Stacey Lee: The Story Announced Itself

Stacey Lee is the New York Times-bestselling author of historical young adult fiction, including The Downstairs Girl, a Reese’s Book Pick; Luck of the Titanic, which received five starred reviews; and Outrun the Moon, winner of the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature. A native of southern California and fourth-generation Chinese American, she is a founder of the We Need Diverse Books movement and writes stories for all kids (even the ones who look like adults). Follow her on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

In this interview, Stacey discusses how brainstorming first sentences with her daughter led to her new gothic novel, Heiress of Nowhere, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Stacey Lee
Literary agent: Kristin Nelson
Book title: Heiress of Nowhere
Publisher: Simon & Schuster / Sarah Barley Books
Release date: March 17, 2025
Genre/category: Historical gothic mystery
Previous titles: The Downstairs Girl, Luck of the Titanic, Outrun the Moon
Elevator pitch: An orphan races to uncover a killer—who may have come from the sea—when she and her beloved orcas fall under suspicion in this historical gothic mystery from the New York Times-bestselling author of The Downstairs Girl, Stacey Lee.

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I’ve been fascinated by the San Juan Islands ever since my 20s, when I first ferried there and felt the atmosphere change—forest meeting sea, rock spines rising like half-buried secrets, and those black-and-white leviathans that people still insist on calling “killer whales.” They are only 100 miles from Seattle and yet they feel like another country. The book didn’t start in an orderly way; my daughter and I were tossing out opening lines for fun and I said, out of nowhere, “A head washes up,” and that was that—the story announced itself.

Two to three years—which in writer-time feels less like a calendar and more like climbing a fog-soaked mountain, getting lost in a hemlock tangle, then stumbling out again with burrs in your hair. The idea did change. The longer I lived inside the island, the estate, the secrets in the mist, the more the story thickened. It got juicier the way stories do when the setting itself keeps handing you shadows.

One surprise was how much of the “tone” work still happens after the book is technically “done.” I had assumed once the plot was settled the rest would be light sanding, but a gothic atmosphere is a fragile thing—one wrong note can break the spell—so I was still refining mood and texture deep into the production stage. Another surprise, though a pleasant one, was how collaborative the process is when you have a good team: cover designers, copyeditors, marketers—all solving for the same invisible goal of how the story feels when it lands in the reader’s hands.

I learned that in this book, weather is not decoration, it is plot and mood and pressure. I had never before needed to build a literal weather-roadmap while revising a novel, but for this one I had to—day by day, scene by scene—because fog, rain, wind, and light govern how people move on that island, what they see or miss, and how danger hides. I knew atmosphere mattered, but I did not realize until late in the process that I needed to treat the weather like a character with its own arc in order for the gothic currents to ring true.

First, escape—the feeling of falling into a world that temporarily replaces your own. I never sit down to teach anything, but if the book sends a reader Googling or daydreaming or questioning something they thought they knew, that is a win. And because this novel lives at the intersection of humans and the more-than-human world, I hope it nudges people to see our interdependence a little more plainly.

Walk. It untangles knots on the page and in the head, and it keeps you alive long enough to finish the book.