Author Emiko Jean on her 'curiosity and frustration' with violence against women

This is the KUOW Book Club, and we just finished reading Emiko Jean's thriller "The Return of Ellie Black." I'm your guide Katie Campbell. Let's get into it.

A content warning before we continue: This article includes discussion of child abuse, including sexual abuse.

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here are many lines in "The Return of Ellie Black" that felt like a gut punch. But when I was going through those I'd written down in preparation for my interview with Jean last week, one stood out.

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Chelsey is the dogged Detective Chelsey Calhoun, who's searched for the titular Ellie Black since she disappeared more than two years before she suddenly reappeared. Chelsey knows all too well how women are victimized — and which have their cases solved.

But Jean, our author — she's made a career in the YA literature space. When we sat down, I wanted to know if she, like her character, mourns girlhood, and if this dark adult novel is her way of exploring the fear underlying the joys of youth.

"It is," Jean said. "There have been bookmarks in my adolescence where I realized what it meant to be a girl and how dangerous it was to be a girl. And there was a certain point where — and much earlier than, I think, boys — where I didn't move as freely through the world."

Those "bookmarks" came in the form of warnings, to walk with keys between her fingers or not to accept drinks from strangers. Boys are taught to take risks, she said, while girls are taught to be careful.

"You don't realize how much that shrinks you and makes you afraid," she said. "It's up to you to keep yourself safe."

The teenage girl at the center of her mystery, Ellie, moves through life unafraid, until she is kidnapped and held in a nightmare. When she reappears, the difference in her is obvious, even to a reader who only knows snippets of her past self.

We get a list of "nonessential facts" from her mother, Kat, in a flashback from when she first went missing.

That simple description contrasts sharply with the girl who blames herself for what was done to her and others.

"When she goes missing, [Ellie] has devised this whole plan to throw a party in a motel, so that she can buy a new phone," Jean said. "So, she's very, in some ways, entrepreneurial. I like to think she's ballsy, and I liked that about her. I wanted her to be really fierce. I wanted her have that grit."

That grit becomes part of her captors' justification for taking her, for violating her.

RELATED: 'The Return of Ellie Black' questions society's fixation on the victim stereotype

Without giving away too much (because there are a lot of twists in this book), Ellie's captors, David and Michael, are deeply misogynistic. They blame the women in their lives for all their faults and failures, insisting they've saved these girls from a world that will let them run wild (God forbid). David, the leader, says he loves the girls even as he starves, rapes, and kills them.

"One in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime, and it's just such a curiosity and frustration for me when we know this, but there's so little done about it," Jean said. "I remember reading another book, researching for this book about toxic masculinity, and this writer had said something about being a man is like living in a very cold, hard cage. And that just struck me. It was something that I thought about when I was thinking about Ellie's captors. What had happened to them, and what was formative for them in childhood that kind of made them that way?"

(According to the World Health Organization, "Across their lifetime, one in three women, around 736 million, are subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence from a non-partner — a number that has remained largely unchanged over the past decade.")

For Jean, the issue is not only one of violence against women, but also the way society fails men and boys. "The Return of Ellie Black" asks what happens when we don't teach boys about consent, feelings, and identity.

"I don't know if my book necessarily gives any answers to these questions, but I think they're questions that we should be asking ourselves and ruminating on," Jean said. "But I don't think it's up to girls. I mean, it's not our responsibility. The responsibility is on men and boys and how we raise them."

I won't spoil the end of "The Return of Ellie Black," but I'll say I was satisfied as a reader. If nothing else, Ellie seems to have found some of her "grit" again, even if it's less jagged.

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Spoiler alert: For those of you who like to plan ahead, I'm happy to share I've picked what we'll be reading in June, too — and it's a two-fer!

We're celebrating Pride Month with Corinne Manning's "We Had No Rules" and Ijeoma Oluo's "Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World — And How You Can, Too."

"Be A Revolution" is the fresh new book from Oluo, the Seattle author who wrote the #1 New York Times bestseller "So You Want To Talk About Race." Oluo continues her critical work with "Be A Revolution," which aims to educate and inspire readers to create positive change in the systems around them. As HarperCollins puts it, "Oluo wishes to take our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pure pain and trauma, and into a place of loving action." That just feels right for Pride.

And we're pairing it with a short story collection that explores queerness in contemporary life. In "We Had No Rules," Manning centers characters faced with a choice: assimilate or rebel. The stories remind us that no two people's experiences are the same, and that there's something powerful in that. Paul Lisicky, author of "Later" and "The Narrow Door" described it this way: "Expansive, soulful, vulnerable, sexy, funny, and broken, 'We Had No Rules' is queer all the way down to its bones."