[My idea] remained fuzzy until I stumbled across the Sixties Scoop, something I’d never heard of before, something I’d never been taught in school (I’m American, by the way). In Canada, beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1980s, indigenous children were taken from their homes and families and placed into government-sanctioned facilities, such as residential schools. The goal was for primarily white, middle-class families across Canada, the US, and even Europe—to adopt these children. It’s estimated that over 20,000 indigenous children were taken, and it wasn’t until 2017 that the families of those affected reached a financial settlement with the Canadian government totaling over eight hundred million dollars.

[…]

And so I began writing The House in the Cerulean Sea, imagining a world not so different from our own, where people who are different than the majority are controlled by those in power. The smallest of us—the children—are taken from their homes and placed into euphemistically named orphanages, overseen by caseworkers in DICOMY.

He says it was principally inspired by it, and he goes on about the '60s scoop for quite a while in the interview. He’s trying to draw this parallel very strongly. And my problem with the guy who runs the orphanage being kind is that the residential schools were horrifically abusive. They were explicitly made for the purpose of genocide. You can’t just repurpose that into a fun happy orphanage which the children love and which they’re all fighting to preserve. It’s garish.

And the kids are happy—at least, the ones at Arthur’s orphanage, which is what the story focuses on. They love Arthur, they love the orphanage, and they don’t want to be separated. They’re all fighting for the orphanage to stay open.

Again, it’s like a writing a story about a concentration camp where the guy running it is kind and all the inmates are a big happy family and everyone’s banding together to stop the camp from being closed. Take inspiration from whatever you want, by all means, but absolutely do not go around in interviews telling everyone “well I was thinking about the Holocaust and I wanted to raise awareness, so I started writing this book about how kindness could have turned the concentration camps into a happy and fulfilling environment.”

It kind of is mocking it, though. In real life, the children in these “schools” were horribly abused and died in droves. We keep discovering mass graves near the sites of these places. In the book, the kids are all happy and the guy who runs the school is kind, and nobody ever stops to consider sending these kids back to their families. It’s like if someone set a twee romantic comedy in a Holocaust-inspired concentration camp, where the guards are all friendly and the showers spray laughing gas. If he wanted to write a story about a fun happy orphanage, he shouldn’t have gone around telling people it was about a genocide the survivors of which are still alive today.