Something has gone awry at the supposedly calming hot springs at the center of The Pools, E. Lockhart’s new YA fairy tale–inspired love story with a dark twist. Lexie is new to the town of Covington, where hot springs are all the rage until one evening five guests at the pools—including Lexie’s sister and her love interest, Chester—are suddenly transformed into birds. Lexie races to reverse the curse as the town struggles beneath the weight of the tragedy. Lockhart, the creator of the successful We Were Liars series adapted for Amazon Prime, shared why small towns always breed interesting stories, and the simple reason grief is prevalent in her stories.

Were there any fairy tales in particular that inspired this novel?

There’s a cluster of fairy tales in which people turn into birds. In particular, seven brothers turn into ravens or swans, depending on the variant that you’re reading, and their sister is tasked with rescuing them. But The Pools isn’t about seven brothers; it is a love story. I borrowed the idea and then transposed it into the present day.

Covington is a small town, similar to the settings of some of your other novels. Is there a particular reason you enjoy exploring the dynamics of small-knit communities?

I really love the pressures that an enclosed world puts on a group of young people. That could be a boarding school, a summer camp, a private island, or it could be a tiny town in the mountains. When people feel like this world—the world that they know—is all that there is, the stakes feel a lot higher. The people of the town have this big attachment to the hot springs. They are going in them every day. They meet there. They swim. Swimming is like breathing for them.

My main character, Lexie, is a city girl who’s coming to the town, escaping the life she used to lead. She’s looking for that small town to save her, to simplify her life, to help her make human connections, and start over. The boy she falls in love with was born and raised in a small town, and has never really seen much of the world.

How did you want to showcase the many different responses to a traumatic event?

The book traces the love between Chester and Lexie, which has become impossible because he has been transformed into a bird. But it also traces various townspeople in the aftermath of this tragedy. The policewoman whose mother and mother’s partner had been transformed into eagles, the apothecary whose friend has been transformed, the parents of a neighbor’s child who’s been transformed, and so on. I was interested in the way that an event can affect an entire community from top to bottom. But another thing that happens is that the people who are not living with a human who’s been transformed into a bird quickly forget. They go about their lives. They think, “Oh, a sad thing happened to my friend.” They’re just going about their lives, and they forget that for the people who are living in this new world, the tragedy is ongoing.

Grief is a subject that comes up in many of your works. Is there a reason you’re interested in exploring the many avenues of grief through the perspectives of young people?

I think it’s something we all encounter. It’s fundamental. When we lose someone to dementia, to death, to turning into a bird, we are confronting what it is to be a human being, and that’s always true.