Many fantasy stories close with the villains defeated and the heroes riding off into the sunset. Jordan Ifueko confronts the complex aftermath of revolution in her YA fantasy The Maid and the Crocodile, set 10 years after her Raybearer series. In the world of Aritsar, the class system divides residents into the rich or the poor, and orphaned Sade is of the latter. But Sade can literally eat curses, and it’s that skill that draws the eye of the mysterious crocodile god who needs help, and a rich hotel owner who exploits her workers at any cost. It is up to Sade to break the status quo, as she learns to overcome her past to fight for a brighter future. PW spoke with Ifueko about the complexities within a revolution, the power of unity, and offering a new look at the world she created with her popular debut duology.
The Maid and the Crocodile is set in the same universe as the Raybearer series, but a decade later. Why did you decide to do a time jump for this novel? And how does this book recontextualize the events of the first two books?
The first two books of the Raybearer world are more typical for a YA adventure, where you have an empire with secret skeletons and closets, and you have a heroine who’s willing to change this world and the status quo for the better. A lot of fantasy, especially YA fantasy, stops at the end of the revolution. You have the righteous woman who is willing to risk her life to be brave and change the system, or at least bring down the last system. That’s where most of them end, and then you presume it’s a happily ever after. But what’s more interesting to me is what does the world look like the day after the revolution? What does it look like after a year? What does it look like after 10 years? Because that’s when the story gets even more complicated. I wanted to dismantle the idea that if you have one super powerful person with a good heart, that will fix everything. As much as I love the heroine of my last books, and as much as she represents everything that virtuous power could be, I wanted to write a fantasy book that talks about what happens when there’s simply too much space between the most powerful person and the least powerful person in any government.
How did you craft the character of Sade?
Every time I come up with a new character, they are generally a mix of a bunch of inspirations that I didn’t even know were inspiring me over the years. There are lots of odes to Howl’s Moving Castle, a fairy tale from the ’70s by Diana Wynne Jones that I’m fond of because the heroine spends most of her time as an old woman. She’s a young lady who has a curse put on her to be an old woman, and that acts as a metaphor for how she limits and sees herself. She’s pessimistic about her own potential. That’s an aspect that I really liked because it’s such an interesting obstacle. But I wanted to make it more complicated with Sade because the idea of “the power was in you all along” is true to a certain degree, but only on a collective level. The truth is, one person at the bottom of a really exploitative system? The power is not in them to change it. The power is in their class of people to change it. It’s not that I need to become a kick-ass heroine. It’s that all of us in the same situation need to band together and fight for each other, because we always outnumber whoever’s at the top trying to exploit us.
Other characters often offer advice about how they believe Sade should use her powers. Can you talk about the intersection of class and agency that this novel explores through Sade’s perspective?
There are lots of different characters in Sade’s life, some of whom are completely self-serving in their aims and others are way more philanthropic. Generally, because of how society is structured, even on the “good side,” there are people who naturally were born into more influence and more power, and sometimes those voices can drown out the least powerful even of the group they’re supposedly fighting for. Sade has to somehow improve her situation while still pushing back at even the philanthropic people who are trying to help her by trying to tell her exactly how she should achieve her own liberation, and even taking choices away from her in that aspect.
This novel toys with the impact notoriety can have on activists. How did that concept come to you? Have you seen this in real life?
It might be controversial to say this, but as necessary as revolutionaries are, a lot of revolutionaries in their personal sphere aren’t always great community members. When you have someone who is so driven and focused on wider structural concerns, to the point where it basically becomes their career, a lot of personal things can slip under the cracks. They can be domineering and dehumanizing to the people directly around them, even if they’re improving the world on a large scale. That’s something I’ve seen happen not only in personal activism circles, but historically as well. There’s a repeated historical thing where when the revolutionaries win, a lot of the people who were good at mobilizing people to bring down power structures are fairly bad at planting gardens. After you have taken down a corrupt power system, the world needs people who are good at planting, rather than just tearing down, even though the tearing down is necessary as part of the process. So often, those two skill sets are assumed to be in the same person and it’s not. You have these societies that are now led by these militaristic people who were very good at taking down the previous regime, but not good at building a new one.
Can you share a bit about your own experiences with activism? Has it impacted the way you shaped this novel?
It has. You meet so many people when you’re part of any movement. You slowly realize how many different people come to it for different reasons. For some people, it’s an identity thing. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve moved the needle, as long as you feel like you are saying the righteous things, and you have the current righteous opinions of the moment. You see a lot of people whose activism amounts to being the first to speak out about something on social media, even if they aren’t willing to do the community building work that causes long-term change. In contrast, there are some amazing, beautiful people who you’ll barely ever see online. But they’re the ones who are holding a community down, who cause an activism movement to gain legs to last. They’re building these relationships, so that when you have an activism community, it is actually a community.
Why was it a priority to highlight the love and the joy that Sade and the Amenities, her coworkers at the inn, experienced together, not only their pain?
That is the true happily ever after of this fairy tale. It’s [about] what are the conditions in which not only you and the handsome man you’re in love with, but also your community, can thrive and be happy and support each other, and have agency over your own situation? Found family is going to be a recurring theme in pretty much everything I will ever write. It’s something that’s important to me. I think it is just as magical as romance. That’s one of the most beautiful things about humanity. There’s lots of found family in the Raybearer books as well. But I think there’s so much about any exploitative system that intentionally pits people of that exploited class against each other. That’s a huge way that those systems operate. When you unite, even if it’s not formally for the purpose of revolution, when you see each other as companions, and you see the people controlling you, as the opposition, even that tiny little shift is, can make a big crack in an exploitative system.
This book showcases how the victory of Tarasai doesn’t exactly lead to a happily ever after, and that there is always more work for us to do. What words of encouragement can you offer to those like Sade, who are next in line to pick up where their predecessors left off?
That your ordinary is sacred. This is one of the last lines of the books, after the end. You see another character speak and he says, “I hope you grow to love your ordinary as I have grown to love mine.” Because I think it’s a trap to look at all the most prosperous places in the world, which are often based on exploitation, and think that your happily ever after lies in somehow mimicking the societies they have managed to make for the most comfortable. I don’t think that means you should romanticize your life if you don’t have the basics you need to survive. I think that’s also a trap. I’m saying that Sade’s happily ever after doesn’t come in not being a domestic worker. It comes in fighting for conditions that are comfortable and livable and have dignity. The Maid and the Crocodile isn’t a story about a maid who becomes a princess. It’s about a maid who changes how the world thinks about maids.
What’s next for you?
I am working on a middle grade book, my first contemporary fantasy, with a brand-new cast of characters. It’s definitely more humorous than my other books, but I can never stay away from real-world structural concerns. Usually my heroines are very anxious about their big destinies and their purposes. This one is not. She’s like, “No, I’m actually a genius though.” And I love heroines like that. She’s been a joy to write, definitely a change of pace from my previous main characters. It’s slated for 2026, fingers crossed.
The Maid and the Crocodile: A Novel in the World of Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko. Amulet, $19.99 Aug. 13 ISBN 978-1-4197-6435-6
