In her verse novel Sync, author Ellen Hopkins’s first YA since People Kill People in 2018, 17-year-old twins Storm and Lake struggle to navigate the foster care system and all the complications that come with it. After enduring a childhood of abuse and neglect, the twins are admitted into the California foster care system and separated from each other. Following a brief period in juvenile detention, Storm finds stability with his single foster parent. Lake, meanwhile, is staying with a deeply religious family and pursuing a romantic relationship with a fellow foster in secret. After reuniting for an afternoon, Lake and Storm are ripped apart again when their worlds simultaneously implode. Hopkins spoke with PW about complex sibling and child/caregiver relationships and ways adults can step up for children in need.

What was the catalyst behind Storm and Lake’s story?

In 2012, I founded Ventana Sierra, a nonprofit that took kids off the street and put them into safe housing and helped them get into college or trade programs. A lot of those kids were aged out foster kids. So I became really interested in the pros and cons of the foster care system. There are very good people working within that system, and there are also some not so good people. I’ve also worked a lot with kids within juvenile justice systems. It just seemed like a group that we don’t talk about a lot. I really wanted to give people a kind of straightforward view of what the system can be like for those kids.

Complex parent-child relationships have been an essential aspect of your work. What new ground did you aim to cover in this novel?

I wanted to show what happens when there’s a lack of good solid parenting or parent-adjacent relationship. But at the same time, both Storm and Lake eventually end up with caregivers who actually do provide for them what their own parents did not. I think looking at the people who step in and step up for kids who have been basically deserted by their parents is really important. I wanted to honor that relationship and also point out that this is a situation in which other people could step up.

You use unsent letters and mental musings between the twins—who are constantly pursuing their “sync”—as the primary storytelling vehicle. Can you elaborate on this choice?

The relationship between twins is one that I’ve always wanted to explore. And maybe I’m also a little jealous that I never had something like that, so I created it for myself. There’s a bond between twins that I’ve noticed from my own friendships and people I know who are twins that other people don’t always recognize. And I think it’s more than just a physical thing. It really does have a mental component. I do think that there’s something about sharing a very intimate space for nine months that creates a bond for sure. So when that bond is broken, like it is in the case of Storm and Lake, it has the capacity to be very intense and real, and I was eager to recreate and explore that.

You were adopted at birth by an older couple and have taken guardianship of—and subsequently adopted—several children over the years. How did these experiences impact the way you approached writing Sync?

At this point [my husband and I] have raised, like, three generations. We still have a 15-year-old in the house. So we’ve been watching how issues affect kids for years, even how the pandemic and lockdown affected them, which I touch on a bit in Sync. To say that life is more difficult for them than it was for my generation isn’t necessarily true, but I think they face different kinds of challenges and distractions. Knowing that I have adult readers as well as teens definitely influences how I approach writing a book, because I know that my writing can give some kind of perspective to adult readers—as well as younger readers—about the kinds of things kids like Storm and Lake go through.

I hope that my readers always come away with the idea that everybody goes through some pretty bad times, but there is light out there past all that darkness. That’s always been something that I wanted to encourage people who are going through that phase of their life to remember: this is going to be temporary. You can make it through to the other side. To really understand joy, you have to understand pain as well. That’s when you know the difference. If we can grow from the dark part, learn something from it, it can help us move forward into a better place.

Sync by Ellen Hopkins. Penguin/Paulsen, $20.99 Aug. 27, ISBN 978-0-593-46324-6