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Heidi Henneman

YA FictionYA

Jennifer E. Smith

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Two teenagers take off in a whirlwind journey and a quest for answers in Jennifer E. Smith’s second book for young adults, You Are Here. Along the way, they find out a little about each other and a lot about themselves.

Emma Healy and Peter Finnegan, both on the brink of their 17th birthdays, embark on a road trip—in matching Mustang convertibles—that will change their lives and their feelings for each other forever. Emma, a middle-of-the-road student and self-admitted misfit, has never quite understood how she is related to her academic-obsessed parents and multi-degreed, uber-successful siblings. She has always felt that there was a missing link in her life—until she finds a clue to a dark family secret hidden away in the attic.

On the other hand, Peter, a study geek and history buff, fits in with Emma’s family just fine—but not his own. His widower, police officer father cannot understand why Peter would ever want to leave their small upstate New York town or why he is obsessed with historic battlefields and far-off places instead of just being happy where he is. First separately, then together, Emma and Peter set off on a spontaneous road trip to find out for themselves who they are and where they belong.

Smith’s coming-of-age story, told intermittently through the eyes of both Emma and Peter, is remarkably insightful, heart-wrenchingly sad and laugh-out-loud funny. Through both Emma and Peter, we learn how the loss of someone you never really knew—in Emma’s case, a twin brother, and in Peter’s, a mother—can leave scars that run surprisingly deep. We see how an uninvited three-legged hitchhiker (a mangy but hilarious dog) can unlock hidden talents and emotions in a person. We witness how a friendship born out of patience, understanding and a little bit of teasing can lead to unexpected first love. And we see how the open road and a fresh perspective can help two teenagers find a new path to happiness.
Smith got her start in the publishing world working in a literary agency in New York City shortly after graduating from Colgate University in upstate New York, a location she later used as the setting for You Are Here. She had wanted to be a writer since the fourth grade, and after helping others get their starts in the literary world, Smith took the plunge into writing herself.

Having perused volumes upon volumes of adult literary fiction, Smith was anxious to focus on another genre. “That’s what steered me to young adult books,” the author recalls in an interview. “It’s a different world from adult, and it was nice to sit down and be the writer for once.” It also helped that she was a longtime fan of the genre. “I loved Where the Red Fern Grows and Bridge to Terabithia,” Smith says, “and I wanted to write a book that I would have liked to read when I was a kid, something wholesome and heartfelt.”

Smith’s first novel for young adults, The Comeback Season, was inspired by her love of baseball. A Chicago-area native, Smith was watching a Cubs baseball game on TV when she got the idea for the book. “I wrote the first two paragraphs of the novel right then—and they are the same now as when I wrote them,” she says. In fact, the book took her a mere four months to write. “It was a once in a lifetime experience,” Smith says, “and such a wonderfully easy process.” From there, Smith was convinced that YA was the right market for her. “The more I learned about YA books and the wonderful outpouring from kids and teachers, the more hooked I became.” She especially loves hearing from her readers. “The emails I have received have been so gratifying,” she says. “Kids have an unabashedly honest response to people’s work, and that’s the best part.”

After The Comeback Season was published, Smith went back to school to get her master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. While there, she started working on her second novel, You Are Here. “It was great to take a year to really focus on writing and traveling,” Smith recalls, “and it was nice to have a new perspective.” When Smith returned to New York, she went back into publishing—this time as an editor—and had to finish the book “on the side.” “I love my job,” Smith says, “and it’s been great to see the industry from all perspectives, but it does make writing a little slower.” Still, she hasn’t been that slow: she finished You Are Here in nine months.

The author’s experiences traveling through Europe and studying abroad leant a theme of perspective to the book as well. Her characters seem to be able to “find” themselves once they have stepped out of their normal comfort zones. For Emma, it takes tracing her family’s history back to her birth and visiting her long-lost brother’s grave to find out that she is the glue that has always bound her eclectic family together. For Peter, it takes a road trip to Gettysburg and a view from outside his small town’s limits to realize that where he actually wants to be is home.

Smith’s own journey is taking her further into the YA world, with two more books already underway. In addition, she’s promoting You Are Here with local readings, school visits and guest blogging for various YA sites. All the while, she is keeping her “day job with homework,” as she calls it, and continues to edit manuscripts for the adult literary world by day and write wonderful stories for her young adult audience by night. With her sophomore title already poised to take the YA world on an incredible voyage, Jennifer E. Smith has arrived.

 

Two teenagers take off in a whirlwind journey and a quest for answers in Jennifer E. Smith’s second book for young adults, You Are Here. Along the way, they find out a little about each other and a lot about themselves. Emma Healy and Peter Finnegan, both on the brink of their 17th birthdays, embark […]
YA FictionYA

Scott Westerfeld

Interview by Heidi Henneman

What if World War I was fought with giant walking machines and genetically modified monsters instead of airplanes and ammunition? What if, instead of telephones and radios, long-distance communication was carried out by talking lizards and trained birds? What if our version of history was somehow turned on its head and futuristic tales were spun instead? 

This is just what happens in Scott Westerfeld’s exciting new novel for young adults, Leviathan. Westerfeld treats readers to a captivating story about a young boy in the early 1900s, who happens to be the orphaned son of Archduke Ferdinand. History teaches us that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife ignited the sparks that led to World War I. In Leviathan, this bit of history remains the same, but the details of the war are dramatically different: Britain and her allies are armed with a fleet of Darwinian-created “beasties,” including a flying, hydrogen-burping whale, while Austria and her allies fight with enormous “clankers” made of metal and gears, and run by classic engines.

For Westerfeld, whose previous works for teens include the Uglies and Midnighters trilogies, writing in the genre known as “steampunk” has been an interesting challenge. “It’s about rewriting history in an alternative way—and making it better,” he says in a telephone interview from New York, a day after arriving in the city from his native Australia. Westerfeld and his wife Justine Larbalestier, also a successful YA author, divide their time between the two locations.

Although steampunk has been around for awhile (think H.G. Wells and Jules Verne), it gained notoriety in the 1980s and ’90s. The genre gets its name from the time period in which most stories are set, the Victorian era, when steam power was king. Westerfeld became aware of the genre when he came across a role-playing game called Space 1899, in which players explore futures that could have been. “That was the first time I realized that people were really doing this stuff and thinking it through,” he says. 

Westerfeld especially enjoyed researching and writing about the technology of the era. “Everything looked weird at the time, sort of clunky and fantastical: airplanes had three wings, tanks looked like boilers on tractor treads,” he says. He particularly liked researching zeppelins—both the original giant flyers and his own genetically fabricated creations. “I have a big airship fetish,” Westerfeld admits, “and thought a living airship would be a kind of fascinating thing.” To do research, he and Justine went to the headquarters of Zeppelin Corporation in Switzerland, where a smaller version of the historically giant airships are still being produced. “We got to go up in one and that was cool,” Westerfeld says.

He also drew a bit of inspiration from the biological sciences: Darwin and his true-life granddaughter Dr. Nora Darwin

Barlow play major roles in the book.  “Scientists of that era were the original action hero-adventurers,” Westerfeld explains, “and I thought it would be fun to make Darwin a character.” Indeed, the author takes Darwinian philosophy to a new level, creating a world in which Darwin has discovered DNA threads and has been able to manipulate them to create hybrid animal species: jellyfish that float through the air like hot air balloons, lizards that talk like parrots, and of course, the title creature Leviathan, the aforementioned flying whale.

To help us visualize these fanciful creatures, Westerfeld enlisted the artful talents of Keith Thompson, who created more than 50 illustrations for the book. “It was a very collaborative process,” he says. “He did with the pictures the same thing I was doing with the text. It was like being a novelist and an art director at the same time.” After Thompson drew the magnificent creatures and ornate machines that Westerfeld had imagined, the author edited the text to reflect the details that Thompson had added.

Westerfeld’s exuberance for the technology of the era—and beyond—comes through clearly in his writing. From mechanized horses to metal-eating bats, eight-legged battleships and light-producing earthworms, he has created a world where technological and biological sciences collide. “It’s a war between two completely different world-views,” he notes.

The same could be said of the early 20th century, and the events of the era created fodder for Westerfeld’s storyline. “The great thing about doing historical research is that you can look back and say, if they had only done this it could have all been different. It’s a fascinating perspective.” By creating the alternate reality of Leviathan, Westerfeld is able to inspire his readers—young and old—to think about what really did happen at that time in history, how close we might have come to the fictional story, and how the fate of the world can hinge on seemingly innocuous events.

Heidi Henneman writes from New York.

What if World War I was fought with giant walking machines and genetically modified monsters instead of airplanes and ammunition? What if, instead of telephones and radios, long-distance communication was carried out by talking lizards and trained birds? What if our version of history was somehow turned on its head and futuristic tales were spun […]
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Mitali Perkins

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Guerilla warfare, child soldiers and landmines: What do these ripped-from-the-headlines terms have to do with a coming-of-age story for young readers? As it turns out, quite a bit.

While displacement camps and military maneuvers are not the trappings of your standard touchy-feely “do the right thing” tale, they bring a sense of hard-edged reality to Mitali Perkins’ Bamboo People, an intriguing and insightful story about two boys learning how to become men in the midst of chaos.

The award-winning author of such internationally diverse books as Monsoon Summer, The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen, Secret Keeper and Rickshaw Girl takes us, this time, to the border between Burma and Thailand—and into the eye-opening lives of children in the midst of a war zone. Bamboo People follows two boys caught in the crossfire of the ongoing border fight—a cultural and land battle that has been waged for decades, but in recent years has escalated dramatically through the forced enlistment of child soldiers.

Chiko, a scholarly and quiet Burmese teen whose father has been imprisoned for having anti-government sympathies, longs to be a teacher and avoids conflict at all costs. In an unexpected turn of events, Chiko is forced to enlist in the Burmese army, where he learns that education is more than the stuff of books. On the other side of the lines is Tu Reh, a member of the Karenni ethnic group displaced by the fighting, who would give anything to prove he is man enough to carry a gun. Tu Reh and his family have lost their homes, their loved ones and much of their sense of community during the many years of fighting, and his prejudice against everything Burmese runs deep. When Chiko is injured behind enemy lines, it is up to Tu Reh to decide whether this boy, his supposed mortal enemy, lives or dies. It’s a decision that changes both their lives.

Perkins was inspired to write the story during the three years she and her husband, a Presbyterian minister, spent on a missionary assignment near the Burmese border in northern Thailand. Here, Perkins witnessed firsthand the hardships, tenacity and hope of those affected by war. “These people are in conditions that seem nearly unbearable: They have been hunted, forced into labor, lost their homes, and many are hiding in the jungle,” Perkins explains. “You see them trying to perpetuate nationhood, trying to teach civility to a younger generation, trying to keep a hold on their culture and language. It’s fascinating and sad, but amazing to hear their stories.”

She also learned that war is never black and white. “When you think about the Burmese army from the Karenni point of view, it’s easy to think about them as evil. But Burma used to have one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and now it has the most child soldiers. So you have all of these soldiers who are really young and uneducated. They are trying to send money back to their families, trying to make ends meet, and they are desperate. It’s not always clear who are the good guys or the bad guys.”

Having traveled the world from an early age, Perkins knows a little about how diverse the world can be. Her father, a civil engineer who developed shipping ports, took the family from their home in India to live in such places as Cameroon, Ghana, Mexico and London. But it wasn’t until she landed in America that she felt a culture shock. “I was often between cultures,” Perkins recalls. To find refuge, she would sneak onto her family’s New York City fire escape—and there she also found her passion for writing. “I used to take my Sweet Tart candies, a pen and my journal and go out there to write,” she remembers. “It was in between the world of home and the world outside, and even today the fire escape metaphor really works for me.” Indeed, Perkins has a blog called Fire Escape where she invites her readers to join her for chats, discussions and a place to “explore hopes, dreams, and fears.”

Her own sense of being in between cultures is also why she is so interested in sharing stories from around the world with her readers.

“I like opening the eyes of children,” Perkins says. “They are much more open-hearted and aware than many adults believe them to be.”

“I think there is a lack of respect for what children do and want to know,” the author says. “They understand the human experience much more than they are sometimes given credit for.”

Guerilla warfare, child soldiers and landmines: What do these ripped-from-the-headlines terms have to do with a coming-of-age story for young readers? As it turns out, quite a bit. While displacement camps and military maneuvers are not the trappings of your standard touchy-feely “do the right thing” tale, they bring a sense of hard-edged reality to […]
YA FictionYA

Chris Lynch

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Violence, substance abuse, death and depression are just a few of the tough topics acclaimed author Chris Lynch has tackled in his works for young adults. Now, in his latest book for teens, Inexcusable, Lynch delves into the often taboo subject of date rape and as an intriguing twist, tells the story through the eyes of the accused.

While the topic of date rape is not a personal issue for Lynch someone else suggested the idea to him he thinks it's a subject closer to most of us than we probably realize. "The nature of the crime is that I could well be acquainted with someone who has been there without my ever knowing about it," he says. As the father of teenagers, Lynch is highly attuned to the possibilities out there. "I read an interview with John Irving recently where he described the feeling exactly," he says. "If you have children and have an imagination, you should have enough brains to be worried about everything.'"

Lynch, who grew up in Boston and now lives in Scotland with his family, started writing for young adults as part of his post-graduate course work at Emerson College. He never expected to be writing for this age group, but realized early on that it came easily to him. "To my surprise, I discovered I had a great deal of material from adolescence, and an inclination to speak in that voice." Perhaps that combined with his concern for his own children explains why he is so capable of addressing the harsher realities of adolescent life in books such as Freewill (a Printz Honor book about suicide), Dog Eat Dog and Iceman. "Usually I'm writing fairly true-life stuff," Lynch says, "and as far as I've seen, true life is crammed with these issues." Now he finds it harder to sidestep the issues than to get at them. "Tackling serious business feels like we're accomplishing something," says the award-winning author.

And serious business it is, especially in Inexcusable. Lynch's portrait of Keir, the accused date rapist and narrator of the book, is a departure from the usual victim's story of date rape. "I think it's a dangerous idea that any story, no matter how horrific, has only one side," says Lynch. "Perpetrators are made, not born. There is always more to a story, and a story is always much longer than the scene that ends it." This holds true for Keir, who Lynch is able to show as a genuinely warm, caring, and somewhat vulnerable high school senior. The story follows Keir through various moments leading up to the rape of his best girl friend. "We are all more than our worst qualities and our worst moments," Lynch says, "but often our lives wind up being defined by exactly these." For Keir, a violent football play, an unpunished hazing incident and the constant reminder from others that he is a "good guy" regardless of his actual behavior, leads him to blur the line between right and wrong without being aware of it. "I believe it is incredibly common for people to be in denial about the things they do," Lynch says. "That's what makes so much of the awfulness in the world possible."

As the story progresses, we see several instances if alternate choices had been made where the rape could have been prevented. Keir's father, his coach, his siblings or his friends could have stepped in to set this young man straight on various occasions. "If he had been dealt with more forcefully at some of the earlier warning points in his life," Lynch explains, "he could well have been molded into a stronger individual. But instead, he was allowed to devolve by being unchallenged." Although we are able to sympathize with Keir and his situation, Lynch is not at all dismissive about the heinousness of the crime. "Keir is allowed to see himself as a loveable rogue rather than a genuine threat to society," Lynch points out. "And, I fear this is not an uncommon situation."

Whether Inexcusable will become required reading for young men everywhere is yet to be seen, but opening a discussion of date rape among those who might be at risk both to as perpetrators and as victims is certainly a step in the right direction.

Violence, substance abuse, death and depression are just a few of the tough topics acclaimed author Chris Lynch has tackled in his works for young adults. Now, in his latest book for teens, Inexcusable, Lynch delves into the often taboo subject of date rape and as an intriguing twist, tells the story through the eyes […]
YA FictionYA

Sharon G. Flake

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Murder, guns, drugs, violence. Caldecott Award-winning author Sharon G. Flake leaves no holds barred in her newest book for teen readers, Bang!. This eye-opening novel follows an inner-city boy, Mann Martin, as he struggles to overcome the loss of his younger brother and his fear of life on the streets. BookPage reached Flake at her home in Pittsburgh to find out more about the inspiration and message behind this haunting coming-of-age story.

BookPage: What motivated you to write Bang!?
Sharon Flake: Like a lot of U.S. cities, Pittsburgh goes through seasons where there seem to be a lot of killings in the inner city. Two years ago, this was the case. It made me sad, and I wanted to do something about it, so I started writing a short story about a boy who would solve the problem. It didn't work well, so I dropped the idea. Then a year later the shootings started again, and Bang! was born.

BP: Are any of the characters or incidents in the book based on your own life experience?
SF: The incidents and characters are all made up. But as an African American, I grieve, as many of us do, especially for what is happening to our boys in regards to violence and murder. So it is not such a big leap to take their hurt and give it a face.

BP: There is quite a bit of death and loss in the book. What message are you trying to send to your readers regarding this?
SF: Bang! is what happens when the six o'clock news goes off. Night after night we watch the news and see families who have lost loved ones via violence. We eat our dinner, shake our heads and keep on moving. But for families that have lost loved ones, life is never the same. Bang! is a reminder that what is happening is not right and that we should be speaking up about it, and a reminder to me that those who are lost should not be so easily forgotten.

A little while back, I was speaking to a friend who is a principal in a Philadelphia school. One of her students had been murdered. She had gathered students in the auditorium to talk about it. She asked if anyone had known anyone else who had been shot. She said almost every hand went up. That's when I started asking students the same question after I read a chapter of Bang! to them. It stunned me no matter the city, many hands would go up, sometimes all of them. Some black, some white, some Hispanic. It let me know that there are many, many students in our schools who are grieving, or angry, at the very least hurting over loss, and I wondered, who is talking them through their pain? I'm hoping that Bang! will do that, as well as provide a platform for them to discuss the issue of violence and what it does to individuals and families.

BP: Mann is also good at drawing and painting. Why did you make him an artist?
SF: Writing isn't just about what you think should happen, it's about what your characters tell you should happen. I follow their lead mostly. But this I will say, I believe that there are no boxes for inner-city youth. That they are as big, as deep and as wide as we as writers make them, and we as parents and people believe them to be. So I am always writing characters that I hope readers see and say, Yeah, somebody living there can do that.

BP: One of your characters poses an interesting question in the book, asking why kids like him should work hard or go to school when they're going to die young anyway. Do you think this is the thought process of inner-city kids today? If so, what do you think can be done to change that?
SF: These are hard times for kids: shootings, parents and strangers taking off with kids, tsunamis, 9/11. Many of them, in the city and elsewhere, think, What is the point? I think you change that by letting them know that you will protect them. That you will keep them safe. You do that by trying to provide a stable home, whether you are a single parent or not. You do that by engaging them in activities . . . so they know you care. You do that by dreaming a future for them and with them, saying, When you go to college, When you finish ninth grade and volunteer for the summer, When you . . . It's scary out here, even for parents, but kids look to us to be a lifeboat, and it only takes one lifeboat to give you hope that you can make it to shore even though the waters are rough and rocky.

Murder, guns, drugs, violence. Caldecott Award-winning author Sharon G. Flake leaves no holds barred in her newest book for teen readers, Bang!. This eye-opening novel follows an inner-city boy, Mann Martin, as he struggles to overcome the loss of his younger brother and his fear of life on the streets. BookPage reached Flake at her […]
Children's & YA

Jacqueline Woodson

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Wonderfully innovative, Locomotion is the story of a young boy named Lonnie, a.k.a. Locomotion, who loses his parents in a house fire. His younger sister, Lili, is adopted by a wealthy family, while Locomotion is placed in a foster home. The story is told through Lonnie's eyes as he attempts to express his anguish, fears and dreams through poetry.

For Jacqueline Woodson, writing about an inner-city African-American boy was only one part of her project. Locomotion not only tells the thoughtful, insightful story of a young boy in search of himself, it also teaches its readers about the art of verse. "I hated poetry growing up," says Woodson, who was raised in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York. Which is why one of her writing teachers was so surprised to hear that she had written an entire book devoted to the genre. "I think it was more that I was afraid of it," says Woodson. "I didn't understand it until I started getting rid of the line breaks."

The fear of line breaks wasn't Woodson's only obstacle to enjoying poetry. "When I was growing up, we read Robert Frost's poems. I didn't know what it was like to 'stop by the woods on a snowy evening'," she says, "because nothing like that ever happened in Brooklyn or South Carolina."

It wasn't until she read a poem by Langston Hughes called "I Loved My Friend" that Woodson felt she could actually relate. "He was one of the first people I understood," she says.

Woodson has written numerous titles about city life and the neighborhoods she grew up in. Her book Miracle's Boys received the Coretta Scott King Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2001, while If You Come Softly was named an ALA Best Book for Young Readers in 2000.

With Locomotion, she hadn't planned to delve into a poetry narrative. "I had been reading some poetry that my friends had written, and a light came on in my head," she explains.

"Poem Book," the first poem in Locomotion, helped put her creative energies in motion. As young Lonnie says, "This whole book's a poem 'cause every time I try to/ tell the whole story my mind goes Be quiet!"

From there, Woodson explains, things just took off. "I started thinking of different circumstances and different types of poems," she says. "Commercial Break," "Lili," "God Poem" and "Pigeon" were all inspired by experiences in Woodson's own childhood, whether it's noticing the differences between TV and real life, combing out hair braids, "roofing bottles," or watching the neighbor tend to his pigeon coop.

As she began writing through Lonnie's eyes, he became a character all his own. "As it happens with many of my characters," Woodson admits, "I began to like him a lot."

The character Woodson has created in Lonnie gives the reader rare insight into the mind of a young boy on the verge of becoming his own person. It's a glimpse full of anger, sadness, fear and confusion feelings that many young readers will be able to relate to.

Equally as important, Lonnie's story reminds us that poetry is not just about sonnets and odes or Dr. Seuss rhyming. It does not have to be intimidating. Woodson, who teaches at the National Book Foundation Summer Writing Camp, offers this advice to young readers who may be put off by the genre: Try not to think about the line breaks when you read a poem for the first time. Then go back and read it a second time with the breaks, so that you can better understand it.

Indeed, if there's one thing Woodson's audience will learn from Locomotion, it's that verse can be a powerful, meaningful way to express one's thoughts. That's right—poetry is cool.

 

Heidi Henneman writes from San Francisco.

Wonderfully innovative, Locomotion is the story of a young boy named Lonnie, a.k.a. Locomotion, who loses his parents in a house fire. His younger sister, Lili, is adopted by a wealthy family, while Locomotion is placed in a foster home. The story is told through Lonnie's eyes as he attempts to express his anguish, fears […]
Children's & YA

Kate DiCamillo

Interview by Heidi Henneman

When Kate DiCamillo was in her 20s (not that long ago), she told everyone she was a writer. At least she thought she was a writer. In fact, she knew she was. But there was a problem: She hadn't written anything. After graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in English, she got jobs at Circus World and Disney World, where she worked the ride lines. She also called bingo at a children's camp.

"At the time I thought I was going nowhere," admits the critically acclaimed author. "Now I can see there was a pattern." When she relocated from her home in Florida to Minnesota and took a position at a children's bookstore, the pattern working with kids really began to materialize, and her dream of being an author soon came to fruition. "I finally realized that I actually needed to write something to become a 'writer,'" says DiCamillo, "so I started writing short stories."

As a Southerner far from home, the first frigid winter in Minnesota took its toll on the author. "I was homesick and couldn't afford to go home," she remembers, "and it was the first time I didn't have a dog." Out of this experience came the idea for her first book, Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). The story of a lonely little girl named Opal who adopts Winn-Dixie, a muddled mutt with a loving heart, the book set in sunny Florida won a Newbery Honor and climbed onto The New York Times bestseller list. DiCamillo's next effort, The Tiger Rising (2001), was based on a character she had written about in one of her short stories. Rob Horton, a 12-year-old mourning the death of his mother, makes an amazing discovery: there's a tiger in the woods behind the Kentucky Star Motel, where he and his father live. The magical creature opens up new possibilities in Rob's life, including a friendship with a feisty, dark-eyed girl named Sistine. Another critical success for DiCamillo, The Tiger Rising was a National Book Award Finalist and a Book Sense 76 selection.

Her latest book for young readers came about in an entirely different way. The Tale of Despereaux was inspired by the son of one of DiCamillo's closest friends. "He wanted a story about an unlikely hero," recalls DiCamillo, "and the hero had to have exceptionally big ears." She tried to explain to the boy that characters don't just materialize on demand; they have to exist as ideas in the writer's head in order to work. But over the next few months, as she thought about the request, something clicked for DiCamillo. Three years later, The Tale of Despereaux was complete. The novel's mouse-hero, Despereaux Tilling, has fallen in love with a human, the beautiful Princess Pea, whose family owns the castle he calls home. But the romance is thwarted by his father, and Despereaux is soon imprisoned in a dank dungeon. To the mouse's magical story, DiCamillo adds the adventures of the castle's other inhabitants, including a rat named Chiaroscuro, and Miggery Sow, a young servant girl who dreams of becoming a princess. With its old-fashioned, fairy tale qualities and whimsical pencil drawings by Timothy Basil Ering, the book is definitely a departure for DiCamillo, but one readers are sure to love.

Her next project, a picture book, is already in the works. Nowadays, though, the popular author has a new responsibility answering mail from fans. "It's thrilling when a kid writes you," she says, "and it breaks my heart to think they would take the time to write and get nothing back." As for future children's novels, DiCamillo promises there will be more. "I'm at the mercy of whatever character comes into my head," she explains. "Every day I get up and write two pages and only two pages. It's an easy goal that I know I can do, whether I'm working on a book or not." More importantly, it ensures that this former Disney World employee and bingo caller will continue to prove her claim that she really is a true, honest-to-goodness writer not that any of her readers ever thought differently.

 

Heidi Henneman writes from San Francisco.

When Kate DiCamillo was in her 20s (not that long ago), she told everyone she was a writer. At least she thought she was a writer. In fact, she knew she was. But there was a problem: She hadn't written anything. After graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in English, she got […]
YA FictionYA

Jordan Sonnenblick

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Excuses. Excuses. Excuses. For many of us, they are the cause of frustration, but to 14-year teaching veteran and acclaimed author Jordan Sonnenblick, they are also the inspiration for his new young adult novel, Notes from the Midnight Driver.

Sonnenblick, a fifth-grade teacher in rural Pennsylvania, faced a flood of excuses after his class acted up for a substitute teacher. He was absent from the classroom for only one day, but that was enough for the substitute filling in for him and she left him a note saying so. "It was like her last note before she became overrun with the insurgency," recalls Sonnenblick, who was livid about the incident. "I felt so taken advantage of, and when I confronted the students about it, they just rolled their eyes."

So to make up for their misbehavior, he made each of them write a note of apology to their parents. Sonnenblick thought that exercise would be the end of it, but when he read the students' letters, he was appalled. "They were flippant, self-serving, non-responsible, blaming notes so much so that I couldn't even send them to the parents." A few days later, after his frustration had passed, Sonnenblick decided that this would be a great concept for a book. "It was my way of dealing with the stress of the kids having really made me mad, and once they heard the story, they completely realized it was their stuff."

Notes from the Midnight Driver follows a teenager, Alex, in the midst of his parent's breakup, who gets drunk on his dad's vodka, steals his mom's car, mortally wounds a lawn gnome and then blames everyone but himself for his behavior. Although the plot deals with divorce, drunk driving, estranged families and, ultimately, death, it is more a story of the narrator's growth from excuse-making boy to responsible young man.

"I don't think it pounds you over the head as a message book," Sonnenblick says, "but I needed it to be serious enough for the kids to get it." While the concept of excuse-making is deliberately drawn from the episode on that fateful day in the classroom, the characters themselves are drawn from Sonnenblick's own life. The main character, Alex, is fashioned after the author himself. Alex's best friend, Laurie, is a compilation of some of his students. And Sol, the crotchety old man Alex befriends, is based on Sonnenblick's wonderfully outspoken grandfather.

In a strange twist of fate, the author had received a call only hours after he decided to write the book, telling him that his grandfather was sick in a Florida hospital. Sonnenblick flew down to be by his side and when he arrived, his grandfather was sitting up in bed, belting out songs in Yiddish and making the nurses laugh. "I felt like it was a sign that he had to be in the book, and I had to write it," the author says.

This isn't the first time Sonnenblick knew he had to write something. His first book for young readers, Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie, was similarly inspired. "I had a student whose little brother had cancer," Sonnenblick says. During a parent-teacher conference, "I carelessly mentioned to the mother that her daughter seemed to be handling things very well. The mom replied, 'No. She's not. She's hiding it,'" remembers the author, who was mortified at his misunderstanding.

To make up for his mistake, Sonnenblick offered to find a book for the student that would help her cope with the ordeal. After quite a bit of research, he came up empty-handed. "I couldn't find a book to help her, so I decided to write one." Ten short weeks later, Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie was born. Getting that first book published however, proved to be a much more lengthy and difficult process. Initially, Sonnenblick signed with DayBue Publishing, which went out of business just four days after Drums was released. In the midst of that difficulty, Sonnenblick was hit with worse news: The brother of the child who inspired the book relapsed and died three weeks before the book came out. "It was bittersweet," Sonnenblick says. "I was excited for the book to be published, but it was too late to help the kid for whom I had written the book."

It wasn't too late for others, however. Since the publisher was going out of business anyway, Sonnenblick convinced the company to donate 4,000 copies to SuperSibs, a charity organization that supports siblings of cancer patients. "The swan song was to get it to those kids who really needed it," says Sonnenblick. After a bit more publishing turmoil, some lucky connections and a weird series of coincidences, Drums was picked up by Scholastic Press and reprinted. It received numerous honors, among them a nomination for ALA's Best Book for Young Adults 2005, a BookSense Pick for Teens and loads of great reviews.

Sonnenblick, who has continued to write a book a year since Drums in 2002, is taking a hiatus from the classroom this fall, but he says he has a good excuse to return to teaching middle school one day. "I love the ironic reaction I get from people: They are glad that I am doing it, but they think I'm a little nuts." And that's an excuse he can live with.

Excuses. Excuses. Excuses. For many of us, they are the cause of frustration, but to 14-year teaching veteran and acclaimed author Jordan Sonnenblick, they are also the inspiration for his new young adult novel, Notes from the Midnight Driver.

YA FictionYA

Anna Godbersen

Interview by Heidi Henneman

Scandalous affairs, decadent parties, steamy rendezvous and scheming friends: In her new novel for young adults, The Luxe, Anna Godbersen captures the essence of Gilded Age New York high society at its most lavish and luxurious.

Told in a series of vignettes from the perspectives of several interwoven characters each with his or her own agenda The Luxe follows a young debutante, Elizabeth Holland, as she navigates the world of late 19th-century New York aristocracy, a world filled with backstabbing friends, salacious affairs, strict societal rules and lots of gossip.

In all, the characters seem remarkably similar to teenagers today or at least the ones we see on Gossip Girls or The Hills. And with a first printing of 200,000 for this first entry in a scheduled three-part series, HarperCollins is expecting this clique of characters and their charmed lifestyle to be just as popular. The author of this teen sensation got her start in writing as the assistant to the literary editor at Esquire magazine. I wrote a review almost every week, Godbersen recalls, and it was a real learning experience. Though she reviewed mostly male-oriented books for Esquire, her personal reading on the side included plenty of more girly books. From there she went on to ghostwrite a series of books for teen readers under a pseudonym. It was a fun thing to do, Godbersen says, and I made a small amount of money. Ultimately, she got a lucrative book deal of her own, and this one, The Luxe, became her labor of love, she says.

Once Godbersen got the green light for the book idea, she started researching the Gilded Age in New York. "I had a fondness for the Edith Wharton-type of novel," says Godbersen, a Berkeley, California, native and Barnard graduate. She also expected the glamour and excesses of the time to appeal to her teenage readers. Because she lives in New York City herself, it was easy to choose Manhattan as the setting for the book.

"New York was where that type of society was strongest during that period, she says, and I thought readers would be able to identify and recognize the places here." As for the characters, Godbersen tried to create believable and empathetic personas, each with his or her own issues. " Elizabeth is the heart of the book and I wanted her to embody certain aspects of the period," she says. "As the eldest daughter of a wealthy widow, Elizabeth must maintain a certain type of decorum in order to marry well. I started thinking about the ways that she would have had to conform to the period and that she would want to appear to be a very pristine, elegant and obedient girl of the time," Godbersen recalls.

But Elizabeth has secrets that even her closest friends and family do not know, including a clandestine love affair, a dark secret about her deceased father and a passionate yearning to escape the life she has been born into. "I ended up thinking about all of the hyper-accomplished women in high school these days who have high test scores, play sports and have lots of extra-curricular activities and the frightening pressure that all of that encompasses," the author says. "They are so taxed by having to appear perfect all the time."

But not all of the characters in The Luxe are do-gooders and overachievers. Elizabeth's supposed best friend, Penelope Hayes, is just the opposite. " I really wanted her to be evil," Godbersen says. And through backstabbing, man-stealing, blackmail and quite possibly murder, the author gets the job done. As for the men in the book, the author has tried to create a certain fantasy about men through her male characters. "I think they embody a type of courtliness that is true to the times," she says. " Not because they were more romantic, but because there were so many more layers of ritual and subterfuge associated with their courting." But she doesn't portray the men as infallible either: Henry Schoonmaker, Elizabeth's betrothed, is a known womanizer and drunkard; Teddy Cutting is lovelorn romantic who himself has proposed to the eldest Holland girl on several occasion; and Isaac Philip Buck is a scheming hanger-on who helps to plot Elizabeth's demise.

With the publication of her book this month, Godbersen will learn whether her pampered 19th-century party girls (and boys) and her vision of long-ago decadence will catch the imaginations of today's teen readers.

 

Heidi Henneman writes from the decadent city of New York.

Scandalous affairs, decadent parties, steamy rendezvous and scheming friends: In her new novel for young adults, The Luxe, Anna Godbersen captures the essence of Gilded Age New York high society at its most lavish and luxurious.

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