Jon Little

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As a “Pb,” the lowest of three classes in Lahn Dan, Serendipity’s life is narrowly prescribed: a food pill for breakfast, manual labor for lunch, another pill for dinner and then off to sleep in the cramped pod she shares with her ailing mother. But when she discovers a handwritten map that details a world stretching beyond Lahn Dan’s walled confines—a world her government says no longer exists—everything begins to change. With the light of dawn slicing through the proverbial crack in the wall, Serendipity is left facing a world she no longer fully recognizes or trusts.

Aided by a host of colorful characters—most notably Professor Nimbus, a subversive storyteller whose tales offer the Pb children one of their few delights, and Tab, a rough-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside smuggler—Serendipity risks her life to discover what is real. Is her map real? Is there really a world where horses still roam free?

Set in a near-future London, Zillah Bethell’s dystopian world fails to inspire nagging unease, but a storyline that rarely lags makes A Whisper of Horses a memorable tale. It may not keep kids reading late into the night, but it will keep them entertained.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As a “Pb,” the lowest of three classes in Lahn Dan, Serendipity’s life is narrowly prescribed: a food pill for breakfast, manual labor for lunch, another pill for dinner and then off to sleep in the cramped pod she shares with her ailing mother. But when she discovers a handwritten map that details a world stretching beyond Lahn Dan’s walled confines—a world her government says no longer exists—everything begins to change. With the light of dawn slicing through the proverbial crack in the wall, Serendipity is left facing a world she no longer fully recognizes or trusts.

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Three-time National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin’s Undefeated charts the rise of Jim Thorpe, Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon and All-American fullback for the Carlisle Indians, one of the most innovative football teams ever to take the field. Despite its focus, readers need not be sports fans to enjoy this book.

As a Native American man born in 1888, racism was a constant in Thorpe’s life, but it’s because of this daily prejudice that Thorpe first set foot on a football field. At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school that was created to “kill the Indian, and save the man,” Thorpe encountered the game that he and his Carlisle teammates would come to redefine.

In those days, football was a hybrid of rugby and bare-knuckle boxing. Guided by Coach Pop Warner—inventor of the reverse, the single wing and a multitude of other plays and formations—Carlisle did more than any team to move football away from its brutal origins. Warner ran a “whirlwind offense” that pitted the Carlisle players’ speed and agility against the bone-crushing brawn of America’s sporting elites: Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale.

Along with redefining how the game was played, Carlisle’s emergence as a football powerhouse forced the nation to face what was then an uncomfortable and controversial truth: Given a level playing field, Native Americans could compete with anyone—America’s most privileged sons included.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Steve Sheinkin about Undefeated.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Three-time National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin’s Undefeated charts the rise of Jim Thorpe, Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon and All-American fullback for the Carlisle Indians, one of the most innovative football teams ever to take the field. Despite its focus, readers need not be sports fans to enjoy this book.
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Prejudice. Hate. Fear. Farting dragons? Though Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale often careens into the absurd, it is rooted in the reality of the outcast. Grounded in the perennial quest to see beyond one’s self and social group, to grasp the common humanity of all—particularly those branded as other and lesser-than—The Inquisitor’s Tale is a rare page-turner, both humorous and profound.

Drawing on myths and historical figures, The Inquisitor’s Tale recounts the adventures of three misfits: William, a mixed-race monk in training who possesses superhuman strength; Jeanne, a peasant girl who has visions of the future; and Jacob, a Jewish boy who can heal mortal wounds with plants and prayer alone. Along with their resurrected dog, Gwenforte, these three outcasts take on a dyspeptic dragon, a fanatical Bishop and a monarchy hell-bent on burning every last Talmud in France.

Fast-paced and thought-provoking, Gidwitz’s well-plotted tale overcomes its only failing—a cast of diverse narrators whose voices sound, essentially, alike—with a wealth of humor and a story so compelling you won’t care who’s telling it. Slyly crafty, Gidwitz’s prose is sparse yet densely descriptive. Coupled with Hatem Aly’s whimsical “illuminations,” which mark nearly every other page of text, this action-packed tale of the oneness of humanity will captivate readers, young and old alike.

Prejudice. Hate. Fear. Farting dragons? Though Adam Gidwitz’s The Inquisitor’s Tale often careens into the absurd, it is rooted in the reality of the outcast. Grounded in the perennial quest to see beyond one’s self and social group, to grasp the common humanity of all—particularly those branded as other and lesser-than—The Inquisitor’s Tale is a rare page-turner, both humorous and profound.

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All her short life, Neen has heard the rumors. They say her mother was a mermaid, a merrow. They say that when her father drowned, her mother followed him back to her home on the ocean floor. Neen’s tight-lipped Auntie Ushag swears there’s nothing to the gossip, but Neen isn’t so sure. The sea’s swelling waves beckon her in a way she doesn’t quite understand. And if her mother were a merrow, it would certainly explain the strange, almost scaly skin condition that covers both her arms. 

Packed with adroitly selected physical details and stirring, folklore-inspired nested narratives, Ananda Braxton-Smith’s Merrow follows Neen on her journey of discovery and self-realization. From skeletons in caves to colloquial yarns about local sea monsters, each encounter forces Neen to reconsider her world and her place in it. Is her island home full of merrows and other fantastical beings, or just everyday people struggling to understand their everyday lives? Is she the offspring of a mermaid returned to sea, or just the daughter of a depressed widow who couldn’t bear to live without her husband? 

As Neen tries to parse the real from the imaginary and the mythic from the mundane, she comes to understand the power of stories—how they can bind and destroy us, or shape and sustain us.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

All her short life, Neen has heard the rumors. They say her mother was a mermaid, a merrow. They say that when her father drowned, her mother followed him back to her home on the ocean floor. Neen’s tight-lipped Auntie Ushag swears there’s nothing to the gossip, but Neen isn’t so sure. The sea’s swelling waves beckon her in a way she doesn’t quite understand. And if her mother were a merrow, it would certainly explain the strange, almost scaly skin condition that covers both her arms.
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Three-time National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin offers a new work of nonfiction as riveting as any historical novel you are likely to read this year. Undefeated exhumes football’s early years and a period in American history not as far removed from today as we might like to believe.

Why do you think this story of a football team from the early 1900s will resonate with a 2017 audience?
At heart, Undefeated is about Jim Thorpe and his teammates taking on enormous obstacles, on and off the field. I feel like once readers get to know the characters, and what they’re up against, it’ll be easy to start rooting for them. I’m a huge fan of underdog sports books like The Boys in the Boat or Seabiscuit—and I really couldn’t care less about rowing or horse racing. But those stories pull you in, and you find yourself worrying and cheering, as if these races from the 1930s were taking place before your eyes. I tried to capture this same edge-of-your-seat feeling with the football games in Undefeated. And I think it adds to the drama that modern readers have no idea how Carlisle’s big games turned out.

You fit so much into Undefeated—the formation of the Carlisle Indian School, the early years of football, Pop Warner’s backstory, the origins of the Carlisle football program, the rise of Thorpe and his teammates and on and on. Were you aware of all of these strands when you started this project?
Projects always grow on me as I research and begin to outline. I started off with the idea of making the rise of Jim Thorpe the spine of the story, and that didn’t change. But as I read more, I kept finding more to put in. After lots of trial and error, I decided to start with three stories: Thorpe’s childhood and teen years, Pop Warner and the early days of football, and the Carlisle Indian School and the formation of their football team. I get all three stories going right away in the book, and sort of juggle them until they all come together. And of course, I wound up writing way too much, and had to cut some of my favorite scenes.

“The Carlisle team changed everything by inventing a new and more exciting (and slightly safer) way to play. They saved the sport—and made it a lot more fun to watch.”

What was the most surprising fact you discovered while researching this story?
I was really stunned by the details of just how violent early-day football was—far more dangerous than it is today. Basically, it was loosely organized combat. The forward pass was not allowed, and there was no place for speed or strategy. Teams ran what were called “mass plays” over and over—walls of men crashed into each other, and guys openly punched each other in the pile-ups. In the year 1905 alone, 19 young men died playing football. Colleges were beginning to ban the sport, and momentum was building to ban football entirely in America, when the Carlisle team changed everything by inventing a new and more exciting (and slightly safer) way to play. They saved the sport—and made it a lot more fun to watch.

Beyond Thorpe and Coach Pop Warner, were there any other figures in this story that really caught your attention—people you wished you could have written more about?
One was Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of Carlisle. He’s a complex and controversial guy, a man who cared about the future of Native American kids at a time very few white American leaders did. Yet the school he founded, which was designed to strip Native kids of their culture and assimilate them into white America, inflicted tremendous and lasting pain on the people he claimed to be helping. Pratt is an important figure in my book, but I focus more on the Jim Thorpe years at Carlisle, after Pratt was gone. Besides, this is a sports book, and I didn’t want to go too heavy on the history.

You use the term “Indians” throughout Undefeated. Can you explain why you opted for that term, as opposed to more contemporary terms like Native Americans, indigenous or first nation’s peoples?
Where possible, I refer to the specific nation a person is from, rather than the more general Native American or American Indian. But those terms are used a lot too, when speaking of diverse groups, like the Carlisle team. The reason “Indians” comes up so often in the football scenes is because that’s what the Carlisle team was called—the Carlisle Indians. It’s what newspapers called them, and what they called themselves. In the epilogue, I take up the issue of modern sports teams using the name “Indians,” or other stereotyped variations, and ask the reader to think about the appropriateness of this.

By contemporary terms, Thorpe was mixed race, but seems he thought of himself—and was pretty universally described—as “Indian.” Why was this?
It’s true, Thorpe always referred to himself with pride as “Indian.” From the start, his Native heritage—Pottawatomie on his mother’s side, Sac and Fox on his father’s—was a central part of his life. As a young kid in what was then Indian Territory, he literally watched some of the Oklahoma land rushes, as the government opened Native American land to settlers. And he was later sent to a series of Indian boarding schools. All of this must have shaped the way he saw himself, though it’s not something he talked about publicly. In terms of how non-Native people saw him, that was pretty simple. He wasn’t white.

“I love the challenge of picking stories and figuring out how to tell them. It’s like trying to solving a puzzle that has a thousand possible solutions, most of them wrong.”

You started your nonfiction career writing history textbooks—which, it seems, you didn’t much enjoy. What is different about writing historical nonfiction that you find so appealing?
When I visit schools I always start by confessing that I used to write history textbooks. Kids get mad at me, and rightfully so. But some forgive me when I explain that I’m trying to make amends with the narrative nonfiction books I’m doing now. For me, the beauty is that I get to focus on people and the stories, as opposed to dates and facts. I think nonfiction for young readers should be as exciting and entertaining as fiction. I love the challenge of picking stories and figuring out how to tell them. It’s like trying to solving a puzzle that has a thousand possible solutions, most of them wrong.

When you were a young reader, what was the first historical narrative that you remember capturing your imagination?
I was captivated by stuff I didn’t think of as history—tales of shipwrecks and lost treasure, outdoor adventures, survival stories. I was learning history, but I didn’t know it! And there were also some historical novels that really blew me away, like Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery, a very well-researched book about a famous heist in Victorian-era England. The mix of history and thriller in this book really stuck with me. I’ve been trying recreate that feeling ever since.

What are you reading now? What further reading would you recommend to readers of Undefeated?
I’m always reading a mix of things; work and pleasure reading tend to get mixed up, and I like it that way. Right now I’m fascinated by a book called Operation Overflight, the memoir of Francis Gary Power, the U2 pilot who was famously shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. I’ve also been reading the amazing letters of Abigail Adams, for a younger fiction series I’m trying to get started. And I always seem to have a graphic novel or two going. For recommendations, let’s see . . . Ghost by Jason Reynolds, which won over my non-sports loving daughter, and Joseph Bruchac’s Jim Thorpe: Original All-American. For page-turning nonfiction, check out Lost in the Pacific by Tod Olson, Sabotage by Neal Bascomb (who also wrote a great sports book called The Perfect Mile) and Dive by Deborah Hopkinson.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Undefeated.

Author photo credit Erica Miller.

Three-time National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin offers a new work of nonfiction as riveting as any historical novel you are likely to read this year. Undefeated exhumes football’s early years and a period in American history not as far removed from today as we might like to believe.

Interview by

Weaving together narratives from three different times and places, Alan Gratz’s Refugee offers a frank and moving account of the hopes and struggles of refugees the world over. Effortlessly melding the historical and the contemporary, Gratz’s insightful novel will intrigue children and parents alike, leaving them talking—and thinking—long after they’ve finished the last page.

Having written plays, television, steampunk, historical fiction, and on and on, how, and why, did you decide to write Refugee?
I’ve been really lucky to have a career where I’ve been free to write books about whatever I’m interested in—history, mystery, fantasy, sports—and have editors want to publish my stories. I tended to be all over the map with my books until Prisoner B-3087. That book, based on the true story of a man named Jack Gruener, who survived 10 different Nazi concentration camps as a boy, proved to be an enormous hit with middle school readers. I got so many letters from young readers asking for more stories about World War II, which led a couple of years later to Projekt 1065, a book about a boy who is a spy in the Hitler Youth.

Refugee is an extension—an evolution?—of the work I did in Prisoner, Projekt and Code of Honor, a contemporary thriller that deals with issues of what it means to be Middle Eastern in today’s America. I heard a great podcast with Jordan Peele, the writer and director of Get Out, where he called his work “social thrillers.” I love that description, and I like to think that’s a great way to describe what I’m writing now. Refugee is a book that tackles a real-life issue—the difficult lives of refugees from different eras and different parts of the world—in a story that is so action-packed that (I hope) young readers can’t put it down. 

History is full of stories of forced expulsions, or people fleeing for their lives or for better lives. How did you decide to focus on Nazi Germany, Castro’s Cuba and the plight of modern-day Syrians?
It was while looking at further stories of World War II I could write about that I ran into the story of the MS St. Louis, a real ship that carried more than 900 Jewish refugees trying to escape Nazi Germany in 1938. I was still trying to find a way into that story when my family and I came across a homemade raft on a Florida beach that someone had used to come to America in the night. That, combined with the nightly news reports about the Syrian refugee crisis, gave me the idea to write one novel that would combine, compare and contrast all three at once.

There are, unfortunately, many other refugees crises (both historical and current) that I could have written about. But those three spoke to me personally, and had clear parallels I could draw to link them through time.

With the war in Syria still raging, this book could not be more timely. Looking back on how things have developed since you completed this book, in terms of Syria, as well as the debates around refugees and immigration more generally, what do you hope young readers take away from Refugee?
My number one hope with Refugee is that young readers see these people and understand what their lives are like before, during and after their journeys. Logically, I knew that refugees were coming to this country every day seeking the safety of a new home. But I had let myself forget until I saw that raft on the beach. Forget or ignore, if I’m being honest with myself. I hope that Refugee does for young readers what that raft did for me—brings the world of refugees to life so that their plight becomes visible, either again or for the first time.

Unlike many stories for young readers, the villains in Refugee are rarely pure evil personified. Taking the Nazis that appear, as an example, we see some flatly deplorable characters, but then you also give us the Nazi youth who doesn’t rat Josef out for not wearing his arm-band. Were you conscious about that—about not painting any one group as totally inhuman?
It’s so easy to judge an entire country or race or community on the actions of their government, or their religious leaders, or their most vocal agitators. And I don’t mean in any way to excuse the actions of the Nazis, or to claim that most of the German people were just following orders. That such institutional evil was allowed not only to begin but to thrive is a scar on the German peoples’ collective soul that may never go away. (And we Americans have our own scars to bear.) But when we begin to cast our enemies as all-of-a-kind, one-size-fits-all, it allows us also to do things like lump all refugees and immigrants into similar stereotypes and molds. Throughout the book, I challenge my young readers to see each character as a unique individual, each of whom has strengths and weaknesses and dreams and fears.

What do you think refugees’ experiences have to teach us about the relations between majorities and minorities today, whether they be racial, ethnic, religious, gender or some other grouping?
By showing refugees from three different places in the world, with three different cultures and three different religions, I hope that readers will understand that at some point, everyone was the “other.” One of the things I tell students every time I talk about Refugee is that, unless they are Native American, they are all descended from immigrants. Whether your family came over on the Mayflower or on a raft last year, you’re from a family of immigrants. We forget that. We also forget that at almost every point in this country’s history various immigrant groups have been met with prejudice, scorn and violence—Germans, French, Irish Catholics, Japanese, Chinese, Italians, Poles, Africans, Mexicans. But can you imagine America today without the contributions of all those groups? And what will America be like in 100 years without the contributions of the Middle Eastern immigrants we’re turning away for purely nativist reasons? If history is any lesson, America will be lesser for it, to be sure.

How we treat people who are different from ourselves, especially when those people are religiously, politically, racially or sexually very different from us, says a lot about who we are as human beings. Will we embrace the other, even when he or she is alien to us, or will we hate that which we don’t understand? I hope that by showing how different people from vastly different backgrounds were all treated the same by different people in different eras, young readers will begin to see that any one of us could be the “other” in need of help with just the slightest change in our fortunes.

I love how your book, by focusing on three different refugees, shows how diverse and yet similar the experience of refugees can be. What made you decide to have three narratives and three protagonists instead of one? What do you think was gained from this approach? What might have been lost?
What I gained was perspective. Historical context. I think if it had been just one story, a reader could have said, “Well, that’s how everyone treated the Jews in the 1930s”; “Of course Cubans want to escape Castro, that’s a unique situation”; or, “What’s happening in Syria right now is crazy.” But by showing all three stories—and more importantly, drawing parallels between them—I could show that these aren’t unique situations. Every story may have different details, but they are essentially the same. There’s a refrain in the book: “Tomorrow. Mañana.” Each of the refugee families says it in some way. They say it like a mantra for a better tomorrow. But I’m also, as an author, saying that unfortunately, tomorrow is going to be just like today—someone, somewhere is going to leave their home seeking help, and they’re going to be turned away. Unless we break the cycle. With just one of those three stories, I would have lost that message—and that’s one of the most important things I’m trying to say with Refugee.

As heart-wrenching as parts of this novel are, for two out of the three protagonists, the novel ends if not happily, at least on a relatively hopeful note. In this fraught political climate, was it important for you to encourage young readers to keep hoping for a better future?
Yes. I’m a naturally hopeful person. I like to think the best of people, and I always expect the world will (over time—if not in the short term!) get better and better. I could never write a book as hopeless The Chocolate War (which I literally hurled across the room at a wall when I finished it!). I don’t require a Hollywood ending for every story; I’m not that naive. But I cannot write a book in which there is no hope. What kind of message does that send? I don’t sugar-coat anything, and each family sees its share of real tragedy. Their struggles are real and hard. But I hope to show that with perseverance, luck and the kindness of strangers, there can be a hopeful ending.

What upcoming releases do you have planned? And what project are you currently working on?
I’m working on a book right now called Grenade about the Battle of Okinawa. I got to visit Japan a few years back, and while I was there I met an old man who had been a young boy on Okinawa when the Americans invaded toward the end of World War II. The day of the invasion, he and the other middle school boys were pulled out of school by the Japanese army, and each one of them was given a grenade and told to go off into the countryside and not come back until they’d each killed an American. That’s my first chapter. That book is slated to come out in the fall of 2018.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Refugee.

Weaving together narratives from three different times and places, Alan Gratz’s Refugee offers a frank and moving account of the hopes and struggles of refugees the world over. Effortlessly melding the historical and the contemporary, Gratz’s insightful novel will intrigue children and parents alike, leaving them talking—and thinking—long after they’ve finished the last page.

Interview by

A true-crime, legal thriller. A stirring treatise on diversity, gender, race, crime and justice. In The 57 Bus, award-winning journalist and author Dashka Slater offers a window into America in all its tangled complexity. The author talks about nonfiction aimed at teen readers, the power of restorative justice, the importance of community and more.


The 57 Bus started out as an article for the New York Times Magazine. How and why did you decide to target teen readers with this book-length project?
The whole time I was working on the Times Magazine article, I was also fantasizing about writing the story in a different way, for a different audience. It seemed clear to me that teenagers would find the characters compelling and I wanted them to have a chance to grapple with the complex issues the story raises: issues about either/or narratives, about race, gender, class, justice and forgiveness. At the same time, I wasn’t sure if YA nonfiction of this type was even a thing. As it turned out, my editor at FSG, Joy Peskin, read my piece and immediately contacted my agent to see if I would be interested in writing it as a book for teens. It felt like kismet.

Superficially, The 57 Bus is about two people in Oakland and the bus ride that leaves one severely burned and the other facing criminal charges. But it is so much more expansive than that. You bring multiple, overlapping communities into the story. Was this emphasis on community and interconnection a response to the facts of Sasha and Richard’s stories, or was this a larger worldview you brought to the work?
A little of both. I’ve always been interested in communities of all kinds—from renaissance fair jousters to cryptography hackers to small towns afflicted by toxic spills. I’m the daughter of a sociologist (Philip Slater, author of The Pursuit of Loneliness) and a psychologist (playwright Dori Appel). I was raised to understand that people don’t exist in a vacuum: We are all part of a family, a community, a society and an environment that shapes who we are and how we see the world. Given that understanding, it felt clear to me that Sasha and Richard’s stories couldn’t be told without some context for the worlds in which they lived.

When people discuss social justice today, intersectionality is a big buzz word. What do you think your book has to say about intersectionality? What can it add to these discussions?
The two protagonists in the book have very different experiences with race, gender and class. I hope that readers will think about the ways in which these experiences and identities overlap and inform one another, as well as the ways in which they differ. But to be honest, I wish there was more intersectionality in the book. A book that is about rejecting binaries would have benefited from the voice of an LGBTQIA+ person of color, for example. But the person in this narrative who could have spoken to that experience elected not to, for reasons of their own.

Though it raises many important questions, The 57 Bus offers no easy answers. The closest we get to an answer is restorative justice, posed as an alternative to the black and white, crime and punishment mentality that has too often marred our social justice system. For those who aren’t familiar with restorative justice, can you talk a bit about it and explain how you first became interested in the idea?
Restorative justice focuses on healing rather than punishing. In Oakland, it’s used both in public schools, as a way of reducing suspensions, and in some criminal cases, to allow juveniles who complete the process to avoid criminal prosecution. For restorative justice to work, both the offender and the victim have to be willing to participate. The details of the process vary depending on the circumstance, but generally, the offender hears from the victim about the impacts of their crime and agrees to take measurable steps to repair the harm they’ve caused and rejoin the community with a clean slate.

I became interested in restorative justice after hearing about it from local advocates. It seemed to me that it offered a pragmatic path to reducing crime and its impacts—by focusing on fixing what’s been damaged and preventing something similar from happening again. Incarcerating people is extremely expensive, and as a criminal justice reporter I know that it does a terrible job of preventing crime: 77 percent of people released from state prisons are arrested again within five years. Initial studies indicate that restorative justice significantly reduces recidivism for juvenile offenders and yields higher satisfaction and fewer trauma symptoms for victims. So while restorative justice didn’t end up being used in Richard and Sasha’s case, I did want to show what it looked like. To me, it’s a compelling example of what can happen when you step away from either/or narratives and look for solutions that make things better for everyone.

Your book was so compelling, I found myself pulling back, reminding myself, this is not just entertainment, this is a true story, these are real people’s lives. As an author, how do you negotiate that line between honoring someone’s story and presenting it in a way that will be entertaining enough to keep readers engaged?
My goal wasn’t to be entertaining as much as involving—for readers to feel connected to the two protagonists’ stories, to walk in their shoes and to care what happened to them. My hope is that if you care about Richard, maybe you’ll also care about the 54,000 kids who are held in U.S. correctional facilities on any given day. And if you care about Sasha, maybe you’ll also care about the other 150,000 American kids who identify as a gender different from the one assigned at birth.

Beyond the protagonists, who are both captivating, there are so many intriguing people in The 57 Bus. Was there anyone in particular you wish you could have devoted more time to?
Kaprice Wilson certainly merits her own book—her life and her stories are fascinating. And I would have loved to spend more time with Dan Gale, the hero who puts out the fire. I was intrigued by how much he felt his own story was changed by that moment of heroism.

What are you working on next?
I’m not very good at sticking to one genre, so at the moment I’m trying to finish a middle grade fantasy novel and a collection of short stories for adults, as well as continuing to work as a magazine journalist covering issues related to criminal justice, poverty, education and the environment. Plus a few picture books.

Can you suggest some further reading for teens who want to learn more about issues of race and social justice or restorative justice?We are experiencing a flowering of wonderful and illuminating novels about race and justice—Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, Nic Stone’s Dear Martin and Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down, to name just three. But I also want to mention a few nonfiction titles. Juveniles In Justice and the follow-up, Girls In Justice, by photographer Richard Ross, document the daily experiences of kids in the juvenile system using photographs and interviews. Racial Profiling: Everyday Inequality by Alison Marie Behnke offers clear, evidence-based explanations of flashpoint topics like inequality, Islamaphobia and incarceration. Queer, There, and Everywhere tells the stories of 23 notable LGBTQ+ folks throughout history, giving readers a sense of the breadth of gender expression over time. And while not written expressly for teens, The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr is a good introduction to the topic of restorative justice. Finally, this is a beautiful article about the Restorative Justice process that appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The 57 Bus.

A true-crime, legal thriller. A stirring treatise on diversity, gender, race, crime and justice. In The 57 Bus, award-winning journalist and author Dashka Slater offers a window into America in all its tangled complexity. The author talks about nonfiction aimed at teen readers, the power of restorative justice, the importance of community and more.

Interview by

Part romance, part thriller, and wholly intriguing, Anat Deracine’s Driving by Starlight is an engaging chronicle of a razor-sharp witted girl coming of age in Saudi Arabia. With a knack for the small, telling details, Deracine reveals the contours of daily life in Saudi Arabia—and the mind-boggling, complex web of culture, religion, gender and class that undergird it.

You dedicate Driving by Starlight to “all the girls of Riyadh,” but I understand that many books are still banned in Saudi Arabia. Do you think Driving by Starlight will ever be read in Riyadh?
Banning books only increases their readership. When I was living in Saudi Arabia, I smuggled in books and magazines without their covers, wrapped in dirty laundry and buried at the bottom of the suitcase. My friends did, too. I believe that water will find a way, and that people who love this story will find a way to share it. I hope, especially as the government finally lifts the ban on women driving this June, more people will read Driving by Starlight and feel less alone.

Like your protagonist Leena, you were raised in Saudi Arabia and then moved away. How much of Leena’s story is inspired by events from your own life?
While some of the characters in Driving by Starlight are inspired by my own friends and acquaintances, Leena’s story is very different from mine. I wish I’d had her foresight and her courage when I was her age. But the story is definitely inspired by people and events in my life. That scene where Daria kicks a dent in a metal desk out of frustration? That was me. The scene at Al-Kharj where the girls dressed up underneath their abayas? That was us. Also, that prank with the food coloring and the Vaseline? Sorry to say that was real.

Do you still visit Saudi Arabia, and if so, what is the experience of returning home like? Would you ever move back?
At the moment, I’m not allowed back. While Saudi Arabia is planning to open up some tourist visas eventually, I am pretty sure those will not be available to women traveling alone. Still, I don’t think I’d ever go back. I’ve grown used to my freedom now and wouldn’t be able to fit in anymore. Whenever I miss the desert, I travel as close as I can. I went to Jordan recently and it was incredible. Something about being at the mercy of that landscape always leaves me both humbled and energized.

Did you choose to publish Driving by Starlight under an alias because of the political situation in Saudi Arabia, or is there some other reason for, or significance behind, your pen name?
Deracine in the French means "uprooted." I chose to write under a pen name for a variety of reasons, the political situation in Saudi Arabia among them. Activists get arrested and charged as traitors. There were other considerations as well, like uniqueness and findability. (My real name is both common and frequently misspelled.) I consider myself a citizen of the world, having lived for years in many countries. At this time in history, when there is so much hyper-focus on identity as being defined by national boundaries, it was important to me to take on an identity that was more global. To be uprooted from one’s native homeland or society can also be a blessing. To be deracine can also mean to be free of the expectations rooted in a single culture.

We hear much about fundamentalist religion in Saudi Arabia, but your protagonist shows us an alternative approach. Did you feel it was important to expose Western readers to different branches of Islam?
Honestly, that didn’t occur to me! I wrote about people I’ve known, the beliefs they had, the struggles they went through in reconciling what they were told to believe with what their hearts and minds told them to be true. I’ve studied religion and philosophy pretty deeply, so I know that even in the smallest of sects there is often a division of belief. What’s happened in Saudi Arabia is that the conservative religious imams have substituted unity of practice instead, as if everyone appearing to believe the same thing is what matters. But conformity is not the same thing as community.

For readers who know little about Saudi Arabia, Driving by Starlight is sure to be truly revelatory. Is there one thing about Saudi Arabia, or Saudi Arabian people, that you hope readers take away from your book?
It’s very easy to turn anger and pain into a weapon against others, instead of using those emotions as a catalyst for structural change. It’s also easy to consider this a gender war, men against women, when in fact women can perpetuate some of the problems because they’re afraid of change, while many men find themselves frustrated by the same laws and cultural norms that oppress women. In some ways, the current conversations in Western feminism are leaving these people behind, because people from the Middle East can be ostracized for not being progressive enough. In Driving by Starlight, I wanted to make sure people saw the full picture in all its complexity, saw these people and the hard choices they make more clearly. In your review of Driving by Starlight, you mentioned that alongside the desperation there was hope and joy. If nothing else, I hope people remember that.

Leena is such an engaging character, is there a sequel in the works, or are you turning to a new project?
Both? My writing process usually involves more than one project at a time. I would love to write a sequel. I have so many questions, and early readers have reached out to me with their own. Will Mishail really be content in her secondary role? Will Leena come to love Faraz, or will she be destroyed by jealousy watching him go to Qaraouine? Will Sofia finally become a writer? What happens to Leena’s mother? So I guess the answer is, insh’allah?

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Driving by Starlight

Part romance, part thriller, and wholly intriguing, Anat Deracine’s Driving by Starlight is an engaging chronicle of a razor-sharp witted girl coming of age in Saudi Arabia. With a knack for the small, telling details, Deracine reveals the contours of daily life in Saudi Arabia—and the mind-bogglingly complex web of culture, religion, gender and class that undergird it.

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The Size of the Truth is Andrew Smith’s first foray into middle grade fiction. The Michael L. Printz honoree’s latest madcap tale follows Sam Abernathy, a claustrophobic eighth grader who bridles against the stifling expectations of his parents, the identity his small-town has foisted on him, and his reemerging memories of the three days spent at the bottom of an abandoned well taking counsel from a wise and acerbic talking armadillo. Eccentric and entertaining, The Size of the Truth is for anyone who’s ever felt boxed in. We caught up with Smith to talk about forging your own path, the power of humor and more.


Sam, the protagonist in The Size of the Truth, is trapped. As a young child he was physically trapped, having fallen down an abandoned well, and now he finds himself trapped in a more existential sense—trapped by his parents’ and town’s expectations of what he is or should be. Did anything make you feel trapped when you were young?
One of the issues I tend to obsessively examine in my books is the idea of boxing (not the fighting kind) and labeling—and how external constraints and expectations on young people produce so much anxiety and unhappiness. The good news—and this may be purely anecdotal, coming from someone who’s spent the majority of his life working with kids on a daily basis—is that things are loosening up and getting better for kids, but the labelers and box-makers among us still have a lot of progress to make. I came from a very strict, regimented family, and my parents definitely started grooming me at a very young age for the future they had in mind for me. I bought into it, I suppose, until I was about 14, but after that, I was determined to go my own way. They were against my idea of becoming a writer, but that was all I really wanted to do from about that age on, so I just did it.

And how did you break free from others’ expectations of you and blaze your own path?
Or was he pushed? I don’t think I broke free so much as grew up on the outside of everything. Like Sam, I was much younger than my classmates, having been put ahead in school (which I thought was a terrific idea for about one school week). So I never fit in, and I think my peers’ expectation was that I would always be an outcast. There were no other paths but the one I had for myself, and I had no sense of what succeeding at what I desired to do would look or feel like.

I really loved Bartleby, the talking armadillo who provides Sam with words of wisdom. Did you have someone like Bartleby in your life growing up? If so, what did you learn from him or her?
First of all, I would love to have a talking armadillo, but I’d want him to be nicer than Bartleby. And I suppose the closest thing I had to him would have been a few of my favorite teachers: Miss Haines (she taught history in middle school); Mrs. Veith, who taught geometry in high school; and my favorite, Mrs. Beaubien, my high school English teacher. Mrs. Beaubien was one of those teachers who every kid was terrified of. She was brutally demanding and an impossibly hard grader, but she gave me a love for literature and writing.

Both Sam and James want to pursue careers that, to a degree, challenge stereotypes of masculinity. What made you want to focus on issues of masculinity and gender in this book?
I’ll be totally honest here—I never thought about gender roles and gender conformity when I was writing the book. I mean, James does mention the pressure society often imposes on boys who dance, but what I mostly wanted to examine and have readers question is the idea of success and the prescriptive future that so many parents construct around their children. Sam’s parents and James’s father have already mapped out for their sons what being successful and fulfilled in their futures will look like, without ever really considering what those things mean to Sam and James. As a high school teacher for going on 30 years, this is one of my biggest frustrations today. In narrowing down the fates of our children, I also see a constriction of opportunities to build a happier future for society and the world as a whole. As I often tell my kids, you only get so many trips around the sun—do you really want to spend them doing something that makes you unhappy?

Your books are, in my view, zany, off-the-wall and consistently hilarious. What draws you toward the humorous and the absurd?
Humor is the best way to challenge accepted notions of certain status-quo practices and ideas without instantly drawing dividing lines and creating enemies. And I think nearly everything has tipped toward the absurd, especially in the past few years, so we may as well just ride that wave and see where we end up, right?

Why do non-traditional characters and themes play such a large role in your writing?
Whenever I begin a new project, I like to challenge myself to come up with something that won’t be like anything else that’s out there, so I try to explore story elements and sometimes technical components of storytelling that defy the conventional. And since I like to have fun doing what I do, humor is always going to be there—even in some of my most serious work.

What’s up next for you? Do you have more middle grade books lined up, or are you back to YA?
I’m currently finishing (I swear I’m almost finished) another middle grade novel about Sam Abernathy. Then I have the young adult novel Exile From Eden, the sequel to Grasshopper Jungle, coming out in September. And I’ve also been working on a graphic novel with my illustrator friend Matt Faulkner called Once There Were Birds, which we’ve been collaborating on for more than a few trips around the sun now. I don’t envy the amount of work for Matt—illustrating is really hard! I drew the illustrations for Exile From Eden and doing it gave me panic attacks. After that? Who knows? I’m going to write some poetry for National Poetry Month in April, and one of these days I’m sure I’ll finish this adult novel that I’ve been kicking around, too.

 

Autho photograph © Kaija Bosket

Award-winning author Andrew Smith talks about his debut middle grade novel, The Size of the Truth.

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