Kate Milford on magic and mental health in her new book, Rialto

Discussing her new novel, Rialto, in the back garden of a café near her Bay Ridge home, middle-grade author Kate Milford said, “I really do love places that feel like characters.”

With a vivid imagination for the architecture and cultures of the worlds she dreams up, Milford is best known for her New York Times bestselling Greenglass House series, set in the fictional port city of Nagspeake. In her latest book, she takes the characterization of place to a new level, as Rialto — a fantastical, now-derelict theme park — proves to have a will and powers of its own.

Rialto tells the story of Brooklyn sisters Ivy, 14, and Dahlia, 12, who, on a summer trip to Rialto, Missouri, with their parents, are pulled into a quest to solve the mysteries surrounding the local theme park’s closure decades before and reopen the park. On a fateful night in 1988, a forest spontaneously arose, engulfing the town and turning the park into an inaccessible, overgrown ruin.

As Ivy, Dahlia, and their new friend Remy investigate, a world of magic reveals itself, including mythological carousel animals that come to life; witchy midnight crafting sessions; and “crossings” to the mysterious “Fiddler’s Green,” a place that few, if any, are said to return from.

Yet Rialto is as much about the ordinary joys and challenges of adolescence as it is about magic. The story explores family relationships, first romance, death and loss, and especially mental health issues, as the younger sister, Dahlia, struggles with anxiety.

Milford, who lives with anxiety herself, says, “We’ve dealt with mental health things in my family for years. So I was like, maybe I could blend a little bit of that in, in the same way that Greenglass House blends adoption identity questions. It's not the point of it, it's the lens for one of the characters.”

The mother of two school-age children, Milford says, “I'm acutely aware now, how do I manage what I feel and experience, and find the right tools for that so I can model the right tools for my kids?”

This wish to model effective self-care extends to her readers as well. Milford worked with a psychiatrist to make sure the strategies Dahlia is learning from her therapist are not just coping mechanisms but actually help her to understand herself better and get to the roots of her anxiety.

Like all of Milford’s novels, Rialto is set more broadly in the “Roaming World,” which she describes as basically our world, except “the weird and the supernatural are dialed up.” But this element of magic — called “ferly” — can only be perceived by those who are sensitive to it. Known as Roamers, they are often travelers or itinerants of one kind or another.

Milford says, “This is a world where being present in a place and looking for the character of it, and the stories, is rewarded by glimpses in at the wondrous that might be hiding there.”

Milford is a champion of folklore and storytelling, and Rialto reads as a call to revitalize these cultural forms the town has neglected since the park closed. As a local elder tells the kids, “There used to be a whole theme park here to share these blasted stories. Now there’s just us — meaning my generation, you understand — and apparently we did a crap job of it.”

Thus it falls to the younger generation to rediscover the stories and the magic they reveal, and to restore them to their rightful place in the culture.

In homage to Brooklyn, Rialto includes references to Green-Wood Cemetery and Owl’s Head Park, and echoes of Coney Island (which Milford wrote about in her second novel, The Broken Lands). She says the borough inspires her world-building because of the variation from block to block and neighborhood to neighborhood, and the surprises one might find just taking a walk.

“We have the little pocket cemeteries, like the Revolutionary War Cemetery, or at Leif Ericson Park we've got the crazy Art Deco monument to Leif Ericson,” Milford said. “I like finding those tiny corners, and Brooklyn is a beautiful place for that.”

For Milford, this is the essence of being a Roamer: not necessarily having magical powers (though some do), but being able to tune in to the world around you with curiosity and openness and presence — some of the same qualities that help Dahlia handle her anxiety.

And once people start to see the magic, Milford says, they will keep seeing it. Imagining her heroines returning home from their summer adventure, she says, “I think they would be more alive to the possibility that some of the weird quirks of Brooklyn might be something more than they seem.”

Rialto is available at The BookMark Shoppe (8415 3rd Ave.), Lofty Pigeon Books (743 Church Ave.) and Terrace Books (1624 10th Ave.), as well as through the Brooklyn Public Library.