Hi book friends! I am beyond honored to share with you the cover of Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong! I don’t know if I’ve told her this, but I’ve been following Maria’s journey since before I even started Bookish Brews. I had the pleasure of asking her an interview question in a Goodreads group (of all places) and her answer was so personal and so honest that I’ve been in awe of her ever since. She is truly a shining star. And you never really know what piece of your work will affect people. For me, Maria’s work touched me from a seemingly insignificant interview on Goodreads. For you, I hope it’s this book. What I’m trying to say is that I’m immensely honored that Maria is trusting me with hosting a cover reveal for her debut novel!!
Maria Dong is an exceptional writer with published pieces in over a dozen magazines. A dozen! I’ve seen from the outside just how hard Maria has worked for this and I’m positive Liar, Dreamer, Thief is only the beginning. You can expect to see so much more of Maria Dong very soon. I can not wait to see what this path has in store for her and I hope you will join me in celebrating her victories along the way.
Bookish Brews Snapshot
Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong
Katrina Kim has an obsession with her co-worker, Kurt, but she isn’t stalking him. But when Kurt sends a cryptic message that implies he’s aware of her surveillance, her hold on a normal life begins to crumble.
✒️ Debut Novel 🧠 Mental Health 🤯 Suspense 🤔 Thought Provoking
- Genre: Mystery, Paranormal, Thriller
Interview with Maria Dong
Amanda: Thank you for joining us today, Maria! Can you tell me a little bit about this cover?
Maria Dong: Thank you for hosting! Yes! When you’re at the stage where a cover is being created, your team usually sends over a small batch of covers as references for the artist so they can get a feel for the genre and tone your marketing and publicity team is trying to hit. I knew from those that the cover design would likely feature a woman with at least a partially-obscured face, and I was really nervous about how that was going to turn out. (I was really, really insistent that under no circumstances could her face be fully obscured. That’s a common trend in covers that feature Asian women, where their faces are blurred, cropped out, scratched out, etc., or where their race is only identifiable by their hair.)
I think, in so many ways, I was really lucky to land at Grand Central. The creative director, Albert Tang, is Asian person. My cover artist, Shreya Gutpa (http://www.shreyaillustrations.com/), is Asian. I felt truly listened to and supported with every concern, every step of the way, and my editor and team were so great about explaining the reasoning behind every choice.
And when I finally got the cover, to be honest, my jaw dropped. It’s so fresh and bold, and several elements from the book and the plot are woven throughout—like the purple flowers in her hair, which are doraji: a star-shaped flower that’s really important in Korean culture and medicine. Doraji flowers are featured in several passages throughout the book. And I think the cover does such an amazing job of capturing the fact that this book blends so many genres: it’s a suspense book, sure, but there are places where I’ve really deviated from that script and gone in a lot of different directions. It’s got very literary sections, fairy-tale elements, fabulist elements, family saga elements, mental-health commentary, race and social class commentary, entire passages that are just about classical music—my editor and I actually had a really long discussion at one point about how some of the pacing elements are really more reflective of Korean media, and how to get that to gel well for a western audience.
I was really not sure what a cover for a book that mashes so many things together was going to look like, and now that I’ve seen it, it’s perfect. And check out that blurb by Ashley Winstead—I love her work, so to get called one of the “freshest, most vital new voices in fiction”—that’s really killer.
Amanda: Almost all of your work to this point has really been in the science fiction and fantasy space, including publication in a number of well-known magazines and anthologies. What made you write a suspense book?
Maria: Right, so, when I wrote this book, I was at a point of like, peak frustration and desperation. My agent and I had gone on sub with two different projects that had the bad luck to coincide with the ramping up of a worldwide pandemic—and one of the effects of said pandemic is that publishers were really hesitant to take things that felt risky or where the audience wasn’t immediately clear and kind of built-in. Almost everything I write tends to straddle genres (maybe because I, as a human being, am kind of a straddler—mixed race, bisexual, disabled but like, in an invisible way, etc., etc.) which can make it a hard sell even in a good market, and the first year and half or so of the pandemic was not a great market for authors. We got a number of passes that were essentially, were it not for the pandemic, we would’ve bought this, which is just like, heartbreaking, because you can’t reapproach a rejection from an editor. Those tend to be final, even if circumstances change.
So after those failures, I was starting to think that maybe this whole writing novels thing wasn’t for me. But my agent, Amy Bishop, encouraged me to try my hand at a different genre, because adult SFF is such a small world. There are only about 5-6 major imprints, which means you only have 5 or 6 opportunities to sell that book to a bigger traditional house—whereas a suspense or mystery might have dozens of potential imprints.
I spent a long time looking through everything I’d written and trying to figure out what a non-SFF book by me might look like, and one thing I discovered is that in almost everything I write, there’s always a mystery. I think it’s because I’m a super-pantser—I used to plot, but it killed the book for me. The feeling of finding out what comes next is what keeps me writing, so it’s not surprising that aspect carries over into the structure of the plots themselves.
So I sat down and said, okay, what’s my window into this mystery? And I just got the image of a man falling off a bridge, and I found it really intriguing, so I started there, and just kind of stumbled my way through a terrible first draft. I tried really hard to make it into this dark, logical, well-paced procedural suspenseful mystery, because those are sexy and sell well—and it was really horrible for me. I was just, so so miserable, just pulling teeth for months.
And then, at like 60 or 70 thousand words in, I wrote the first passage about the kitchen-door world—about seeing a fantasy world overlaid over the real world as this kind of escapist lens—and something just clicked for me. It was so much better than everything I’d written to that point. I had to go back to the beginning and start over, and build that aspect in from the foundation, and then I finally found my groove.
Amanda: Wow, I’m so interested in this kitchen-door world now! Without giving too much away, what can you tell us about this world?
Maria: The kitchen-door world is a fantasy plane from a children’s book that the main character, Katrina Kim, inadvertently taps into when she’s struggling with her mental health. It’s her primary lens for conceptualizing her world and making observations and conclusions about it.
One thing that I have really been exploring through my work is the concept of the truth—as in, is there a universal truth, and if it’s something we can perceive and share. I think I identify so strongly with this concept because of two reasons. First, there’s my own struggles with mental illness, which distorts both perception and interpretation. It puts you in this place where you can only really communicate the experience to someone who’s been there.
Second, there’s the experiences I had as I was getting my graduate degree in occupational therapy, which is a healthcare rehabilitation profession. I was in this field where we have to apply a very scientific, logical, reductionist lens to something as complicated and messy as human behavior and function, and it made me think constantly about how the idea of concepts like logic and science are often used as these, like, clubs to exert dominance and superiority over marginalized communities. (How often do we see someone with a very real and valid complaint about the state of the world get dismissed because they’re “too emotional?”)
I realized early on in writing this book that I wanted to create a narrator whose conclusions about her world were not arrived at through a typical procedural process—a sort of anti-sherlock holmes—because the truth is that we, as human beings, don’t solve our problems and gather information in this pure logical inductive reasoning process either. We have a variety of tools in our toolkit, of which emotions and assumptions and instinct play a huge part.
So I asked myself, you know, how could I get someone like that—someone like me—down on the page in a way that made sense to suspense readers, to the average person, to the plot of a book? And I think that’s where the kitchen-door world kind of came from.
At least, that’s what I think happened. I make my connections via instinct. Almost all of my writing starts out from this like, semi-subconscious space. I choose symbols without really understanding why, at first, and just kind of trust that meaning and theme will become obvious to me as I go. (And they usually do!)
The Cover
Cover art by Shreya Gupta
Isn’t it stunning?! It’s exactly like Maria said! Bold, fresh, and exciting. I’m honestly so intrigued by the cover. It’s not like covers that will instantly tell me everything about the book. This book cover, to me, makes me really wonder what is inside. I just can’t resist taking a peek, which I hope to do very soon!!! Eeeep!
Thank you everyone for joining Maria and me as we share her cover with you! I’m absolutely in awe of the cover and Maria’s brilliance. I can’t wait for all of us to read this together!
