Q: So the American road is their Mississippi River?

Exactly. And they have all kinds of dangerous adventures along the way.

Q: Who do you imagine is the ideal reader for the book?

I wrote it with a teenage girl in mind, but I tried to make it layered and nuanced enough to interest adult readers, too. I think that Twain did the same thing. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is clearly an adventure story for kids, but at the same time is depicts such a violent society, and in such stark and uncompromising terms, that it is obviously a novel of social criticism as well.
Q: Is there anything you’d like to add?

I suppose I’d just want to say that Finn: a novel does enter into a sort of conversation with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but I would hope that anyone who picked it up—whether or not they were big fans of Mark Twain—would find in it a fair but critical portrait of modern America, but even more than that, a good, old-fashioned, picaresque adventure story.