An Indies Introduce Q&A with Aimee Lim

Aimee Lim is the author of The Spindle of Fate, a Summer/Fall 2024 Indies Introduce YA selection and a July/August 2024 Kids’ Next List pick. 

Donna Liu of Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California, served on the panel that selected Lim’s book for Indies Introduce.

“I loved this charmingly written middle grade inspired by Chinese mythology,” said Liu. “Exploring themes of grief, growing up, and family, this novel grabbed me right from the first page and didn’t let go. Full of action-packed sequences and quiet, emotional moments alike, this book was a wonderful read. I know kids and fans of Percy Jackson, Aru Shah, and Amari and the Night Brothers are going to love it.”

Lim sat down with Liu to discuss her debut title.

Donna Liu: Hi, I am Donna Liu. I am a bookseller at Kepler's Books and Magazines in Menlo Park, California. And today I'm here talking to Aimee Lim.

Aimee Lim is a library associate and former Jeopardy! champion from Arcadia, California. She has a BA in English, with an emphasis on creative writing from the University of California Davis. The Spindle of Fate is her first novel, though she is a two-time finalist in a “write the worst opening line(s) to a novel” contest.

Wow! I just got your bio and as I was reading it, I was so impressed. I didn't realize you were on Jeopardy! I didn't realize you had won this “write the worst opening line(s) to a novel” contest. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I'm so curious.

Aimee Lim: I would love to talk about Jeopardy! I was on in 2020. That was like the peak COVID season, so it was a little unusual. Like nobody could be in the audience, so my family didn't get to come. But I am really glad that it was then, because that was toward the end of Alex Trebek's run and so I'm really glad that it was with him. I was a 1-day champion, I wasn't like a streaker, but it was honestly really exciting.

Someone told me it was like a Disney Channel version of a game show where, going into Double Jeopardy, I had $200 and then the other guy had like $10,000. And then I just clawed my way up just barely over half. And then I bet everything at the end. That's how I won.

DL: Amazing! That's so cool.

AL: Yeah, it was very exciting.

DL: How awesome! What about the contest? I think I've heard of this. It's named after the guy who did — What is it? “It was a dark and stormy night,” or something like that.

AL: Yeah. So that's the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

DL: Okay.

AL: And then that's not the contest that I entered — there's a spin off contest. It's called the Little Lytton Contest. They do much shorter lines. Because a lot of the Bulwer-Lytton entries are like, really, really long and go on for a bit. So I think the shorter entries tend to be, like, more original. I didn't mention the name of the contest [in the bio] just because a lot of them are a little bit racy, but yeah, I enter that every year, and I just thought it was kind of funny.

DL: That is so cool. I think that's so fun. Well, I think we can definitively say that The Spindle of Fate does not have one of the worst opening lines. I think it's a fantastic book! I was so excited to receive a copy and get started, and I really blasted through it. I read it probably in two sittings. And I thought it was just wonderful. So, to start talking about the book, would you like to give a little elevator pitch or short description of the book for our listeners?

AL: First of all, thank you so much. I'm really glad to hear that you enjoyed it. The Spindle of Fate is a middle grade fantasy adventure inspired by Chinese myth. It's about 12-year-old Evie Mei Huang who is grieving her mother's recent presumed death when she finds out that her mom had belonged to a secret society of magical weavers. And because her mom had the ability to change fate with the titular spindle, she was kidnapped by a demon and taken to Dìyù, which is Chinese hell. So naturally, Evie has to go through the ten courts of hell to save her.

So it's got a lot of action, and — since the book does take place in hell — some scary scenes, but also a lot of humor and heart.

DL: Yeah, I would agree with all that. Awesome. So, my first book-specific question is: what was the starting seed for this book? What made you want to write about the Chinese underworld?

AL: The starting point of this book was actually a conversation with Dhonielle Clayton, who is the author of The Marvellers and The Belles. Dhonielle is really vocal about diversifying children's books and wanting to expand the kinds of heroes that we see. And we talked about wanting to see a contemporary middle grade fantasy that was rooted in Chinese culture.

For the second part [of the question], honestly, I wanted to write about the Chinese underworld because it's really scary. I haven't looked at like all the different hells out there, but I feel like it's one of the scary ones. I guess that sounds like a strange choice for a children's book, but I was really intrigued by writing a middle great adventure in that setting, that captured that spirit and that darkness, but in a way that's fun and exciting and kind of irreverent.

DL: Yeah, that actually leads me to one of my other questions, which was, what was it like to write those scenes? Was it hard to balance the scariness with the humor and heart?

I'm not the most familiar with myths of the Chinese underworld, despite being Chinese American myself. I know some Sun Wukong, and I know The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and a few other very key myths, but I don't know much about Dìyù. So if you could tell me a little bit about how you chose — did you include all the courts, or were there things that you left out because they were too scary?

AL: As far as what it's like, I had a lot of fun writing Dìyù, once they got there. For me, it was a blast.

One thing that I found out when I was researching is that ten courts is a common number. Dìyù is really popular in Chinese literature and art throughout the years. But there's not a lot of consistency in what torture is where, or even how many [courts] there are. Ten is common, but there's some with a lot more than that. So that did give me a lot to work with where I was like, “okay, I can pick and choose.” I did want to use things that were from existing sources, just because a lot of readers are not that familiar with Chinese myth. But I did pick.

As for things being too violent…when I found all these different sources, I was like, “Oh, this is great. How am I ever gonna narrow it down to just ten?” But as I actually planned it, I realized it was a lot more like, process of elimination. What can actually go in a children's book? A lot of the portrayals are gratuitously violent and terrible. Here's the one where they get cooked in a wok. No. Here's the one where they are being crushed in a mortar and pestle. No. Honestly, that's kind of what ended up breaking the selection. I tried to pick things that felt scary and horrible, but not in a gratuitously violent way.

DL: Right, not in a maiming kind of way.

AL: Yeah, exactly.

DL: I think you picked very well, because I think all of the courts that they had to go through were suitably scary but also it’s conceivable that kids are going to be able to make their way through it. That's really cool. I loved hearing about that.

I guess that can lead us into another question I had, which was that other than the myths — or maybe you were inspired by particular myths that we haven't talked about yet — were you inspired by other books, movies, TV shows, while writing this book?

AL: I definitely am inspired by other stories and media that I love. A lot of times they're really random things, things that might not seem like a comp. Just to give an example: Evie's Auntie Kathie in the book used to be a showgirl in Las Vegas. The reason for that is at the time that I was writing that chapter I happened to be reading Elvira's memoir. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark — that Elvira. (It's a really good book, by the way. It was one of my favorites that year.) But she used to be a showgirl. Right out of high school, she went to Vegas. And she was writing about that. And I was like, “okay, that's what we're doing now.”

DL: That is a really fun Easter egg. It would be like a really funny trivia question. You know: how is this book connected to Elvira?

AL: Yeah the kids will love this. I feel like that's probably not what you were expecting. But I just think it's funny, all the random bits and pieces that we go through kind of make their way into stuff.

DL: Yeah.

AL: A couple of other ones. I watch a lot of movies, so I definitely am inspired by those. There's two that I think I should mention, that did directly inspire Spindle. One of them is a Chinese movie called The King of Masks that I saw when I was a kid. It's about Bian Lian, which is a performing art, where it translates to face-changing. And so these performers wear these opera masks, and they'll wave their hands in front of their face and it looks like — in the blink of an eye — they've changed masks.

DL: Yeah, I've seen those at hot pot restaurants.

AL: You’ve seen that! That’s so cool!

DL: Yeah!

AL: You can't just go out and learn this. It's a very closely guarded secret, where traditionally, performers pass it on from father to son, and not daughters. Because the traditional way of thinking is that — in Chinese genealogy — when the daughter marries out she joins another family, and you don't want the secret to go to another family. That was what inspired how the magic, and the spindle of fate, and the secret society of weavers work in Spindle. I've always been really interested in dying art forms. That's always been really interesting to me, and so the secret of changing fate is passed down in Evie's family in that way.

And then the other movie — this is another kind of weird one — it's an Indonesian action movie called The Raid. It's amazing, if you like action. It is rated R, so I just want to state for the record, I don't endorse children watching this. But it was a surprisingly big influence on this book. I'm not going to say why, because it's a bit of a spoiler, but there is one plot twist about, like, halfway through that I did lift from this movie. Again. Not spoilers. But it does feel necessary to shout it out.

DL: Wow! That's very cool. We're all inspired by so many different things from parts of our lives. As a writer, you must just pick up bits and pieces from everywhere. So that's really cool to hear the very specific inspirations that you had.

Okay, let's go back to talking about Evie Mei and her family. I thought the family aspect was really strong in this book. I loved her relationship with her sister and her dad. And even though her relationship with her mother was a little challenging, it was still very beautiful and strong. I would love to talk a little bit about how you worked out what Evie Mei’s relationship was like with her whole family. Just talk a little bit more about that — I would love to hear about how you created the Huang family.

AL: Yeah, I would love to. I'm really interested in family dynamics. Even though Evie's family isn't on the page for that much, I definitely did want you to feel like you have a specific sense of this family, and their distinct relationships with each other. I knew from the beginning that I wanted Evie's relationship with her mom to have some conflict. Evie's little sister Mona Li — she's eight. And that's an age when Batman lost his parents. That's when you have a more idealized idea of your mom.

But Evie is twelve and — maybe this isn’t universal — but I do think that for a lot of kids, that's when you don't have that anymore. You start wanting to be different from your parents, or questioning them more, or just finding them really annoying, especially for a mother-daughter relationship. So that just felt really natural to me, and that felt really real. But I also think it did create an interesting tension where Evie is motivated by this really deep love for her mom — she's going literally through hell to save her. But on the inside, she's carrying around this guilt that the relationship was not perfect, and that's very normal. I thought that propelled the story in an interesting way.

And for her other members of the family, I largely figured those out as I wrote, and then honed in on things. Since Evie's relationship with her mom is at the center, I would say I extrapolated a lot from that. Evie had kind of butted heads with her mom, so then she had a more — not more loving, but an easier relationship with their dad. They got along really well, and you can tell that they used to have a very friendly rapport. And then there's Evie's aunt — the showgirl — who's her mom's younger sister, and she's Evie's favorite aunt. Evie thinks she's a lot cooler than her mom.

One thing is that I was trying to show is that Evie is annoyed by her sister, but is also really concerned about her and is trying to be strong for her sake after their mother's loss. That just felt like a really common thing with a lot of oldest children — especially oldest daughters — where now that her mom is gone, she feels like she has to kind of step up.

But there was a line where Mona Li calls Evie out on the fact that she and Mom used to argue a lot, and she basically accuses Evie of not really being sad, because she didn't like her. Obviously, Mona Li is really hurting and taking it out on Evie, but Evie is really hurt by that because she also does feel guilty.That was a line that I didn't know I was going to say until I wrote that scene. And that ended up really shaping Evie's character arc.

DL: Yeah. I thought it felt very genuine. I'm an only child, but a lot of my friends had younger siblings, and they can say things that just cut you.

AL: Oh, yeah.

DL: They have the ability to say something so innocently, and/or just with the full heart behind it. And you're just like, “Oh. Yeah, you said that. That is true.”

No, I thought their dynamic was great. I really loved how — it was a very short mention — but you know you talked about how Mona’s slightly on the bigger side, and how Evie wanted to create better clothes for her sister. I thought that was really touching.

AL: Oh, thank you. I'm glad. Evie's mom worked at the tailor shop and she made all their clothes. I just hear a lot about how the fashion industry is aggressively hostile toward people with larger bodies, and it's not even just like they don't have the clothes, it’s the clothes are ugly. So that was another thing that wasn't planned, but a lot of those details I kind of layered in as I went. I'm glad you like that.

DL: While the Dìyù portions were really exciting, the reason I fell in love with the book was these interactions at the beginning with her family. I laughed out loud, and I had to go show this part of the book to all of my coworkers and my partner. But I thought it was so funny when you said that “Grandma didn't teach her dad to cook because he was too handsome. But I don't know what that says about Uncle Kevin, because she did teach him to cook.”

I laughed out loud, and I had to go show everybody. I thought it was so funny. I think there was just so many moments like that peppered throughout the book that made me laugh. I think you did a really good job of bringing the humor and the heart with these really quite dark elements as well. So I applaud you for that.

AL: Thank you.

DL: I have one more question. But we can always talk more. Basically, what do you want readers to come away with most after reading this book?

AL: Personally, I didn't write this thinking I have a specific message that I want to give readers, because this particular story deals a lot with death and the afterlife. And that's something that everybody has very personal experiences and also their own cultural beliefs about. So, for me even to say, “Oh, I hope this book comforts any kids who have experienced loss,” to me that would feel a little presumptuous. Just for me personally.

But I can tell you one thing that I was trying to do was write something that felt honest. One thing Evie is struggling with is not just that her mom is gone, but some of her emotions feel not uncomplicated in a way that she has a tough time admitting. The relationship wasn't perfect, and maybe she wasn't a perfect daughter, and she feels some guilt like, “Oh, does that make my grief not sincere in some way?” But you know, it doesn't. And I did want to show it is actually normal and okay to have those feelings. And if that does resonate with anybody, I hope it does come across as emotionally true.

DL: That's really fantastic. I think we have sometimes an oversimplified idea of what it means to love someone or what a relationship between two people can look like. And I think you really delved into that, so thank you for that.

That's the bulk of my questions. But I guess, is there anything else that you wanted us to know about the book, about your process? Anything that we haven't touched on today that you want to get out there into the world?

AL: Oh, that's a — it's a big question.

DL: I know.

AL: I do feel like what the story means is for the readers, but I can share what the story means to me personally. So the first line of the book — this is going back full circle — is “Adults are so weird about death.” And Evie is going off with the list of all the well-meaning but not very comforting things that adults have been trying to tell her that she takes offense to. And I would say Evie isn't very much like me — she's a lot cooler than I ever was. I was thinking about myself when I was twelve, and I remember I was a skeptical kid which Evie is, too. And I remember, I really didn't like when adults would say things like “everything happens for a reason” in response to a senseless tragedy. I would question that, like, “Oh, how do you know that?” To me, that would feel really unsatisfying. And so a lot of Evie's arc is trying to grapple with how you can come to terms with things that feel just senseless and horrible. Even if you don't feel like — and maybe you shouldn't — have to accept it.

DL: Wow, that's really powerful. I'm so excited for this book to be released. And to have it out in the world. It just really feels very fresh and exciting. Once again, thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for talking to me today. This has been absolutely wonderful. And I don't know if we have said this, but we're going to get to meet in person pretty soon, which is very exciting — in New Orleans! So, very much looking forward to that.

AL: Thank you! I am, too! It'll be right after my book comes out so that's really exciting!

DL: Oh, yeah!

AL: And thank you from the bottom of my heart. I think especially, you know — when you mentioned how much you liked it as a Chinese American reader.

DL: Yeah!

AL: That's always something that I have imposter syndrome about. So that was really lovely.

DL: No, it was! It was absolutely wonderful. You know as a kids’ bookseller, I'm just so thrilled that more and more diverse books are coming out, talking about multiple parts of diverse experiences. This is a book that, if I had when I was a kid, would have made me feel seen, would have made me feel connected to my culture in a way that I didn't always feel growing up.

I came to America when I was very young, so it's kind of tough to keep that connection with your heritage going. And I think this book did a fantastic job of balancing the diaspora experience with cultural elements. I'm very excited about it. I'm very happy that you wrote it.

And I guess with that we can conclude our interview. Thank you guys for listening. And go read The Spindle of Fate. It releases on…Hang on! I have the date. You probably have it memorized Aimee. What's the release date?

AL: June 4!

DL: June 4, that's very soon. Yes, thank you. I don't know if this will have gone out by the time it has released. But yes, June 4.

Everybody go read The Spindle of Fate by Aimee Lim, it's a great book. You'll love it, and you're gonna learn something and feel something. I am so excited about it.

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The Spindle of Fate by Aimee Lim (Feiwel & Friends, 9781250886194, Hardcover Middle Grade Fantasy, $17.99) On Sale: 6/4/2024

Follow Aimee Lim on Instagram at @thesunweptrose.

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