Cameron Kelly Rosenblum is the author of the young adult novel The Sharp Edge of Silence. She also has written the YA novel The Stepping Off Place. She lives on the Maine coast.
Q: What inspired you to write The Sharp Edge of Silence, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: Whew! This is a rugged question to begin with when it comes to this book, which is about a girl struggling to reclaim herself after a sexual assault. But let’s dive in.
As I explain in the Author’s Note, the bones of the story have been floating around my head since I was 16, when I experienced a violent sexual assault by a classmate. I escaped, but those frightening, dehumanizing moments were enough to shake my self-confidence for years.
It was the ‘80s. I kept it secret from all adults and male friends; the few girlfriends who knew helped me try to laugh it off and put it behind me. (Love them!) Truthfully, I could have used some therapy.
My attacker eventually went to prison for viciously raping of two younger local girls. There were allegedly more victims, but for years he fooled everyone, getting by on good looks, athleticism, the willful ignorance of others, and silenced girls.
Fast forward to 2014. A highly publicized rape trial in New Hampshire, involving a similar suspect on an elite boarding school campus, bore eerie resemblances to that early case. The survivor, 15 when attacked, managed to hold her own in court under brutal cross examination, and won.
I was astounded by her bravery, along with the courage of those two younger women in my hometown. All of them had to endure a sandstorm of public criticism.
In both cases, the community (said hometown, the prep school) would have preferred silence to the unwelcome media spotlight calling its cultural mores into question. A high tuition boarding school has a vested interest in hushing any story of sexual misconduct.
With my book, I wanted to tell a post-#MeToo version of this story, where the rules might be clearer but bad things happen anyway, and the hurdles for survivor justice persist. According to rainn.org, at least two of every three sexual assaults go unreported. It’s sobering statistics like this that inspired me to write a revenge plot.
As for the character development, I knew from the beginning I wanted to bring deep nuance to the topic. Sexual assaults often come down to “he said-she said,” leaving it up to outsiders, biased in many directions, to determine the “truth.”
To reflect this, I went with multiple POVs. Quinn, or Q, without hope of legally prosecuting her perpetrator, covers her despair with rage. She goes vigilante.
To offset her emotional intensity, I created Charlotte, a people-pleasing girl. She loves her school and never questions its elitist and thinly veiled sexist climate.
To help differentiate the two female narrators, I worked hard to give them different voices. Q is artsy and musical in a hippie-chick way, while Charlotte is a high-achieving ballet dancer—creative, but within rigid expectations.
Meanwhile, Max allowed me dig into the toxic male culture brewing beneath the surface of Lycroft Phelps. I really do not believe all men are abusive wolves and I did not want that to be anyone’s takeaway from the book.
Max’s trajectory is from disgruntled outsider to socially empowered varsity athlete when he’s unexpectedly recruited as a coxswain. He gets invited to … well, no spoilers, but when he realizes his popularity means compromising everything he always thought he stood for, he has hard choices to make.
There’s an unconventional fourth POV: the school’s. Through texts, news articles, and emails, the administration’s desire to squelch Q’s experience is revealed. Taken altogether, I hope I created a compelling, realistic page-turner with a satisfying but realistic resolution.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: We had a hard time with the title, honestly. I’m grateful for my agent Allie Levick’s and my editor Karen Chaplin’s input. We wanted to convey the notion of darkness lurking beneath a shiny façade. I tried playing on metaphors with rowing and water, slicing glassy lake surfaces and such.
The Edge of Silence came out of that brainstorming somehow, and Allie suggested adding “Sharp” purely for the rhythm of it. I love how it captures the danger of keeping silent, which works for all the characters in different ways, but most profoundly for Q.
Q: The writer Jennifer Niven said of the book, “The Sharp Edge of Silence is a searingly honest story of sexual assault and one girl’s journey to fight for herself in the aftermath. But it’s also about friendship and finding one’s voice.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love Jennifer and was so flattered by this description. Also, she nailed it. I wanted to show how a willingness to let your friends help you can be lifesaving and beautiful, and how collectively we can create change better than any one of us can alone.
It’s true with the boys, too. The culture of the rowing team’s Varsity 1 boat is the opposite of toxic: mutual respect, camaraderie, teamwork, and a “stronger together” attitude. Both can and do happen, but one is so much healthier!
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: My dream is for an all-male high school to use it for a schoolwide read. We need to frame toxic masculinity as a social contagion that can be prevented through conversation and guidance from all the good men out there who hate locker room bull**it.
Let’s teach boys what positive masculinity looks like. We can’t afford to leave the teaching to the internet. It’s absurd to me that there isn’t already a huge push for this out there.
More generally, my goal from the jump was to get young people (and their adults) to think about where they stand on big, important questions around loyalty, peer influence, bodily autonomy, and complacency vs. moral responsibility.
All three narrators, Quinn, the survivor, Charlotte, the super-achiever, and Max, the nerd-turned-cool guy, are forced to define their character one way or the other amidst huge personal stakes.
The marketing tagline of the fictional boarding school is, “Who will you be at Lycroft Phelps?” What if this were you? That’s the question I’m asking readers to answer. Who would you be?
On a side note, I’ve been so gratified by the response from assault survivors thanking me for putting words to their feelings. Q’s voice was at times so emotionally draining to write. I’m honored she could help others.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Ooh, I can’t say much, but my third book is in the works. I’m thrilled for the Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination for The Sharp Edge of Silence, as my work-in-progress is another mystery-thriller with characters I love.
It’s set in Boston. My debut (The Stepping Off Place) was set in Maine and Connecticut, my second book New Hampshire, and now Massachusetts. I guess I better start thinking about a Vermont book next. Or Rhode Island. Stay tuned!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I always like to make people aware of the HarperCollins audio version of The Sharp Edge of Silence, because it has a cast of voice actors rather than just one actor. It’s perfectly suited to the story and really brings it to life. Max’s actor couldn’t fit my imagined version any better.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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