Pop Quiz, Hotshot, a guest post by Natalie C. Parker

Once upon a time at a teen book festival, an eager young reader asked me that age old question: “Where do your ideas come from?” I considered what to tell them, but my truest answer to that question is too long and at the end of the day probably too personal to be useful to them. I leaned into the mic and with complete sincerity gave them the best answer I could: “Keanu Reeves.”

It was a joke, of course. Like most mortals, I have only ever seen Keanu on screen, and ideas are too tangled and sprawling and illusive to have a single source. But it was also kind of the truth. We had only recently emerged from the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I had just finished the heavy and difficult process of writing Come Out, Come Out, one of those books that required me to dig into my own pain points and braid them through a story of queer horror and joy that both was and wasn’t my own. Important work and work I am proud to have done, but it’s not exactly sustainable.

The problem with steeping myself in heavy themes, real world horrors, and the unbearable burden of “getting it right,” was that everything I came up with after working in that space felt flat. My creative spark was sputtering, and I couldn’t stop searching for the “right” novel idea. All I knew was that my next project needed to be anchored in joy. And by joy, I mean a feeling of frothiness and fun and adventure, which obviously lead me to the movie Speed. From there, it was a short leap to Keanu Reeves in general and soon I was by comping every new idea I had to a Keanu Reeves movie.

And this simple act of leveraging an idea I loved without the hubris and ego of being the creator was a true game changer.

For example, what might happen if I wanted to write something like The Princess Bride, but I combined it with the little known but oh-so-delightful Keanu classic, Babes in Toyland? Or, if I wanted to try my hand at a retelling of Cinderella but I merged it with The Matrix? How might I tackle my own version of Pride and Prejudice if I combined it with something unexpected like Speed?

You can see where this is going. Just the exercise of combining two stories from different genres with different tropes can unlock something exciting and energizing. But throw Keanu Reeves into the mix and suddenly there’s a proverbial bomb on the metaphorical bus only Dennis Hopper wasn’t the one who put it there. (Please know, if you have not experienced the perfection that is the movie Speed these jokes are very funny).

This precise exercise is how The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting came about—it’s The Baby-Sitters Club meets John Wick without the dead dogs (or Kristy’s drama). The second I placed those two comparison titles side by side, I knew I’d unlocked the kind of joy that is both personal and meant to be shared.

On a more personal note, I spent the first years of my authorial career burying the queerness in my own work out of a fear that it would be rejected solely on the basis of being “too gay.” But after five books, I realized that that wasn’t serving anyone. Not me. Not my work. And certainly not the readers I was trying to reach. In The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting my main character, Tru has spent her entire life hiding parts of herself. And while that is for Very Good Reasons, her journey is a lot like mine has been—one of realizing that sometimes hiding does more harm than good. 

The work I’d done to unlock joy by linking and remixing my favorite tropes was still missing something. Something I was hiding, that was also hiding from me. In retrospect, it feels obvious:

Like so many children born in the 80s, I was raised on a steady diet of Disney’s fairy tales, that single VHS tape that held both Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and Ridley Scott’s Legend, and all the action movies a young tomboy could hope for. What I didn’t get in all of that delicious, sometimes deliriously romantic storytelling was space for queer kids like me.

It’s that simple.

Today, I get to take all the things I loved and still love about pell-mell adventures and expand those tropes I adore so much creating space for myself and the kid I was, and for kids today, who are in ever greater need of representation in stories. It’s why I write and it’s certainly why I wrote The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting, which is fun and serious and thrilling and romantic and was definitely, 100%, inspired by the legendary Keanu Reeves.

Meet the author

Natalie C. Parker is an acclaimed author of books for young adults, including the Seafire trilogy and the duology Beware the Wild and Behold the Bones. She lives outside Kansas City with her wife.

About The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting

This riveting, superpowered adventure unveils a shadow world of Talented bounty hunters—and plumbs the nature of identity, deadly secrets, and found family.

Tru has been hiding all her life. Her parents taught her to conceal her bastion Talent: indestructible skin, muscles, and bones. In a world where Talents are common and varied, no one trusts a bastion—they’re too powerful. Hiding failed to keep Tru’s parents alive, but moments before their murder, Tru’s mom pointed her to Logan Dire, a famed recluse assassin who adopted and trained orphaned Tru. At seventeen, she’s still hiding. Not even her closest friends know her true name or Talent, or that she’s balancing high school with knife and stealth training (while crushing on her BFF’s older sister).When assassins interrupt a mundane babysitting job booked through BountyApp—where lethal hunters find work and babysitters for their kids—Tru flees with a one-year-old strapped to her chest and spiraling questions: Who killed her parents? Whom can she trust? What does it mean to be a bastion? And is it ever OK to kiss a girl who’s trying to hunt you down?From an award-winning author comes a masterfully plotted thriller that holds character and relationship on a par with action and nail-biting suspense.

ISBN-13: 9781536230093
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Publication date: 01/07/2025
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years

Filed under: Guest Post