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" From gritty Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I step inside the cozy Caf\u00E9 Zona Sur to talk with Katherine Faw Morris about her adrenaline rush of a debut novel, Young God (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which is already garnering heady praise and serious international buzz. I walk past a young woman with long blond hair who&amp;#039;s wearing an animal-print jacket, skinny jeans, knee-high boots, and blue-glitter nail polish. Bold eyeliner makes her almond-shape eyes pop when she looks up from checking her phone. Her vibe is more edgy than Morris&amp;#039; chignon-coiffed author photo.  But then she approaches me and introduces herself. Poised, confident, and direct, the 30-year-old Morris cops to this being her first sit-down interview for Young God and says, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the first book I ever finished.&amp;quot; A stark, seductive coming-of-age tale about ambitious, rebellious 13-year-old Nikki, the novel spans one wild summer in the drug, violence, and poverty-ridden Appalachian hills that Nikki calls home. Bravely, Morris trimmed the story down from 100,000 to 22,000 raw, tense, and poetically incandescent words. Reading it is like having a bottle rocket go off in your hands. Related: &amp;#039;Room&amp;#039; Author Emma Donoghue Is Back With a New, Thrilling Novel &amp;quot;Nikki is all to hell,&amp;quot; it begins. &amp;quot;A boy jumps off the cliff in front of her. She peers over the edge, watching him go.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Nikki.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She clenches her toes. The river is druggy and yellow and slugs next to the bottom road for miles before suddenly whipping itself into rapids and dumping, white and frothy, over the edge of this cliff.&amp;quot; Related: &amp;#039;Family Life&amp;#039;: A Novel That Reads Your Mind Like Nikki, Morris hails from northwestern North Carolina; unlike her heroine, Morris&amp;#039; family was not impoverished. Her father ran an insurance business, and her mom liked to take Morris and her two siblings traveling. Growing up, Morris volunteers, she had not one but two imaginary friends\u2014Tuesday and Thursday. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t remember what they looked like, but they were powerful presences. As a writer, the way I think about stories comes from my film-school background\u2014but I&amp;#039;ve also always had a camera in my head. &amp;quot;I wanted to write a story about a young girl who is not a victim, even when everything in her life has gone wrong,&amp;quot; Morris says about Young God. &amp;quot;I wanted her to be someone who was in charge. I really wanted her to be a queen of the underworld. It&amp;#039;s summer and she&amp;#039;s 13, that time when everything&amp;#039;s happening.&amp;quot; Morris says her own revolt came in response to her parents&amp;#039; divorce when she was 11 but was also fueled by her own &amp;quot;innate rage.&amp;quot; Soon she was dating &amp;quot;guys in their twenties&amp;quot; with cars who introduced her to all the risky pleasures and lethal dangers that mark the divide -between Appalachia&amp;#039;s haves and have-nots. At 17, the precocious, adventurous Morris left the rugged region to study film at New York University; after one semester she transferred to NYU&amp;#039;s Gallatin School, where she got a liberal-arts degree, and then earned an MFA in writing from Columbia University. Seven years ago she married Donald Morris, creative director of the hip-hop monthly The Source. The couple lives in Sunset Park with their two pit bulls, Fela (as in Kuti) and Meyer (as in Lansky), who are Morris&amp;#039; boon companions when she&amp;#039;s at home working on her second novel. These powerful dogs are in no way imaginary; they are the real deal, possessing intelligent reflexes and headstrong brawn\u2014like their focused mistress, an old soul who can rock a hard-core urban style. This article appeared in the May 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a12719/young-god-katherine-faw-morris-book-review/>