The Naturals
The Naturals
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes on The Naturals
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A genre shift with a Ph.D. behind itBarnes came to realistic thriller from paranormal YA, a move that sounds like a market pivot but was actually a homecoming. She had been a mystery reader since elementary school, long before she became a novelist, and the genre had never left her.
I have been a huge mystery/thriller reader since the fourth grade, when I read my first Mary Higgins Clark book. As a YA writer, I started off writing paranormal YA, way back in 2006, and I transitioned from writing paranormal to writing realistic thrillers when I sold my Naturals series in 2011.
bookpeopleteens.wordpress.com, “TTBF Author Interview: Jennifer Lynn Barnes – BookPeople’s Teen Press Corps”Once the genre was settled, Barnes needed a protagonist. The question she asked about Cassie — what kind of childhood produces a natural profiler, someone who reads people the way others read text — became the engine that built every character in the ensemble, not just the lead.
I started with the skills I wanted each of the Naturals to have and then asked myself what kind of childhood would have led a person to developing those skills. Once I knew something about the way each character had grown up, I started to flesh out their personalities.
Beyond the mystery plot, Barnes had a second structural goal for the series: she wanted readers to experience, through Cassie, the specific relief of being understood by a group for the first time. That intent connects directly to research she had conducted on what fiction does for readers psychologically.
In The Naturals, Cassie had never met anyone like herself in her life and then all of a sudden she’s part of the Naturals which is this tight knit group of people who really get her and I just love that theme.
bookpeopleteens.wordpress.com, “Interview: Jennifer Lynn Barnes – BookPeople’s Teen Press Corps”The found-family arc is not incidental to the thriller plot. For Barnes, it is the emotional reason the book exists.
How she wrote it
Backward from ability to damageMichael Townsend’s ability to read emotions at a glance, one of the book’s five exceptional skills, did not come from a decision to write a charming character. It came from Barnes’s knowledge of emotion science and a specific logic about what environments force a person to develop that kind of perceptual precision.
based on my familiarity with the psychology of emotion, I knew I wanted to have an emotion reader. It made sense to me that in order to become as good at reading emotions as Michael is, that ability would have had to be honed in an environment where the ability to read emotions was a matter of survival. So I knew from very early on that Michael had grown up with a father who was physically abusive, unpredictable, and eerily good at masking his own emotions.
Lia, the team’s lie-detector, was not in the original book proposal at all. She arrived uninvited when Barnes got Cassie to the house on the page, and once she existed, her psychological profile snapped into place almost immediately.
The initial proposal for the book series only had four Naturals: Michael, Dean, Sloane, and Cassie. And then when I got Cassie to the house, Lia just appeared on the page. I knew immediately that I wanted her ability to be deception detection, because there’s some fascinating scientific research on that topic. And it made sense to me that the lie detector would be someone who doesn’t trust people, holds them at a distance, and is incredibly proficient at lying herself.
Dean’s backstory was one of the few that Barnes designed from the top down, as a deliberate structural counterweight to Cassie rather than as a character who emerged organically. The symmetry between them is load-bearing: it shapes how each one profiles and what each one fears.
I chose Dean’s background—and his affinity for the darker aspects of profiling—because I wanted someone whose past mirrored Cassie’s, but flipped things around. Her mom is a victim. His father is a killer. There’s a twisted symmetry in that, and you can see it play out in the way each of them profiles.
On the plot side, Barnes locked down the answer to every mystery before she wrote a single scene. Knowing the killer in advance meant she could plant everything the Naturals would eventually read, rather than retrofitting clues around a solution she discovered late.
I always knew the answer to the main mystery before I began writing the book. That means that for my Naturals series, I always knew who the killer was before I started writing.
The personal thread
Cassie as a self-portraitBarnes has said she relates to Cassie more than to any other character she has written, and the reason has nothing to do with profiling ability. It is about the specific social experience of adolescence: the feeling of being perceptibly different before you have found the group where that difference becomes an asset.
I definitely relate the most to Cassie. I feel like especially at the beginning she hasn’t found her place yet. Feels a little distance from other people, feels like she’s different from other people and other people pick up on that fact. That very much is kind of how I felt in high school.
bookpeopleteens.wordpress.com, “Interview: Jennifer Lynn Barnes – BookPeople’s Teen Press Corps”That same pull toward other minds, toward understanding people from the inside, drove Barnes into both fiction and psychology. She has described the two careers not as parallel interests but as expressions of the same original appetite.
I actually think at its core, the draw to psychology was very much the same thing that’s always drawn me to fiction, which is the minds of others. Like, when you read a book, you can actually get inside someone else’s head in the way that you never could in reality.
For Barnes, Cassie’s gift for entering other people’s perspectives is not a superpower borrowed from crime television. It is a fictionalized version of something Barnes has spent her academic and creative life chasing.
On what the book is wrestling with
Reading people versus knowing themThe Naturals are the best readers of people in any room they enter. Barnes, writing from her background as a research psychologist, built a caution into that premise: the brain’s tendency toward confirmation bias means that being skilled at reading people can make you more confidently wrong, not less.
I think it’s often easy to trick ourselves into thinking we know other people — who they really are — far better than we actually do. And because the human brain operates with what psychologists call a confirmation bias, that means that once you develop a theory about someone, you’re likely to search out information that confirms that theory and systematically ignore everything else.
Barnes also designed the series to give readers something the characters are themselves learning to find: the experience of belonging to a group that genuinely sees you. She frames this as a deliberate craft goal rooted in psychological research on what fiction actually does for the people who read it.
One of the things that psychologists think that fiction can do for us is fulfill what is called ‘the need to belong.’ In each of my books, I try to give readers something—a group, a family, a team—to belong to.
Asked to compress the whole premise into its shortest possible form, Barnes delivered an answer that doubles as a pitch and a warning about what the book’s teenage protagonists are actually doing inside a federal program built for adults.
Teenage Criminal Minds.
bookpeopleteens.wordpress.com, “Interview: Jennifer Lynn Barnes – BookPeople’s Teen Press Corps”What she wants us to sit with
The gap between a profile and a personSloane, the team’s statistical analyst, was built from research on the relationship between systemizing and empathizing: people who excel at rules-based systems often process people differently than those whose primary gift is social. Barnes used that specific tension to make Sloane both the most intellectually precise Natural and the one most visibly navigating what other people take for granted.
Sloane’s numerical abilities (and large bits of her character) were inspired by research on the relationship between systemizing (understanding of rules-based systems) and empathizing (understanding of people).
The book’s deepest question is whether Cassie’s skill at reading crime scenes, profiles, and people around her brings her closer to truth or gives her a more sophisticated version of the same illusion everyone else lives inside. Barnes set that question up from the first page and left the series room to complicate it across four sequels.
I think it’s often easy to trick ourselves into thinking we know other people — who they really are — far better than we actually do. And because the human brain operates with what psychologists call a confirmation bias, that means that once you develop a theory about someone, you’re likely to search out information that confirms that theory and systematically ignore everything else.
Cassie solves murders. She is also a teenager with a theory about everyone she meets. Barnes, who spent years running a research lab on the cognitive science of fiction, would not let those two facts sit comfortably together.