Don’t Skip the Thought: A Rialto Discussion with Kate Milford

*sigh*

Folks… I dunno. It can be disheartening being in this business sometimes. Folks disparaging the whole of children’s literature in the 21st century isn’t anything new, but can I be honest? When people say that the bulk of books for kids today aren’t great, they’re (a) wrong and (b) just talking about fictional picture books. Which is more than a little limiting. Let me tell you a story then.

In the year 2010 (so, a good sixteen years ago) I encountered a middle grade novel called The Boneshaker. It was a little confusing at the time because in that exact same year there was an adult fantasy novel by Cherie Priest by the same name (ya can’t copyright a name!). I read the book and at the tender age of 34 I was utterly and wholly charmed by it. To me, it seemed to glean the best elements of my favorite author of all time, Ray Bradbury. There was, in fact, more than a hint of Something Wicked This Way Comes to the entire affair. What I didn’t realize at the time was that its author, Kate Milford, was using that book to begin to spread her wings. And spread them she did.

Now the year is 2026. There have been now been 10 books in the Roamers series, the latest of which is Rialto. Released last month, Rialto is one of those books that you could read completely on its own without any knowledge of the others in this series. But if I’m going to be honest, the kid that reads at least a couple of these books together is going to get SO much out of this latest. That said, check out this boss description:

“Ivy and Dahlia Vicar know this summer’s trip to visit friends in Rialto, Missouri, is going to be different from their usual family vacations.

Twelve-year-old Dahlia, an artist who lives with anxiety, is looking forward to something new. Rialto, after all, has its own abandoned theme park! But mystery-loving, fourteen-year-old Ivy is struggling with how to be the right kind of big sister to Dahlia, and longs for the way things—especially vacations—were when they were younger.

In Rialto, it quickly becomes clear that this vacation will also be different in totally unexpected ways. For one thing, the town stands in the middle of an improbable forest that, according to local legend, swallowed it overnight decades before. Then there are Dahlia’s even more improbable sightings of impossible creatures—a giraffe with antlers and a leopard with wings. And there’s their new friend Remy, whose family inherited the house they’re all staying in from an aunt who left bequests for local friends that Remy must personally distribute.

When he enlists Ivy and Dahlia to help deliver these gifts, they find themselves drawn into a mystery going back to the time when Rialto Park was still open. And it begins to seem that, if they are going to help Remy solve it, they will have to find a way to believe in magic.

Themes of friendship, family, mental health, and resilience are expertly woven through this magical, richly imagined story of two sisters and an enigmatic town that transforms everyone who visits it. “

It has cover art from Arch Apolar. It has interior illustrations by James Firnhaber. And it has me asking Kate Milford a whole slew of questions here today.

---

BB: Kate! Such a thrill to talk to you about RIALTO today! It’s been a day or two since we were last in this world. How did you come up with the idea of an abandoned theme park? What is RIALTO’S origin story?

Kate Milford: So delightful to talk to you, too! And it has been a while, hasn’t it? It’s funny, actually, I went back and looked, and my earliest notes about this book were from like 2010, and they were about an entirely different potential story. About the only thing that remained in the final version of that original idea was a link to Venice, though even that link is different in the story that eventually became RIALTO. That early idea didn’t have the theme park angle, and that was so early in my career that I also hadn’t envisioned it as being connected to the other books (or book, really, because at that point the only thing I’d published was THE BONESHAKER). I am trying to remember now at what point I changed everything. When Clarion bought RIALTO, I was using a synopsis that reflected some of the earlier idea, but now it also had a sort of kitschy roadside attraction–not quite an amusement park, but like Rialto Park it was abandoned, and also, in its way, magical. (My love of oddball roadside attractions goes just about as deep as my love of amusement parks.)

The thing I love about theme parks in particular is (this will just shock you) the worldbuilding. A really well-made theme park makes you believe that the place you’re experiencing just might continue out of sight behind every door and window, even if intellectually you know some of them are just set dressing and the rest lead to break rooms and electrical closets and what-have-you. Ever since the days of family trips to Disneyworld when I was a kid, I was always as much in love with the detailed theming as I was with the actual rides, and the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean were formative bits of visual storytelling for me, from the entrances and queues all the way through the exits. They made me want to go home and write stories, and all these years later, I’m sure my early love of immersive, narrative places like theme parks contributed to how I wound up approaching my own invented worlds. And of course, abandoned–or just never finished–theme parks are out there to be found all over the world. When I was a kid in Maryland, we used to go to a very old, very handmade theme park called The Enchanted Forest that was maybe half an hour from my grandparents’ house in Catonsville. (Every time I smell the bromine that most parks use to treat their water, it takes me right back there.) It opened in the fifties and closed in the nineties, and for a long time it just sat abandoned off Route 40. Some of its structures have been relocated to a local petting zoo, and the rest of the grounds have been redeveloped, but in my heart it is still there, off of Route 40, hidden in the woods, waiting to be found and explored and still smelling of bromine. I wrote it into Nagspeake as the abandoned Fantasytowne all the way back in the days when Nagspeake was just the tourism website, and then I wrote it into THE THIEF KNOT, but I think The Enchanted Forest has been waiting in the back of my mind for a time to find its way into the Roaming World in a bigger way.

BB: One of these days you and I are going to hang out again and I’ll get to delve into your opinions on The House on the Rock. Meanwhile, I could be wrong, but I really feel that part of what makes RIALTO so satisfying is that while a kid may read it without seeing your previous books, it also offers explanations for Roamer-related mysteries that have come up in your other titles. Was that always the plan? Because I feel like this book, though it stands entirely on its own, clarifies your world building in new and exciting ways.  

Kate: It was definitely not always the plan. As I was typing up my answer to your previous question, I stopped and looked up the actual synopsis I sent my editor before she acquired RIALTO, and I can tell you that at the time the proposal sold, I still hadn’t planned to connect it to the Roaming World at all. But in the interim between selling it and actually sitting down to write it, I had started thinking about Rialto–both the park and the town–as a place with a deep connection to the Roamers. I had just finished THE RACONTEUR’S COMMONPLACE BOOK, and if I hadn’t written that one first, I don’t think RIALTO would have followed the trajectory it did. I have no idea what it would’ve been.

But then came the challenge of that standalone aspect you mentioned. My editor and I were in complete agreement that we really wanted new readers to be able to comfortably start their journey into the Roaming World here, but also to be able to put the book down after finishing it and feel completely satisfied even if it’s the only one they read. This is where the theme park aspect maybe does extra duty, because a theme park invites you to step temporarily into a potentially unfamiliar make-believe world, enter with a sense of wonder and play, and feel welcome in it even if you don’t know the underlying IP by heart. (For instance, I have somehow never watched even one of the Avatar movies, but I still think Pandora at Disneyworld is amazeballs.) And, of course, Ivy and Dahlia are complete outsiders when they arrive in Rialto. They step into the Roaming World the same way I entered the Enchanted Forest as a kid. 

And theme parks are amusement parks with unifying stories, so I started thinking about what stories a theme park built by Roamers would tell. What ‘lands’ would it contain? What kinds of rides and attractions and gift shops would it have? (Thought experiment: how would a Roamer with an extended lifespan design a land themed to the future?) And why would Roamers build a theme park at all? The hard thing was making choices about what to keep and what to leave out while also making sure the park had elements that didn’t come from the earlier books, hinting at an even larger world to explore. So threading that needle was…interesting. But endlessly fun. All of those questions kind of guided how I tried to tie it back to the wider Roaming World. 

BB: Adam Gidwitz said of the book that it was, “One of the most sensitive, realistic explorations of mental health I’ve yet seen in a middle grade novel.” He’s absolutely correct about that. You’ve managed to meld an incredible story of one sibling coming to terms with another sibling’s mental health issues and coping strategies WITH fantasy, seamlessly. Tell us a bit about why this aspect of the book was important for you to include.

Kate: I live with general anxiety and occasional depression and panic attacks and racing thoughts and social anxiety and all the things Dahlia lives with, though I didn’t really start to get help for it until well into adulthood. I think sometimes with mental health stories, there is a focus on a moment of realization or crisis and getting through that–and those stories are very important–but for most of those of us who deal with spicy brain chemistry, there’s a lifetime of maintenance afterward, which comes with its own constant adjustments and challenges. I wanted to show that after part, including the family dynamic, which for Ivy and Dahlia is complicated by the more mundane changes they’re experiencing as they become teenagers. I’m also the oldest of four, living in a different state from my younger siblings and their families, so I have had the experience over and over of trying to figure out how to be the big sister they need at any given time–including, I am sure, at plenty of times when they did not actually need me to big-sister them in any way. Each of them was part of the writing of this book, whether for emotional support, memory-dredging, or general ranting as I tried to get to the final version. 

BB: Along these same lines, in terms of mental health, what experts did you talk to? What research did you do? And how did you approach writing about it?

Kate: Oh boy, I had to totally change my approach midway through, at the point where I handed my first draft to my primary expert reader. Originally, I had put poor Dahlia through a slightly more traumatic mental-health crisis, and the events of the book took place about a year afterward. But my goal was always to show a family that was (at the time of the story) in a relatively healthy maintenance state, so I could focus on the girls’ struggles to find equilibrium and a more comfortable relationship with each other not only because of mental health stuff, but also because relationships between siblings change organically all the time. And let me tell you, that draft was messy in about five distinct ways, but I did think I had the mental health aspects kind of sorted out. And then I handed it to an old-school psychiatrist for a read. (I say old school because Dr. Pressman does both prescribing and talk therapy/counseling, which is relatively uncommon these days.) He called me when he’d finished and very gently asked, “Tell me what your intent with this book is.” And my stomach just sank down to my toes, because I understood that whatever I thought I’d done, I’d gotten something very wrong. He listened to my explanation of what I wanted the book to be, then said, “Okay, but this family that you’ve written is not actually handling things well.” Thus began my first major rewrite, which focused on changing Dahlia’s mental health challenges so that they align more closely with what I experience, and giving both Dahlia and her family better tools for managing them than I had been using myself. Those better tools include breathing techniques and progressive muscle relaxation, but Dr. Pressman also reiterated something that I gave to Dahlia and her dad as a kind of mantra: Don’t skip the thought. I am not a doctor and I’m paraphrasing, but the idea is that when we anxiety-havers have big or out-of-control feelings, there’s often a thought that sparked the emotion. It’s easy to focus on the feeling and try to will it away, but that doesn’t work as well as trying to identify the actual thought behind the emotion and (if possible) deciding if it’s a rational worry that needs to be addressed or not. For instance, in THE THIEF KNOT, Marzana uses a tactic of relying on a trusted friend to tell her whether she did okay in a social situation and then trying to just let go of the worry. I wrote that because it’s what I did myself for a long time, but what would work better would be for Marzana (and me) to figure out what we’re really worried will happen in those situations. Are we worried we might commit a faux pas of some kind? Are we afraid people generally don’t like us and wish we weren’t there at all? Are we just anxious because it takes us more energy to be social, in which case maybe it’s okay to take some time out? So Dahlia tries to remember not to skip the thought when she feels her anxiety climbing (and so do I). Dr. Pressman read every revision after that, and we worked pretty closely at every stage on all of the mental health elements, which include not just Dahlia’s experiences and tools but those of her father, who also experiences anxiety, and those of the family at large, even if Ivy is sometimes a reluctant participant. 

BB: Lord, I love every part of that. Okay. Back to the plotting of the book itself, though, one thing that legitimately shocked me about this title was the fact that the parents are massively involved in the overarching mystery. Generally speaking, usually in a book like this, the kids would ditch the parents, tell them nothing, be exposed to the magic, and that would be that. Here, our heroes come in ignorant and as they learn, their parents (albeit a little later) learn too. This goes against a LOT of children’s fantasy novels. Why did you opt to go in that direction?

Kate: That’s a good question. For one thing, I like to write families, and writing this family took a lot of care and attention. There would’ve been a bit of a cognitive dissonance if the Vicars, who work so hard to be supportive of both daughters and their changing relationship and to foster such open communication, could not be trusted with the truth about the adventure their kids are having, and did not come around to believing in what the girls are experiencing. Also, I didn’t want there to be any question of disbelief that might bleed over into the mental health conversations–at the very beginning, when she spots the antlered giraffe, Dahlia worries momentarily that her family will think she’s seeing things as a result of her brain chemistry, and her dad shuts that concern down right away. Plus, while obviously there’s room in fantasy for all sorts, in general I like the challenge of figuring out how to let the kids have their adventures without having to do it in spite of the adults. And really, what would be my excuse for shunting the parents off or having them be obstructive in this book? Given the actual events of the story, the parents almost have to be on board from the moment they agree to let the kids deliver the departed Jess’s bequests. 

Something I thought about while trying to thread the needle of parents being involved in the adventure was: How would I behave as an adult if I discovered that an actual, real and necessary thing could only be done by a kid of my acquaintance? In a real-world setting I find that idea very upsetting, but if it happened that I truly didn’t have the ability to take the burden or prevent the necessity of doing the thing, I might at least have the ability to provide an assist. That’s how I tried to approach most of the adults in RIALTO. And then, of course, in fantasy specifically, there’s also the problem of bringing the adults around to believing in magic if you let them in on the secrets, and that was harder in this book than it was in, say, GREENGLASS HOUSE. You can have them believe because something undeniable happens to convince them, or you can try to get to a point where they believe in the kids who believe. I tried to go the latter route with RIALTO. 

BB: Plus you manage to include so many incredible and cool details in the book. That’s much of its allure. At the same time, I suspect that there was even more you wish you could have included. What was some element or description or place that either didn’t make the final version or that you wish you could have talked more about on the page?

Kate: Oof. So many options! At one point there was a pair of grave markers that frequently disappeared from the cemetery island and turned up in random places around town because the tricksters whose stones they were liked to prank the groundskeeper. I’ll probably save those for something down the line. That draft also leaned harder into the idea that ‘home’ is a complicated concept that changes over time, sometimes uncomfortably so, and that many Roamers have a complicated relationship with the idea of home in general, because they are so often inclined to…well, roam. I had a bit of dialogue where the speaker contrasts the founders of Rialto with another character who wanders through the Roaming World looking for a place to create his particular (and much less friendly) idea of home. (“He could’ve taken that coal and built a hearth around it, but instead…”) 

BB: I suspect I may know who that is. Finally, can we expect to return to the Roamer world again in the future? What else are you working on these days? What’s next?

Kate: Next is actually three entirely unrelated projects, before we return to the Roaming World! I have the first installment of SEACRITTERS, my pirate capybara graphic novel series with Lucy Bellwood, coming out in early 2027; then there’s the first installment of THE BELIEVERS, a WW2 magic series inspired by Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks movie adaptation (I think also 2027); there’s GRAVELLE MANOR, a haunted house book that I hope will be the beginning of another extended universe. And then at last we return to the Roaming World, though we’re still deciding on the specific project (because of course I have seven or eight potential stories I’d like to tell next). I’d love to know what part of that world readers would most love to return to. (And thank you for having me, Betsy!)  

---

Kate Milford, folks! Ain’t she a peach? The book Rialto is a heckuva ride as well. Certainly worth your time. It’s on shelves now, so be sure to grab yourself a copy when when you have a chance. Special thanks to Kate for taking SO much time to answer these questions (I owe you one, buddy) and to John Sellers and the team behind Harper Collins Children’s Books for helping to put this all together.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Interviews