Before publishing the contemporary fiction she’s best known for—including Merci Suárez Changes Gears, winner of the Newbery Medal—Meg Medina dabbled in magical realism. Two early books—her 2008 debut, Milagros: Girl From Away, and The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind—both teased magic, bringing it into a contemporary setting. Her latest middle-grade novel embraces it completely, building a fantastical underwater world that intertwines with—and often influences—our own.

Graciela in the Abyss was originally conceived in 2010, and it’s been a nearly 15-year journey to publication for the author, who served as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2023 and 2024. The final book, with illustrations by Anna and Elena Balbusso, is out from Candlewick on July 1. “I knew I wanted it to be otherworldly,” says Medina over Zoom from her home in Virginia. “The first iteration was two friends, Graciela and Amina. They were spirits, they had pearl teeth, and they were being pursued.”

That general premise remains, and if it sounds eerie, that’s because it is. There’s much that terrifies and even more that haunts in this ghost story about a long-deceased girl who faces enemies both living and dead and some conflict within her own heart. But while Medina has crafted a narrative that may at times unnerve readers, it’s one that will heal them, too. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m interested to hear how this novel developed on the back burner.

There was something in the relationship between these two girls that I wanted to write about, but I couldn’t find the story. I gave up so many times. Ultimately what happened was the pandemic, when we were all faced with so much loss. It was a time of enormous fear and regret, with death everywhere, and with vitriol that spread so widely and is still with us. All of that needed to cook inside me so that I could shape the story.

I was afraid every day that I wrote it. When I gave the manuscript to my editor, I said, “Don’t let me write a bad fantasy. If I’m going to do this, I really want to write a good fantasy. Help me shape this.” It took a lot more back-and-forth between us than is typical on my books. But boy, she kept her promise.

So much of this book feels organic, including your magic system, which connects the dead to the living.

It all amounts to worldbuilding. The way I handled it was by first doing a lot of research into the abyss, especially through the work of female oceanographers. I wanted to know what it really looks like down there and what it sounds like. The next step was bending the facts to my will. How do currents happen? There is a scientific explanation, but how marvelous if it’s actually the spirits of the dead moving the water in this elaborate dance. The last layer was figuring out which elements carry deeper meaning about being human. Bioluminescence is a good example. In middle school and high school, especially, you need to spend some time figuring out what your own engine is, what your own light is.

Graciela has some adult preoccupations and some very childlike characteristics. What was it like to write her?

I love writing characters that are flawed. Graciela has moments of jealousy and dishonesty. She has moments where she betrays people that she loves. She has enormous regret about the absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary way that she died. She has lots of other regrets, just like most kids do. They say and do things they wish they hadn’t; they have moments when they’re not their best selves; they have things they want to hide about themselves as they’re growing up. All of that is Graciela.

Her counterpart, Jorge, is different. If I had one word for him, I’d think of valiant, of a young man who has valor so instinctively inside of him. But he has so much doubt. He’s timid about things. How does he come into himself and his gifts?

There’s not one way to be a kid. You could be a Jorge, you could be a Graciela. But they all have their flaws.

I worried so much for Jorge. Because this book takes place over generations, you really see the impact of family secrets, and the narrative was pretty unforgiving toward his parents.

I try to tell kids the truth about things—with compassion and with an eye to their age, but I try to be truthful. And the truth is that you will meet people who will not be redeemed. You will meet broken people, some potentially in your own family. Certainly I believe that there’s a way back for people, that generational patterns can be broken. But in this book, I really wanted to feel those tentacles: how greed, poverty, envy, and brutality fester in people and what they create long-term.

I didn’t tie it up neatly in the end. But what I try to do in all my books, because I write for young people, is to end on a note that feels propulsive. I want it to feel like there’s hope for what comes after; that what they’ve lived through was hard but that it also offers them a door to something else.

How lucky are the children growing up with caretakers who love them and with supportive friends. Those are blessings. But many kids do not grow up in that way. You can still work through that and end up in a good place for yourself. I think kids need to know that; they can weather really hard things and be OK in the end.

Speaking of hard things, you write in your author’s note about receiving the advice to hurt the characters that your readers love. Excuse me?!

Isn’t that crazy? That advice came from [children’s and YA author] Lamar Giles—we often call each other when we’re stuck. Another friend whose work I admire immensely, Erin Entrada Kelly, this year’s Newbery winner, told me something similar. We taught together at Hamline University, and I remember sitting in on one of her lectures, and she said that when she’s working through a plot point, she asks herself, How can I make this worse for the character?

I channeled them both and did some unthinkable things to characters here. But again I’m going to say: Hard things happen. When they happen in a book, kids have an extra layer to experience it, to be angry about it, to argue with me, or just feel it. There’s a catharsis in that, in letting kids interact with the range of their feelings in a book.

But even when you’re hurting our favorite characters, it does feel like you take great care of your readers.

I really have so much respect for kids as they read. I trust them to come to the page with their whole selves, and they trust me to come with a story that’s going to entertain them, and maybe scare them, and maybe make them laugh, and land them safely. That’s the contract that we have with kids when we’re writing for them.

Maggie Reagan is a program manager for the American Library Association and lives in Chicago.