In the Veins of the Drowning
In the Veins of the Drowning
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Kalie Cassidy on In the Veins of the Drowning
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Belonging everywhere and nowhere at onceThe book began with a personal wound before it became a fantasy novel. Cassidy grew up half Puerto Rican and half Irish on the Pacific coast of Southern California, and the experience of existing between two heritages without fully landing in either gave the project its first engine.
I began writing the book as an exploration of my experience as a person of mixed-race — that odd feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.
That feeling of displacement had a specific, public texture: other people’s certainty about who she was. At the cover reveal, she named the mechanism precisely, grounding the novel’s identity themes in something that happened to her repeatedly, not abstractly.
My outward appearance didn’t necessarily reflect my heritage. I’ve lived my life listening to people’s opinions of what and who I am based on my name and the color of my skin.
The ocean arrived as a second, separate origin point. Growing up swimming in the Pacific gave her a firsthand relationship with the sea as something genuinely threatening, and that physical memory became structural.
The root of this book was, like, I grew up on the Pacific Ocean. I learned to swim in the ocean. It’s terrifying. And so that was very much I was like, ‘Hey, the sea’s scary. I’m going to incorporate that into a book.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Siren mythology had been accumulating in her thinking for years, and what drew her was not the creature’s appearance but its function: across centuries of art and folklore, from winged to scaled to nearly human, one thing never changed. She wanted to write toward that constant rather than away from it.
The threat is always the same. And the threat is always that they will be the downfall of men. And so I really wanted to play with that idea, which is why the themes of power are so prevalent in this story. [paraphrased from audio]
Hans Christian Andersen’s original Little Mermaid, which she read at nine, was also in the room. She described the finished novel at SDCC 2025 as definitely not a retelling, but shaped by those older, darker sources where the siren’s power costs something real.
How she wrote it
A lantern in the dark, a knife in revisionA decade as a theater actor and acting coach left a permanent mark on her sequence of decisions. She builds from character outward, not from plot inward, and that priority determined everything from scene construction to the choice of first-person narration.
Characters are like the first, first thing that come for me and then I’m filling in behind. [paraphrased from audio]
First-person point of view followed directly from that character-first method. Restricting the reader to Imogen’s knowledge was a formal commitment, not a default, and she framed it in terms of the reading experience she was engineering.
The reader only knowing what Imogen knows and only learning it as she learns it... as close to an immersive sort of reading experience that we can get. [paraphrased from audio]
Her drafting method is improvisational within a loose frame, but the metaphor she chose at SDCC 2025 reveals why the books feel tense rather than sprawling: she is always just ahead of darkness, not surveying the whole field.
I frame out the garden and then I go in and let it, let the seeds grow... I’m carrying a lantern and I can see maybe three chapters ahead, and those are going to be detailed and plotted, and then it’s darkness, so as we get there it reveals itself. [paraphrased from audio]
Where drafting allows discovery, editing demands economy. She described her revision practice as an act of compression, and the image she used makes clear this is not a gentle pass.
I’m a very tight editor. I’m like, how can I take a knife to this and pick the most impactful words, say the least while saying the most. [paraphrased from audio]
The two-tiered magic system in The Siren Mage, the series in which Imogen navigates a world where some power is inherited and other power is earned through labor, was built to carry a specific argument. Cassidy was deliberate about the asymmetry from the start.
I was very clear in wanting to have two different types of power. One that people are born with and one that people have to work to earn... we have one that is an inherent privilege and we have one that is really hard fought. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The book she grew into alongside itThe novel had a long gestation, moving through multiple iterations before it reached publication. In an Instagram post Cassidy shared at her cover reveal, she described the years of drafts not as wasted time but as parallel growth: the book changed because she did.
I remember starting it many years ago, not knowing anything at all about novel writing, about the journey it would take me on, or the people it would bring into my life. This book has changed so much. It has moved from one iteration to the next, and I grew and changed alongside it too.
The character at the center of the book carries the same duality Cassidy built her personal question around: not one thing or the other, but both simultaneously. She was specific about why that tension could not be resolved into something tidier.
Imogen is brave and fearful, selfish and caring. She’s both a goddess and a monster. That duality was so important to me for her character.
On what the book is wrestling with
Shape-shifting as survival, fantasy as argumentThe siren mythology’s centuries of formal change, from winged to finned to nearly human, was not just a research curiosity. Cassidy read it as a record of adaptation under pressure, and that reading became one of the book’s animating claims.
Women have had to sort of shape-shift to keep themselves safe, to fight, to preserve themselves in so many ways. And we see that in the sirens in this book as well. [paraphrased from audio]
She pushed back in one interview against readers who found Imogen difficult to inhabit. The frustration those readers felt, she argued, is not a flaw in the characterization but evidence of a double standard that the book is actively examining.
I think that there are a subset of readers who do not like when female characters are traumatized, messy, struggling, are not an easy self-insert... a male character will be allowed so much more leeway than a female character will be. [paraphrased from audio]
Her answer to those readers was not to apologize for Imogen but to reframe the messiness as the whole point: she described the full arc, trauma and all, as the most honest way to celebrate a woman on the page.
She has been consistent about why she chose fantasy as the vehicle for these conversations rather than, say, a contemporary novel. The argument she makes is that the genre comes with political obligations, not just decorative freedom.
If there’s any genre that is political, it’s fantasy and we should use it as such. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
The whole of herBelonging is the book’s stated intention, and at the cover reveal Cassidy made a move she repeats consistently: she rooted the theme in autobiography and then opened it outward, arguing that what feels personal is in fact structural to how humans organize themselves.
This story’s central theme is one of belonging and identity, and while I wrote it from the perspective of my heritage, I think that those themes are incredibly universal. Belonging and identity are central to our humanity and the relationships and communities we choose to be in.
The romance in the book is not separate from the identity argument; it is designed to dramatize it. The two central characters are chosen because they are maximally ill-suited to agree, which means their relationship becomes the site where the novel’s claims about prejudice and understanding get tested.
The dynamic between our two love interests forces them to understand each other’s different lived experiences and challenge their prejudices. I hope readers enjoy how their growing understanding of each other and themselves brings them together — even in the face of terrifying obstacles.
She described the romances she writes in terms of function rather than feeling. The catalyst frame makes clear what she is asking the reader to track: not just whether the couple ends up together, but what each person had to dismantle in themselves to get there.
The romances I like to write are about two people who are best suited to force each other to change. They are each other’s catalyst. [paraphrased from audio]