Interview with Victor Piñeiro, Author of The Island of Forgotten Gods

Welcome to Smack Dab in the Middle, Victor! Please tell us a bit about The Island of Forgotten Gods.

Thanks for having me! Sure thing. The Island of Forgotten Gods is a coming-of-age adventure  set in Puerto Rico, where thirteen-year-old Nico—a New Yorker who dreams of being the next Spielberg—plans to make a film so brilliant it’ll get him into LaGuardia, his dream high school. But when he’s sent to spend the summer with his Abuela and cousins in PR, his project takes a wild turn: he stumbles on the chupacabra, who begins hunting him down. Soon, he’s not just making a movie—he’s fighting for Puerto Rico’s survival against the ancient Taíno gods who created the island.

The Island of Forgotten Gods blends contemporary coming-of-age with Puerto Rican mythology. What drew you to weave Taíno mythology and culture into a modern story about a young filmmaker?

The book actually started its life as a memoir. I wrote the first draft during an especially dreary pandemic winter, reliving my favorite childhood summer as a way to cope with the gloom. The young filmmaker is an amalgam of my brother and I, who spent all of our time making movies since we were old enough to hold a camera. We made one of our wildest films in Puerto Rico the summer before I turned thirteen. 

The mythology aspect was a happy accident. It came in partway through the first draft as I was studying myths for a completely different project and stumbled on a unique link between the chupacabra and ancient Taíno myths. (More on that soon!)

The book has been praised as "a love letter to Puerto Rico." Can you talk about your personal connection to the island and how you approached representing both its magical elements and real-life struggles?

I was born in Puerto Rico, but my dad joined the Air Force soon after I was born and we started moving all over the US when I was two. We always returned to Puerto Rico for the summers, though—it was our anchor. 

As I was reminiscing over our greatest childhood vacations in PR, I was brought back to the summer when my brother and I started noticing the cracks underneath the idyllic exterior of the island. Walmart had recently opened stores in Puerto Rico, and our town plazas became ghost towns, which ultimately got our parents talking to us about colonization. It blew our young minds to find out that our summer playground wasn’t all sunshine and beaches. And as we grew older we started to better understand the complicated history of the island, and how much pain it’s gone through. 

COVID was rough on Puerto Rico, given everything else the island had recently been through (from Hurricane Maria to Zika to earthquakes and constant blackouts). Writing the first draft of my book in lockdown, I felt powerless and unable to help. I hoped that by bringing awareness to the many issues Puerto Rico has faced in the past decade, it might help in some way.

This is your third middle-grade novel after Time Villains and Monster Problems. What keeps drawing you back to stories that blend fantasy with family dynamics?

On the one hand, I like my books to draw deeply from my life and experiences so that they feel more authentic. On the other hand, I love stories with big speculative hooks, so I love taking my life experiences and then blowing them up by adding fantastical elements. I also like balancing epic moments with quieter, family-centric moments that are very relatable. Something I love about the upper middle grade audience is that they’re often torn between being close with their family and adventuring out on their own. I try to reflect that dynamic in my books.

The chupacabra plays a central role in the story. What made you choose this particular creature from Latin American folklore?

I was not a fan of the chupacabra growing up. It had a cheezy name (a comedian came up with it!) and it was portrayed so differently by everyone who saw it that it seemed both fake and lame. Decades later I made two realizations that changed everything I thought I knew about the monster.

1. The chupacabra craze was a nineties phenomenon, but a very similar creature had been spotted twenty years before it, and then again just seven years ago. Though they had different names, sightings generally described them as bat-like, or gargoyle-like.

2. The Taínos believed that the first humans emerged out of a cave as bat-like people, until their wings were burned off by the sun.

I’ve never seen a connection made about the chupacabra and the creatures the Taínos believed we evolved from, and I thought it would be so fun to tie those two strands together in an epic fantasy story.

Your career has been incredibly diverse: working at HBO Max and YouTube to designing games for Hasbro and teaching third grade. How do these varied experiences influence your storytelling?

I’ve been fortunate enough to watch a variety of storytellers spin their tales – from kids to game designers to showrunners to YouTube creators – and I love taking it all in and applying it to my writing. Stories come in such different shapes and sizes, and I like trying to figure out why some stories work better as short YouTube videos versus HBO Max shows versus a book I’d read to my third graders. But mostly, I just love being around creative people who work in different mediums, as it’s incredibly inspiring.

The relationship between Nico and his Abuela Luciana is pivotal to the story. Can you discuss the importance of intergenerational connections in your work?

Something I explore a lot in The Island of Forgotten Gods is the very real threat of gentrification to Puerto Rican culture, and nothing exemplifies the culture we’re losing more than understanding what the island was like 50-80 years ago, through the eyes of abuelos y abuelas. I wanted my abuela to be one of the main characters because she was iconic and incredible, but I also wanted her to show off the culture we’re at risk of losing as Puerto Ricans leave the island in droves and billionaires are incentivized to settle into it. 

You've mentioned that reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in third grade sparked your desire to write. How do you hope your books might similarly inspire young readers?

I hope this book inspires young readers to explore their homelands or families and see them through a new lens. But overall, I hope my books help motivate kids to create. Writing would be wonderful, but if my books push someone to create in any medium, I’d be happy. It’s harder and harder to push through the firehose of passive entertainment we’re met with every minute of every day, and create something original. And when we create, then we’re in dialogue with each other and the rest of the world. I think it’s going to get more and more challenging to create art as technology begins doing a lot of the work for us. But there’s such a beauty and satisfaction that comes out of creating things. 

 

What’s next?

I’m working on an upper middle grade book that fuses my love of music with my love of fantasy.

Where can we find you?

Talk to me on Instagram @victorpineiro or head over to victorpineiro.com and drop me a line!

Snag a copy of The Island of Forgotten Gods