Sacramento novelist Anna-Marie McLemore discusses her new book

Anna-Marie McLemore was standing in the forest wearing an enormous pair of wings when the idea came to her.

The writer and her husband were taking engagement photos with a friend. The pictures were belated: McLemore and her husband, who is transgender, had eloped in 2008 in a brief window of time during which same-sex marriage was legal in California. Now they wanted something to commemorate the occasion.

Initially the couple had planned to wear their regular street clothes. But the photographer had another idea and dressed McLemore in the wings. Instantly, the writer found inspiration.

“There was joy and fun,” McLemore remembers of the session.

The moment also revived childhood memories of a story her father had told her about a traveling mermaid show in Florida.

“I loved the idea of performing as a mermaid. I love mermaids; I’d wanted to be one since I was 3,” said McLemore who is now 28.

So there, among the trees, the Sacramento novelist decided to join the two worlds.

“[I knew] I wanted to put together a story about mermaids and winged performers,” she said.

The resulting young adult book The Weight of Feathers (St. Martin’s Press, $18.99) chronicles the story of Lace and Cluck, teenagers from rival families of vagabond entertainers.

McLemore will read from the book Saturday, October 3, at Face in a Book in El Dorado Hills.

The Weight of Feathers, which takes place in central California, centers around the Corbeaus, a family whose generations of “winged” boys perform atop tightropes strung between tall trees, and the Palomas, who build a show around pretty girls who must don elaborate bejeweled mermaid “tails” and take to the water.

While both families, long locked in a bitter, sometimes deadly feud, rely on elaborate costumes to create a visual spectacle, they also come by their gimmicks naturally. The Corbeaus boast actual feathers while the Palomas have fish scales on their backs.

After an accident at a nearby chemical plant forces Lace and Cluck to cross paths, decades-long rivalries are revived and histories fatefully re-examined. Think Romeo & Juliet in a traveling sideshow.

The novel was published earlier this month to widespread acclaim. Kirkus Reviews called it “a contemporary, magical take on an ever compelling theme,” while Publishers Weekly raved “the enchanting setup and the forbidden romance that blooms between these two outcasts will quickly draw readers in.”

The story draws heavily from McLemore’s roots. The Palomas are, like McLemore, Mexican-American; the Corbeaus are Romani gypsies.

“The culture I came from inspired the feel of the book,” she says. “While not drawing on specific traditions, it was the groundwork.”

If anything, she adds, she enjoyed the research that went into learning more about the French gypsy culture—and then weaving the heritages together.

“I like the idea of writing about two cultures. … There is so much overlap between their beautiful worlds, but they also have trouble,” she says.

With its lush, lyrical prose and elements of magical realism, The Weight of Feathers finds allegiance in works by Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende, Nicaraguan novelist Gioconda Belli and the late Columbian author Gabriel García M&#;aacute;rquez.

“I grew up very much with a sense that you have magical realism—the magical and the ordinary, and the ordinary and the brutal,” she says. “I grew up with that but I didn’t know the term for it. These are the books I grew up with, this the world I naturally fell into.”

In particular McLemore loved Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel’s 1989 classic Like Water for Chocolate, about a young woman who is cursed in love only to find she can control those around her through cooking.

“That’s one of the first [magical realism] works I read and I come back to it a lot as a story of strong women.”

While cultural boundaries play heavily into her book, The Weight of Feathers also explores other forms of identity and body politics.

When Lace’s initial encounter with Cluck leaves her burned with the imprint of one of his feathers, her grandmother turns her out of Paloma family. Alone and homeless, the 16-year-old is faced with trying to, in a sense, come to terms with literal scars, cultural beauty standards and a figurative reclaiming of her body.

“For Lace, the accident at the plant highlights [issues] that she can’t think of before that point,” she says. “To have the accident happen to her—it puts it right in her face so that she can’t ignore it.”

The story, which is told in Lace and Cluck’s dueling narratives, also gives voice to other issues.

“Cluck is darker than the rest of his family—what he contends with and what people think of him, he has this idea that his body is there for his family to abuse,” McLemore says. “He has to break out of that. He and Lace are both reclaiming their bodies in their own ways.”

Such themes, McLemore says, are rooted in elements of her personal life, including being queer and biracial

“I’m cis-gender and I’ve struggled with being mixed race and my very curvy Latina body,” she says.

Likewise, she adds, her husband has struggled in “finding a space” within the transgender community.

McLemore and her husband first moved to Sacramento in 2009 with the latter attending McGeorge School of Law and later taking a job as a lobbyist for Equality California.

Now the writer, who is originally from Los Angeles, says Sacramento “is where we’ve made our home—we’ve fallen in love with it.”

McLemore is currently working on her second novel, which will also include elements of magical realism and multicultural themes, as well as a transgender character.

“My husband is a wonderful help with that,” she says. “As close as I am to it, there’s nothing like having someone tell you what you’re getting right or getting wrong.”

Whatever the story, McLemore says she’ll continue to write about different worlds.

“Writing diversity is important to me,” she says.

But although McLemore has described her writing as works that “could be called Latina literature,” she also aims for them to transcend labels and genre. It should be this way for books from any viewpoint or culture.

“What I hope happens in [writing] diversity is that we see books as beautiful in their own culture, but also as stories for everyone.”