The Canadian cover of Shelley Wood's book is different than the American version, which uses a clockSupplied
Depending on where you buy Shelley Wood’s latest novel, it will have not just a different cover, but a different title too.
“It’s two different publishers,” says Wood of the book we know here in Canada as The Leap Year Gene, which was released this summer. “The U.S. publisher said that they liked the Canadian cover, but they didn’t feel like it was right for their audience.”
Along with swapping the DNA-helix-meets-pop-art look of the Canadian edition for a more literal representation of a watch – a reference, we assume, to the way that the main character ages four times slower than your average person – they also tweaked the title. “They went with The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley,” says Wood, a British Columbian journalist, editor and author. “I’m guessing they did that to soften the ‘gene’ part of it. They wanted to humanize it.”
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There’s also been a spate of hugely successful books with people’s names in the title – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, for example, or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – that may have informed the title choice, a crucial marketing decision in the industry that’s built a business on the way we judge books by their covers and how similar they are to other works that we’ve already read and liked.
Wood says she set out to write a novel that readers would embrace even if it didn’t sit in a certain corridor of a bookstore.Hailey Pacey-Wood/Supplied
Case in point: The Leap Year Gene – billed as “part medical mystery, part love story,” and covering a vast sweep of 20th-century history through the story of a woman with a unique genetic makeup that means she ages incredibly slowly – defies easy categorization, something that became a hurdle for Woods to overcome when she was pitching the book to publishers.
“One of the editors who opted not to publish the book said that he would have trouble figuring out which part of the bookstore to put it in,” Woods says. “And I was thinking, isn’t that a good thing?”
For her part, Woods says she just set out to write “a really good book,” one that readers would embrace even if it didn’t sit in a certain corridor of a bookstore. Given the response to The Leap Year Gene – which hit The Globe and Mail Bestseller list – it seems she’s achieved that, and more.
The Globe chatted with Woods about finding inspiration, the long shadow of eugenics and forgotten Canadian history.
Did this book start with a speculative idea? Were you just walking along and wondered, ‘Huh, I wonder what it would be like if you were born on a leap day and only aged every four years?’
You nailed it. It was at a time when I was really feeling my own age, and the ways it’s creeping up. I can’t run as fast any more, I can’t remember the words as quickly as I want, my hair is going grey. I remember clearly thinking: If only there was a way to stay young! And the instant I thought that, I realized that if you can stay young, you will lose everyone you love. I also lost my mother a couple years previously, and I was still grieving that. I thought, you can’t fall out of sync with the rest of the people in your life. That doesn’t solve anything. I knew right away I wanted it to be about a little girl who ages more slowly. I also decided quite quickly that I wanted it to be a genetic condition, something that could be known, and then that genetic theme could drive the book along.
That theme of genetics pulls us into the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, then into Nazi Germany. It was really interesting, because I didn’t initially see this being a book about that.
I originally thought, I’ll write a book that tells the entire history of genetics, but once I stumbled on the eugenics part of it, I thought that was even more fascinating. To have Kit’s mother be a scientist who would be hearing so much of that eugenics information, and wrestling with that in her own life, was a tension that I felt like I could work with. Following that eugenics story to its most vile peak in Nazi Germany, the extent to which they were focused on people who were deemed “different,” before we got onto all of the awful ways in which they chose to murder other humans, I certainly wasn’t aware that they had practised their killing machine on people with physical and mental disabilities.
In so much history of the early 20th century, eugenics is this shadow – you’ll have these otherwise exemplary historical figures who do incredible things, and then there’s this footnote in their biography, ‘By the way, they were also deeply invested in eugenics.’
I really like those stories that aren’t black-and-white. We can be grateful for [Canadian suffragette] Nellie McClung fighting for the vote for women in Canada, but she was also instrumental in getting forced sterilization laws on the books in Canada. And Alberta was not the only province that had these, and they weren’t repealed until the 1970s. We have to keep that in mind as we hold our heroes up, they also have, as you say, a shadow behind them.
Is that a link of sorts between this book and your other novel, The Quintland Sisters, which is about the Dion quintuplets? If there is a pattern to your work, it does seem to be taking these icons of Canadian history and poking behind the shiny facade.
I do have a fascination with the forgotten Canadian stories. Many people still remembered who the Dion quintuplets were, but a whole generation for sure had forgotten about them. It was a pretty sparkly, glossy surface that had so many dark currents underneath. In terms of the suffragettes in part one of this book, it was important to me to look into that, and I have my characters wrestle with it.
Do you have your eye on any other forgotten Canadian history?
I’m waiting for inspiration. I really do feel like ideas come out of nowhere. I have a couple starting points, though. I do think it was ridiculous to try to write a book that covered 100 years, so my next book I joke that I want it to be only five days long. On a personal level, I’m trying to not write it on a computer. I don’t know if I’ll be successful, but because I work full-time as well as writing fiction, it’s just too much time in front of a screen. I’m thinking I might do more of it in a notebook.
Are you thinking that might help you access a different part of your brain or creative centre?
I feel like I’m being unfaithful to you by saying I think I might not go Canadian, but I do. I’m going to see where the ideas take me. I’d love to try to write a whodunit, but that might be because I’m looking for a book that is resolved, even though I love books with an ending that leaves you wondering. I think something the pandemic did to us is that it made us want to find solutions, reach a conclusion. I’m starting with some of these thoughts, and we’ll see where it takes me.