parts of her life, and is consistently plagued by the questions of what might happen if she does.
Time travel has always been fascinating to me; some of my favorite pieces of media deal with distortions in time: Interstellar, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the many books I’ve read rooted in Groundhog Day-esque concepts. What’s so powerful about stories like this—and fantasy as a whole—is that it allows us to interrogate our thoughts on time, memory, and regret in a specific framework. Often the creator is searching for answers through the art of creation, offering a mirror to readers who may be searching as well.
Eternal love stories
The romance between Everest and Ryka has been brewing for nearly 500 years. This was an intentional challenge I set myself, because how do you create a compelling love story that’s taken centuries to culminate? Here, I was inspired by some of my favorite love stories that take place across prolonged periods of time; the Before Trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) was formative in the way it maps the progression of a relationship over the course of decades.
I also reflected on the relationships in my life; I am fortunate to have some friendships that have lasted through periods of considerable evolution for both parties, but some of my other friends and I joke that we wouldn’t have liked each other very much if we met when we were younger. My therapist and I also talked about how some people cycle in and out of our lives, and our relationships both directly influence and are a byproduct of who we are.
Ryka and Everest
While readers meet Ryka and Everest much later on in their relationship, they’re still coming to terms with how they’ve changed. Ryka has clung to the twenty-seven year old that she was when she arrived at the fair, while Everest is an immortal time god who hasn’t realized how the people around him have changed him. I wanted to extend this consideration to the other characters in the novel too; the ghosts, some of whom have been around nearly as long as our core couple; Valentin, a strange human who joins them at the start of the novel; and the people in Ryka’s past whom she’s never forgotten.
This book begins and ends with love, and it rejoices love in all its forms. It’s a celebration of the present, a moment of gratitude for the past, and an embrace of a future that none of us can really predict. I wrote The Carousel of Forgotten Places because it felt like home, and because I wanted to ask the question: what if the magic is where you were always meant to be?
(c) S. Hati
About The Carousel of Forgotten Places:
First rule: Don’t mess with the timeline. Second rule: Don’t mess around with the time-god.
For 500 years, immortal timekeeper Ryka has run a cozy magical fair on the edges of time, managing the time threads and protecting the spirits that live there. She lives happily among a found family of quirky ghosts, a spectral cat, and even her insufferable boss, the annoying (and sexy) time-god Everest.
But when the carousel at the heart of the fair begins to show signs of time rot, a live human falls through time and ends up landing at their feet. With the fair descending into chaos, Ryka and Everest must team up to get this human home, find the source of the rot, and keep the fabric of time from tearing apart – all while hoping that the 500 years of feelings between them don’t get in their way.
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