Candace Fleming is a widely beloved, award-winning author known for her captivating storytelling and meticulous research. Her latest book, Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown (Anne Schwartz/Random, April 29), is a riveting, profoundly insightful, and nuanced account of Jim Jones, his Peoples Temple, and the deaths of nearly 1000 of his followers in Guyana in 1978. Fleming spoke with us over Zoom from her Chicago-area home; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

 Your picture books, like Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!, were storytime staples when I was a school librarian, and your middle-grade and YA fiction and nonfiction are so popular with kids too. Do you have a favorite category?

The work I love most is young adult nonfiction. It’s unbelievably important. , I feel like that’s my job: Let me guide you through these complicated, contradictory events. Let me show you a story from history that connects to you. But, oh, it’s absolutely exhausting! So, every once in a while, I say to myself, Let’s do [a children’s book]—I need it. The year I won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Nonfiction Award for The Family Romanov, I went to an event and was asked, “What’s your follow-up?” And I had to say, “Bulldozer’s Big Day”!

Why Jonestown?

I was in high school in 1978, and I remember watching [the news] with horror and awe. It was presented by the press as a titillating true-crime event. I remember seeing aerial photographs of all the dead people. There was a picture of Jim Jones looking sweaty, wearing sunglasses, obviously drug-addled. They were saying, This is the man to blame. And yet, I had questions: Who would join a cult? Who would they follow somebody like this? What happens to those that survive? (I detest the word cult, I prefer destructive group—but language is needed, right?)

Those questions never faded, and current events have made [them] even harder for me to ignore. Even though we all say I would never join a cult, underneath we know that if there was a cause that we felt was really important, we would. The people I spoke to, the survivors or family of survivors, said, Nobody joined a cult. They joined a cause. If you look at Peoples Temple’s cause, it was beautiful: a multiracial community, a place where everyone was welcomed and taken care of. They were being led by a delusional man, [but] I don’t think that takes away from their dreams and aspirations.

I’d listened to podcasts, watched documentaries, and read books about Jonestown, but I learned so much from you. What surprised you the most as you researched?

I thought I knew the story too—I’ve listened to those podcasts, I’ve watched those documentaries, I’ve read those books—until I talked to [Jim Jones’ son] Stephan. Stephan used the term Temple think. It was hard for me to wrap my head around, but he told me this story. I think he was 14. He was sitting in the San Francisco temple during a catharsis session, which was when they brought people forward who had broken rules. He was watching this little girl who had spoken back to an adult being beaten. This microphone was stuck in her face, so that everyone could hear her screaming, begging, crying. No one helped her. And he remembered thinking, This is wrong, isn’t it? We can’t allow this to happen. Everyone else was sitting there, so his first thought was, I must be wrong. My faith must be missing. His second thought was, I’m afraid to say anything, because I’ll be the next person getting beaten. And the third was, My Peoples Temple family might turn on me, and I love them. Other people told me similar stories.

Mike Cartmell, a wonderful man who managed to leave before they moved to Guyana, said, “Please make sure your readers know that we laughed.” He wanted to make sure that I didn’t portray them as a bunch of shuffling cultists. They loved each other. They danced, they dreamed, they married each other, they had children together. They were a group of lovely people.

You astutely observed that “diversity wasn’t the same as racial justice.”

I kept thinking about the fact that 75% of the Peoples Temple’s membership was African American, and most of those were women. And then you look back at Jones’ starting a church in segregated Indianapolis—and it was a Christian church to begin with—where all races were welcome, and how many African Americans found that appealing. In the 1950s, Jones was able to go to the electric company, the school board, whoever needed to be spoken to on behalf of his Black parishioners, and he could use his privilege and get things done. But it was also exploitative.

I don’t want those African American members to be seen as dupes—they weren’t. They came with real aspirations, and many of the things that he spoke to came right out of their own cultural histories. The idea of moving to Guyana was, in many ways, seen as self-determination, an extension of that exodus from the South to the North.

I hope readers draw parallels to the present day and see how inequality leaves people vulnerable.

It does. The Peoples Temple provided healthcare, food, a decent education, safety, and community in places that had been gutted by poverty. But then you look at how the power structure was all white—for the most part, white, college-educated women. Women who’d come because they were liberal, and they wanted to change the world.

Another resonant line from the book was this description of Jones as “a fake who kept his followers in ‘crisis mode’…he peddled fear, uncertainty, and distrust in the U.S. government.”

I try not to lecture. I try not to connect all the dots. We were talking about contradictions, complications, and downright messiness—I want [teens] to wrestle with that. But I also structured the book in a way that they could see those hooks and echoes between what happened then and what might be happening today.

I hope they gobble it up, and that it haunts them afterward. I’d like them to think about peer pressure, undue influence, and tribalism, and how we might compromise ourselves morally, even just a little, to get along. And how that tiny compromise of your values can lead to a second compromise that’s bigger, and soon you’re pushed to a place that you never thought you’d actually be in.

We need to question our leaders—presidents, pastors, teachers—question what they’re saying, and if it rings false, we need to see if it’s the truth. The Peoples Temple [members] weren’t able to do that once they got to Guyana. One of the conclusions I do draw for my readers is: Let’s not call this suicide. This was murder. Every day they’d been told that if they returned [to the U.S.], they’d be killed, and their children would be tortured—and because they had no ability to verify what Jones was saying, no outside information, they believed it. I think [readers] will see the parallels to being led down a path to take actions that are based on lies.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.