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Linda M. Castellitto

YA FictionYAHistorical Fiction

Meg Medina

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

The sparkly disco ball on the cover of Meg Medina’s mesmerizing new YA novel, Burn Baby Burn, evokes the summer of 1977. But there are flames on the disco ball, too, burning with an intensity that hints at something much more dangerous than disco. In New York City, this was the summer of a relentless heat wave, ever-escalating crime and a serial killer dubbed Son of Sam.

“I like the notion of disco ball as time bomb,” Medina tells BookPage in a call from her home in Richmond, Virginia. In Burn Baby Burn, the explosion comes in the form of a citywide blackout, a real-life incident that Medina remembers well. She was 13 years old and living in Queens.

Medina is the author of five previous books, including the 2014 Pura Belpré Author Award-winning Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, but this is her first novel of historial fiction. She quickly realized it wasn’t enough to draw from her own memories, and so she delved into newspapers to help re-experience that summer’s terror. “I wanted to write the story as respectfully as possible,” Medina says. “It’s part of the historical record of the city, eBand I didn’t want to glamorize it or make it sensational. What I wanted to capture was the sense of horror and dread that we felt.”

That instability and uncertainty permeate the pages of Burn Baby Burn and the life-changing summer of its protagonist, 17-year-old Nora Lopez. Nora has plans for her post-high school life: She’s saving money from her part-time deli job so she can move out of the apartment she shares with her mother, Mima, and brother, Hector. In the meantime, she’s enjoying the beach and disco dancing with her college-bound best friend, Kathleen, even as they alter their daily plans to ensure they aren’t vulnerable to the serial killer. That’s something Medina remembers well: Under Son of Sam’s shadow, running routine errands “felt like a really close call . . . like he could be anywhere and anybody.”

In addition to the fear that casts a pall over the city, Nora’s daily life is marked by exhausting, ultimately fruitless attempts to avoid setting off Hector’s increasingly explosive temper. It’s clear to Nora that Mima, who’s never disciplined Hector for his behavior, isn’t going to start handling things now. It’s up to Nora to save herself.

This is a daunting prospect for a teen with limited resources. Fortunately, Nora is surrounded by a coterie of supportive and caring spirits, including Kathleen and her parents, a badass neighbor named Stiller and the funny deli owner.

“It’s important to keep young people in contact with the idea that what your situation is right now isn’t what it will always be for you,” Medina says. “There are other people around from whom you can draw strength.”

Through the people who encourage Nora to think bigger (a guidance counselor urges her to apply to colleges) and broader (Kathleen’s mother and Stiller bring the girls to women’s rights rallies), Medina skillfully and movingly demonstrates that change can come in small increments, and though there may be setbacks, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.

Take feminism, for example. Nora is growing up during the movement’s second wave, filled with marches and Bella Abzug’s bullhorn. “It’s so painful to me when we see young women now disavow that and say they’re not feminists,” Medina says. “So much of what they take for granted and are allowed to do came on the backs of women who took to the street, marching and being ‘difficult.’ So I wanted to write a story about young women in the beginning of that.”

There’s much that readers will take away from Burn Baby Burn, with its dramatic and all-too-real backdrop of a city in trouble and transition, and characters who are doing their best while realizing that it’s OK to want to do better.

“I believe in the relief of naming hard experiences,” Medina says. “There is a comfort in removing the shame around them. They happen to all kinds of people, and it’s not a character flaw in you, it’s humanity.”

 

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

The sparkly disco ball on the cover of Meg Medina’s mesmerizing new YA novel, Burn Baby Burn, evokes the summer of 1977. But there are flames on the disco ball, too, burning with an intensity that hints at something much more dangerous than disco.
YA FictionYA

John Corey Whaley

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Whether on a book tour or in the pages of a novel, John Corey Whaley’s métier is building connections. So when he had a “complete anxiety breakdown” during the tour for his second young adult novel, Noggin (2014), Whaley knew it was time to write about a subject that he’d wanted to address for a long time: mental illness and his own experience with chronic anxiety. 

“I have the opportunity in my writing to explore this thing about myself that I ignored for a decade, to understand my own anxiety more and help people understand it,” says 32-year-old Whaley (who goes by Corey) in a call to his Southern California home. “It’s also about just being ready to tell my readers this isn’t something to be ashamed of, it’s something you can figure out a way to survive with.”

In Whaley’s third novel, Highly Illogical Behavior, 16-year-old Solomon’s world is bounded by the walls of his house. He’s agoraphobic and has been living indoors since middle school, when his anxiety and panic attacks culminated in his submerging himself in a fountain in front of his school. 

Sol doesn’t see his current reality—taking classes online, limiting his exposure to stressors, relying on his supportive and kind parents—as anything negative or even unusual. After all, he reasons, “All he was doing was living instead of dying. Some people get cancer. Some people get crazy. Nobody tries to take the chemo away.”

If you’re Lisa Praytor, though, you try to leverage Sol’s life into material for your college essay. Lisa desperately wants to escape Upland, California, and she views Sol as her ticket out: cure him, write an essay about it, get into college, get out of town. She knows it’s an unethical plan at best, so she doesn’t share the details with her boyfriend, Clark, right away. What could go wrong, anyway?

Of course things go wrong, but in a way that’s nuanced and affecting. For one thing, Sol is aware that he’s not like his peers, but he also accepts himself in a way that’s refreshing and appealing. He’s initially skeptical about Lisa and Clark but is open to beginning a friendship. And he’s kind to and respectful of his grandma and parents, who offer him unstinting support and frank conversations.

“There are lots of bad parents in YA, so it’s important for me to show that there are good parents that exist,” says Whaley, who considers himself lucky for his own parental lot. “Any writer is still going from those original sources of pain or inspiration or even love.”

Whaley’s debut novel, Where Things Come Back, was a 2012 Printz Award winner, and Time magazine named it one of the Best YA Books of All Time. His second book, Noggin, was a National Book Award finalist, and he’s the first YA author named to the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list. Despite his success, Whaley isn’t quite accustomed to his life as an author.

“It’s so strange and surreal, still,” he says. “My third book’s about to come out, but it still feels like it’s 10 years ago: I’m just out of college in Louisiana, and I’m going to be a schoolteacher for five years. Half my brain is still back there because it’s all happened so fast. It’s overwhelming.”

Although Whaley says he “hated being a teacher,” those five years of teaching sixth- through 12th-graders gave him as much confidence for touring as it did fodder for writing. He immensely enjoys visiting bookstores, industry conventions and schools, where “I get to do my favorite part of being a teacher—talking [to students] about their lives, stories, the world, with no expectations attached. . . . It’s very powerful and meaningful to get to interact with teenagers. Their stories are the way I still try to understand the world.”

That translates nicely to Highly Illogical Behavior: Sol, Lisa and Clark spend lots of time sitting and talking or playing games, but connections grow, issues are gradually faced, and ultimately, motivations and deeper feelings are revealed, from Lisa’s need for escape (and its parallels to Sol’s situation) to what it means—and what it takes—to love someone. These revelations are sometimes explosive, sometimes much quieter, but their discussions always feel true and real, whether it’s some dawning comprehension or the details of a particular “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode. 

Whaley, a “Star Trek” fan since childhood, notes, “Art inspires art, and things like pop culture references or board games can seem silly on the surface, but they’re things people find solace in, and comfort and connection.”

That’s just one of the many ways that Whaley creates connections—sometimes straightforward, sometimes complex, always worthwhile—in Highly Illogical Behavior. And as we learn from Lisa, Clark and Sol, reaching out is all it takes. 

“We’re all so much alike,” Whaley says. “You can forget that when you start growing up, but [many teenagers] have so much more clarity of thought than a lot of adults I know, if you just have a conversation with them.”

 

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

Whether on a book tour or in the pages of a novel, John Corey Whaley’s métier is building connections. So when he had a “complete anxiety breakdown” during the tour for his second young adult novel, Noggin (2014), Whaley knew it was time to write about a subject that he’d wanted to address for a long time: mental illness and his own experience with chronic anxiety.
Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYAFantasy

Victoria Schwab

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

"What about humans makes them so monstrous to each other and the world around them?”

Unexpected monsters haunt the latest young adult novel from Victoria Schwab, who considers This Savage Song “the strangest, darkest book I’ve ever written.” The freedom to explore this creepy new territory comes from her—and her publisher’s—trust in her readership.

“I’ve been really careful to develop an author fandom,” says Schwab during a call to her home in Nashville. “If you have a book or series fandom, you get pressure to stay in your lane and do what works. With an author fandom, I’ve been given more and more creative freedom to be as different and daring as I want, and my readers have been staying with me.”

Schwab, who also writes as V.E. Schwab, has 11 books and counting to her credit—adult, YA and middle grade novels rife with dark settings, sinister storylines and supernatural goings-on. Some of her works have comic-book roots, while others draw upon magic, science-fiction or fantasy tropes.  

“All of my work has a speculative thread, and all of my work has me,” explains Schwab. “[This Savage Song] is the most me. It’s a merger of what I’ve been writing for several years as an adult author and a YA author . . . and it’s about things I’ve wanted to explore but haven’t had the window to do it.”

That window’s certainly open now, and Schwab dove through it and into the dark, Gotham-esque world of Verity, a future metropolis divided by war and ruled by two very different men: Callum Harker, a ruthless crime boss, and Henry Flynn, a kind leader trying to maintain the city’s six-year truce even as Harker moves, with devious determination, to break it.

And there’s another problem plaguing the crime-ridden city: monsters born of violence and hungry for flesh, blood and souls.

In the meantime, the children of these two men—Kate Harker and August Flynn—have both reached an age where they want to be more like their fathers. Kate, an only child whose mother died when she was young, has gotten herself kicked out of six boarding schools in five years. Now she’s been sent home, where she hopes to show her father she’s tough enough to earn his attention and love. August has a different perspective on things, not least because he happens to be a monster (as are his two siblings), and it’s getting harder and harder for him to deny his real nature.

Attempting to suppress our true selves to gain approval is an age-old struggle, one that Schwab clearly delights in exploring, as Kate and August engage in verbal sparring, scary physical combat and mental and emotional gymnastics as the city threatens to fall into ruin around them.

“The epigraph for the book is a line from [my earlier novel] Vicious,” she says, “because I was really inspired by the concept from Vicious—the potential for humans to be monsters and vice versa. I wanted to take that and add the societal question, what about humans makes them so monstrous to each other and the world around them?”

She adds, “Being pagan, I think a lot about the natural world, the cycle of give and take, the notion of balance. If we put that much hatred and bloodshed in the world, there has to be something left, some sort of repercussive force and blowback.” 

In the world of This Savage Song, monsters spawn from malicious deeds—the steeper the crime, the more dangerous the monster. As the monsters of Verity reveal themselves and their varying levels of destruction, cunning and violence, Kate and August begin to question everything they thought they knew about good and evil.

That’s the fun of it, Schwab says. “I feel so passionately about this book . . . and the freedom to write a YA novel that asks existential questions about humanity. It’s a risky book, but I think for the right people, they’ll see what they need to see in it . . . about what we can and can’t change and the difference between the two, and at what point we have to self-destruct or self-accept.”

That’s something Schwab has thought about a good deal in terms of her own life. She had a happy childhood and has always been independent, always off in her own world. “I definitely had a morbid streak,” she says. “I definitely hung my teddy bears from the stair railing, execution-style.”

She adds, “The first story I ever wrote was about the Angels of Life and Death. Death killed Life, and the whole world died. I was 8. It was the precursor to everything I write.”

Schwab says that early focus on death, and her interest in plumbing it in her work, stems from long-held fears about her father’s health. “He is Type 1 diabetic and has been for 60 years. [When I was a child,] I took it on myself to keep him alive. . . . I was hyper-vigilant of the people around me, especially my parents. The idea that if I wasn’t paying enough attention they could die made me observant to a fault.”

Plus, she says, “It also makes for a kind of god complex: If you just pay enough attention, you can keep all of the balls in the air. It’s the same as a writer: You become a little god in your own world.”

Although Schwab’s father was told he’d never see age 50, he’s now 67 and recently retired to a house in the French countryside with Schwab’s mother. The author is working on her next phase, too: She just purchased an apartment and is getting used to a new tattoo, a key that stretches down her forearm. 

“I see writers as gatekeepers,” Schwab explains. “We provide the keys to these worlds and can’t control whether or not readers step through, but we can give them access.”

Fans will be glad to know there will be plenty more books to access, including adult novels and a follow-up for Kate and August. 

“It’s nice to have job security,” Schwab says with a laugh. “And every time I sell a new book, I think about how I get to keep doing this thing I love.”

 

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

Unexpected monsters haunt the latest young adult novel from Victoria Schwab, who considers This Savage Song “the strangest, darkest book I’ve ever written.” The freedom to explore this creepy new territory comes from her—and her publisher’s—trust in her readership.
YA FictionYA

Marissa Meyer

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Heartless is the stuff of dreams, but not always happy ones.

In her bestselling Lunar Chronicles series, Marissa Meyer enthralled fans with super-cool sci-fi takes on Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Snow White. In Heartless, she turns her attention to a fairy-tale character who, in our popular imagination, isn’t considered as goodhearted as her fantastical peers—because her catchphrase is, “Off with their heads!”

The urge to figure out why someone behaves a certain way, especially when their actions seem inexplicably rude (or murderous), is not uncommon—so readers who delight in psychological analysis will love Heartless, Meyer’s first standalone young adult novel. It’s a backstory for the Queen of Hearts that has a little bit of everything: adventure, romance, familial strife, betrayal, terrifying monsters . . . plus the Hatter and the Caterpillar, among other beloved Lewis Carroll characters.

Heartless begins with our heroine (and eventual anti-heroine), Catherine, called Cath, baking scrumptious lemon tarts and commiserating with her gossipy friend, the Cheshire Cat. She secretly dreams of opening a bakery with her friend Mary Ann, one of the maids who works for Cath’s parents. 

Alas, Cath doesn’t realize just how strongly her parents will object to her becoming a business owner; they’re set on urging her into a romance with the foolish King, and Cath’s happiness is secondary, if that. As Meyer pulls readers further and further into Cath’s life, with its opulent clothing and fancy balls, magical vegetables and dancing lobsters, it becomes clear that the Kingdom of Hearts is a special, wondrous place—and that Cath is too naive, at first, to fully grasp her parents’ expectations or the risks she’d have to take if she wants to forge her own path.

“In telling Cath’s story, I wanted there to be a series of things going on in her life that would constantly push her down the pathway to becoming Queen of Hearts,” Meyer says in a call to her home in Washington state. “Everything becomes the perfect storm pushing her toward making these decisions. . . . At that age, we’re all trying to figure out who we are and what we’re trying to become, pushing against boundaries, trying to find that independence.”

Heartless is the stuff of dreams, but not always happy ones: There are plenty of nightmarish and danger-filled goings-on, just like in Carroll’s wacky and weird Wonderland (the Jabberwock makes its terrifying presence known, too).

When it comes to characters, Meyer says she “didn’t have a whole lot of trepidation” about pulling from Carroll’s stories, because “when you mention the Mad Hatter or White Rabbit, people know them, but nevertheless there’s very little information about them. So there was a lot of room to grow and explore, and give my own view and twist on them . . . to pay homage to and not go against them, but still take them and make them my own.”

One aspect of Carroll’s work did give Meyer a bit of pause: “I really wanted to respect the vibe . . . and his brilliant word work, turns of phrases, clever little jokes throughout the book,” she says. “I don’t consider myself a master wordsmith, so it was a challenge for me in writing this book.” This led to a lot of research, including multiple readings of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (three times) and Through the Looking Glass (twice), plus researching scholarly papers.

Naturally, Meyer also considers Gregory Maguire’s Wicked to be highly influential in the creation of Cath’s story. “I felt like the doors were open to take a villain so infamous and well known in our culture and turn her on her head, go back into her past and look at it, to figure out how she became the character we see in Alice in Wonderland.”

Though many writers begin writing stories later in life, the 32-year-old has always known this is what she wanted to do. Meyer has two degrees in writing, wrote copious fan fiction during her teen years and attempted her first novel at 16. “It was my dream from the start,” she says. In many ways, Heartless is a masterful, magical culmination of Meyer’s lifelong love of fairy tales—and not just the pretty, happy ones. 

“When I was a kid, my grandmother heard I liked Disney movies and gave me a book that included the original Little Mermaid story, which of course is nothing like the movie,” Meyer says with a laugh. “I was just horrified and so disappointed in it—but it also made me very curious. That’s what launched me into reading other fairy tales, and into wondering, what happened to the original Cinderella? Aladdin?”

Like the source-material fairy tales of yore, Heartless doesn’t gloss over the painful, heart-wrenching parts of Cath’s story—and readers get an extraordinary opportunity to see the Queen of Hearts as a bit less mysterious, to travel along with her as romance and dreams, desire and fate, terror and adventure collide—forever changing the trajectory of her life. 

It’s an imaginative, exciting, sometimes shocking read. After all, says Meyer, “It’s in our nature to want to sanitize and protect children from [scary, sad things], but kids are fascinated by this. . . . They can handle a lot more than we want to give them credit for.”

 

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

In her bestselling Lunar Chronicles series, Marissa Meyer enthralled fans with super-cool sci-fi takes on Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Snow White. In Heartless, she turns her attention to a fairy-tale character who, in our popular imagination, isn’t considered as goodhearted as her fantastical peers—because her catchphrase is, “Off with their heads!”
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Jerry Spinelli

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

We are drawn to stories set within prisons, with their tales of escape attempts, the wrongfully accused, rivalries and friendships that turn on a dime and the challenges of life after release. Jerry Spinelli’s latest novel for children takes a different tack: In The Warden’s Daughter, the Newbery Award winning author offers the perspective of another kind of correctional facility resident, middle schooler Cammie O’Reilly.

Cammie and her father live in an apartment in the Hancock County Prison, a fortress-like building in the center of their small town. In many ways, it’s a lot like any other living situation: They have breakfast in the kitchen, he goes to work, she goes to school (when she’s not watching “American Bandstand” with her best girlfriend, Reggie) and other domestic goings-on. But her father’s bedroom window looks out over Murderer’s Row, and her neighbors include prison guards and female inmates, with whom she has daily through-the-fence chats.

It’s quite the interesting life for a curious, smart kid like Cammie—one that was inspired by a friend of Spinelli’s, a real-life warden’s daughter. “After I met my friend Ellen, she told me about her life growing up in the prison,” the author says in a call to the Pennsylvania home he shares with his wife, author Eileen Spinelli. “That was 15 years ago. It’s amazing it took so many years to realize what a natural story I had sitting in my lap!”

While Spinelli says Ellen’s life doesn’t resemble Cammie’s, the prison in The Warden’s Daughter is much like the real Montgomery County Prison in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where Spinelli grew up. It was there that he had a friend whose background inspired another important element of Cammie’s life: having a mother who sacrificed her life to save her daughter’s. “I patched in the memory of an old friend and fraternity brother,” Spinelli says, “who was a baby when his mother was crossing the street and didn’t see a milk truck coming, and threw him across the street to save his life.”

Stories and memories combine to make The Warden’s Daughter a coming-of-age tale that’s both familiar and new. Readers who live or have lived in unusual places and small towns will enjoy Spinelli’s spot-on rendering of that sort of life, and those who haven’t will look at such situations with wonder. Anyone who is or has been a 12-year-old on the cusp of 13 will relate to Cammie’s struggle with wanting to be mothered yet wishing people would see how grown up she is. And readers who’ve experienced strong grief will recognize the ways in which those grieving try to carry on, while people around them strive to balance delicate sensitivity and soothing normalcy.

Stories and memories combine to make The Warden’s Daughter a coming-of-age tale that’s both familiar and new.

For Cammie, the summer of 1959 is when things go decidedly off-kilter. She’s been doing a pretty good job of compartmentalizing her feelings, finding fun and relief in long bicycle rides, pick-up baseball games, adventures with Reggie and showing her dad how strong and helpful she can be. 

But then, she realizes, “In the weeks after Mother’s Day, something was changing. Enough was no longer enough. . . . I was sick and tired of being motherless.” Of course, untreated PTSD would wear anyone down, and to make matters worse, the site of her mother’s accident, The Corner, is just blocks away from her home.

Intriguingly, as Cammie’s feelings swell toward a breaking point, Spinelli doesn’t shy away from having her rage periodically manifest itself in abusiveness toward those around her, including Eloda, the inmate trustee who’s been working as the warden’s housekeeper. 

From a practical standpoint, Spinelli says, “Considering where I wanted the story to end up, that seemed to be the way to frame it.” He adds, “Not having been parentless [as a child] myself, I did my best to put myself in her situation and went from there.” 

Cammie does realize her angry outbursts are wrong, and as best she can, she strives to manage her unmanageable feelings. Friends like ebullient inmate Boo, teen-queen Reggie and even a 5-year-old boy serve as a veritable village of support and friendship—but ultimately, it’s the steadfast and sympathetic Eloda who gets Cammie where she needs to go, emotionally and physically. 

This climax between Eloda and Cammie is a finely written, heartbreaking, cathartic scene—and far from the only tear-inducing situation in the book. When asked if he ever cries when he writes his books, Spinelli says, “I’ve never had that question, but now that you mention it, I occasionally might get a little worked up as I’m rereading aloud a particular passage. I’m straddling both sides of the fence: being dispassionate enough to write as well as I can, and somehow, without tears flowing, participating as emotionally as I can for the sake of the characters.”

When it comes to prisons literal and figurative, Spinelli (who’s a big fan of the HBO TV series “Oz”) says he joins the rest of us in our continued fascination with that institution and its metaphorical counterparts: “Once in a while, when I hear news about prisoners or even an execution, I find myself thankful I’m not in such a situation,” he says. “[Our freedoms] are suddenly framed and put into perspective . . . just as standing across the street from a building that houses people who don’t have the things we [take for granted] makes us more aware of and sensitive to our assumed conditions.”

As for the real, long-defunct prison on which Cammie’s home is based, it’s currently the subject of several renewal-project proposals (including a lovely one that’s worked into The Warden’s Daughter). And Spinelli’s friend Ellen, the original warden’s daughter? She gave the book “a rave review.”

 

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

We are drawn to stories set within prisons, with their tales of escape attempts, the wrongfully accused, rivalries and friendships that turn on a dime and the challenges of life after release. Jerry Spinelli’s latest novel for children takes a different tack: In The Warden’s Daughter, the Newbery Award winning author offers the perspective of another kind of correctional facility resident, middle schooler Cammie O’Reilly.
Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYA

Laini Taylor

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

A vital element of Laini Taylor’s sweeping, dramatic, exciting new novel is travel in many artfully rendered guises, including flights of imagination via books in an amazing library, a grueling but thrilling road trip to a forgotten city and nocturnal tours of people’s dreams.

Journeys near and far have been central to Taylor’s own story as an author as well, with the wonders of travel first opening to her through her father’s job as a naval officer.

“It definitely had a huge impact on me,” Taylor says during a call to her home in Portland, Oregon. “I was so lucky to be able to live in Europe as a kid. . . . I wish everyone had the opportunity to see the world from different perspectives at a young age.” She adds: “As an elementary school student, I went on field trips to Pompeii! We were living in incredible places, and I had a blessed childhood.”

“I had to honor the darkness I’d created, but still make the story a place readers enjoy being. Kissing helps!”

Taylor’s literary career began in 2004 with the graphic novel The Drowned, followed by the Dreamdark series, the National Book Award finalist Lips Touch: Three Times and the New York Times bestselling Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy.

That’s a lot of writing over the course of a decade, and Taylor’s work certainly doesn’t tend toward the spare. She creates highly detailed, multilayered worlds populated by complex characters engaged in grand-scale endeavors.

She’s at it again with Strange the Dreamer: 500-plus pages of poetic prose, finely crafted fantasy and oodles of adventure, peril, romance, redemption, gods, royals and warriors. It’s a fantasy lover’s delight, with ever-higher flights of fancy brought crashing to earth and then soaring anew as the pages turn and the characters journey on. It all builds toward a shocking ending—and maybe, a beginning. Fans will be happy to hear that it’s the first book in a duology.

Readers meet Lazlo Strange, orphaned during a war in Zosma and adopted by monks. Around age 5, Lazlo became fascinated—obsessed, really—with the lost city of Weep, a faraway land with a mysterious story. At age 13, he begins work at the Great Library, “a walled city for poets and astronomers and every shade of thinker in between.” (Be warned: Taylor’s descriptions of the place are sure to awaken a great longing in avid readers.)

Just when life is starting to seem a bit routine, Lazlo learns that a man known as the Godslayer has come to town, and he’s leading a band of people with special skills to Weep. Lazlo leaps at the chance to join them, and so begins a journey to a beautiful, damaged place where strange contradictions abound: Beautiful temples and a “cityscape of carved honey stone and gilded domes” share space with “butcher priests . . . performing divination of animal entrails.” It’s a setting of great mystery and wonder, where it becomes clear the travelers’ challenges have only just begun.

In the meantime, Taylor introduces us to some of the residents of Weep, including a beautiful young woman named Sarai who has a most unusual ability (she can enter and manipulate dreams), a decidedly untraditional family situation and jewel-toned skin. She is one of the children of gods, left behind after a long-ago war between gods and men. And she lives in secrecy with her siblings (also in possession of singular talents) in a giant citadel that floats in the sky miles above Weep.

With such a marvelous backstory, it’s easy to see why, at first, Taylor intended to begin the duology with Sarai’s story (and there’s so much more to it than we’ve touched on here). When she first began work on Strange the Dreamer, Taylor thought about “children of war, like children of soldiers left behind in Vietnam, and their struggles.”

But as she tried to write Sarai’s story, about someone “living someplace where they look down on the population but aren’t part of it,” Taylor says, “I knew I wanted to enter [Weep] through the eyes of an outsider.”

Lazlo was that outsider, Taylor explains. “He totally took over the story. All of a sudden, after weeks and weeks of struggling, I had a lightning bolt: His nose was broken by a falling book of fairy tales—and I had him! In that moment, it was his book, and everything shifted. I fell in love with the librarian.”

Speaking of love, fans of Taylor’s work will be happy to hear that there’s romance to be found amid the trauma and fear in Weep. “[A kiss] is a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption to the mundane,” muses one character.

That’s exactly what Taylor says she was going for when she imbued this often dark tale with the lightness and joy of new love: “It was a hard lesson to learn [as I became an author], that I had to honor the darkness I’d created, but still make the story a place readers enjoy being. Kissing helps!”

So, too, do those fairy tales: The book that bonks Lazlo on the nose contains the kinds of narratives that have long fascinated Taylor. “The only books I have in my office are folklore and fairy tales!” she says. “Reading folklore from other countries is a great way to expand your imagination. One line of a folktale from a country you don’t know about could be the seed of an entire novel.”

Certainly, Lazlo’s dedication to reading and research helped expand his mind beyond the walls that surround him. As for Sarai, Taylor says she travels through peoples’ dreams into greater waking consciousness for herself. “She could learn more about the people she’d been taught to hate when she sees their dreams and nightmares. How could she not feel for them?”

There’s much to ponder and relate to in Strange the Dreamer—in addition to simply enjoying (and marveling at) the fantastical fruits of Taylor’s imagination. It’s a compelling, engaging mix of super-fun adventure and timely allegory. As for how to pass the time while awaiting Taylor’s next book, The Muse of Nightmares? Well, there’s always reading and traveling . . . and dreaming.

 

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

Author photo by Ali Smith.

A vital element of Laini Taylor’s sweeping, dramatic, exciting new novel is travel in many artfully rendered guises, including flights of imagination via books in an amazing library, a grueling but thrilling road trip to a forgotten city and nocturnal tours of people’s dreams.

RomanceYA FictionYAContemporary Romance

Sandhya Menon

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Fans of romantic comedies love a meet cute, and in her young adult debut, Sandhya Menon adds an Indian tradition to this time-tested trope: Her characters’ parents have arranged their marriage.

As When Dimple Met Rishi opens, 18-year-old Dimple Shah has graduated from high school and been accepted to Stanford. She loves iced coffee and coding, but not her mother’s incessant harping about her appearance and future wifehood. She’s thrilled when her parents send her to Insomnia Con, a summer program for budding coders at San Francisco State University. On the first day, Dimple sits on the SFSU campus, eyes closed, sipping iced coffee and feeling hopeful that maybe, just maybe, her parents were “finally beginning to realize she was her own person, with a divergent, more modern belief system.”

But her tranquility is shattered when she hears a friendly male voice say, “Hello, future wife.” A horrified shriek and an iced-coffee-flying-through-the-air later, Rishi Patel is left dripping, and Dimple (fleeing at a dead sprint) is worried she has a stalker.

“There is a magic to true love and finding the perfect person. Even if your parents preordain it—that still helps you find love.”

This doesn’t seem like an auspicious beginning to a beautiful relationship, but—thanks to Menon’s warm, funny characters and a story that sensitively and evenhandedly explores what happens when traditional values and modern ideas collide—readers know better.

At first, though, Dimple doesn’t. She’s spent so many years defending herself against her relentlessly overbearing mother that’s she’s understandably twitchy about dating. Besides, she’s at Insomnia Con to code! Rishi, who’s been accepted to MIT, is there to code, too—but also because his and Dimple’s parents plotted to throw them together and nudge them toward marriage.

“I think arranged marriage is still fairly misunderstood in America,” Menon says from Colorado, where she lives with her husband and two children. “On TV, you usually see really old guys marrying helpless, vulnerable women, but that’s not what it’s like in my family and the families I knew growing up. I wanted to portray arranged marriage as it’s more commonly found in middle-class India.”

Menon grew up in India and came to America at age 15. While her marriage wasn’t arranged, she says, “Pretty much all of my relatives’ were, so it’s pretty normal for me to think about it.”

In Dimple and Rishi’s case, the two have more in common than they realize: Just as Dimple always feels like she’s not good enough for her parents, Rishi feels distant from his own. His dad urges him toward a practical business education, despite Rishi’s love for drawing comics.

However, Rishi is more in tune with his parents when it comes to marriage: He trusts them and believes in the importance of tradition. Of course, because he’s male, he hasn’t experienced a lifetime of being told to wear more makeup and to stop caring about school so he can focus on becoming marriage material.

Menon notes that in Indian culture, especially for daughters, it can be “hard to see past your mother constantly telling you how you should be, how things should be, what you should change. It’s hard to see that as coming from a place of love, or that it’s the only way they know how to communicate [that] they want you to end up in a good place in life.”

For Menon, this divide was a crucial addition to the story. “It’s a very universal experience for anyone with a controlling parent,” she says. “In the end, Dimple’s mom was really proud of her and wanted what was best for her, even if that was communicated in a convoluted way.”

As in any good rom-com, time passes and the two get to know each other, allowing perspectives to shift and defenses to weaken. Dimple realizes that Rishi is a good, talented person who stands up for her when it matters. (It doesn’t hurt that he’s handsome, too.) And Rishi acknowledges that fierce, lovely Dimple has been experiencing arranged-marriage pressure in a very different, demoralizing way—and that perhaps it’s OK to pursue something he’s passionate about.

Menon’s own experience of feeling torn between Indian traditions and American social mores is one of the main reasons why she loved writing this book. “I know what it’s like to grapple with the question, how much Indian am I?”

She explains that it got easier in college. “People came to assume I’d been born here . . . and I started to find my place a bit more. I started writing more and expressing myself through art. It was a really freeing thing for me to do—to feel like there’s this thing I can share with people, and they can accept that, even if they can’t accept every part of me just yet.”

When asked if she’s more like practical Dimple or romantic Rishi, Menon laughs and denies being a romantic. “I love to write [romance] and read it and watch it in Bollywood movies, but in my personal life I’m much more practical,” she says.

“I do think there’s a kind of magic to love. My super-logical brain says it’s all chemistry . . . but there is a magic to true love and finding the perfect person. Even if your parents preordain it—that still helps you find love.”

 

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

Fans of romantic comedies love a meet cute, and in her young adult debut, Sandhya Menon adds an Indian tradition to this time-tested trope: Her characters’ parents have arranged their marriage.

YA FictionYA

Kwame Alexander

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Since Kwame Alexander won the 2015 Newbery Medal for The Crossover, he’s been traveling far and wide in a whirl of evangelism for reading, poetry, friendship, self-expression, sports, music and love.

During a call to his Virginia home (where he was resting before lighting out for Ohio, Texas and beyond), Alexander says, “When I won the Newbery, I committed myself to being an ambassador of poetry and literature. Nobody asked me to. I just decided I’d give it two years and go everywhere.”

And so he has, from schools to TED talks, connecting with kids, teachers and librarians. He also continued writing, and his latest YA novel-in-verse, Solo, co-written with Mary Rand Hess, weaves poetry, music and text conversations into a coming-of-age tale.

Seventeen-year-old Blade is a talented musician in Hollywood and the son of a former rock star who’s a longtime addict. His teasingly sarcastic sister, Storm, and secret girlfriend, Chapel (her parents don’t approve), help make life fun sometimes, despite persistently cruel tabloid stories and long-simmering anger at his dad, who’s been emotionally checked out since Blade’s mom died 10 years earlier.

Blade’s mentor, Robert, “a magician / who turns worries / into songs,” is a haven for the teen. Their conversations are a call-and-response rhythm of wisdom and calm that culminates in music. But Blade’s still having a hard time finding serenity, and just as family conflict reaches yet another crescendo, a secret is revealed that has him questioning his very identity.

Thanks to Blade’s songwriting, Storm’s efforts to become a singer and Robert’s improvising, plus name-checks of musicians as varied as Meghan Trainor, Lenny Kravitz and Metallica, there’s plenty of music sounding through Solo.

Alexander says a mutual love of music helped him and Hess find their way from disparate tastes to their own perfectly tailored collection of influences. “Mary’s a hard rock fan, and I’m the 1980s Lloyd Dobler type, the Genesis guy. . . . But there were no arguments, just a frustration and sadness when we had to leave certain people out.”

He jokes, “Whenever it got to a point where there was gonna be a disagreement, I brought out my Newbery Medal,” then says, “No—there were certain things I knew that were not up for discussion, and certain things I trusted that she knew that weren’t up for discussion. You need that level of trust when you’re writing together. And it’s poetry! You’ve got to follow the rules, rhythm, emotion, metaphors, and distill powerful moments into very few words.”

Some of Solo’s most powerful moments take place in Africa, where Blade flees in pursuit of more information about that shocking family secret. Alexander says he chose Ghana for the book because of his own feelings for the place: “In 2012, a friend was becoming a queen in a village, and she wanted me to document it. I went to Konko and fell in love with the people and the children, the possibilities and hope and history.”

Since then, he’s founded LEAP for Ghana, which has provided books, literacy training and more. Last year, when Hess asked if he wanted to team up on a book, he knew the time was right: “I’d always wanted to write about Ghana but hadn’t figured out the story. Mary’s novel-in-progress was set in Kenya, but she’d never been there. I said, let’s put my ideas with yours, and a year later, we were finished.”

In Solo, when Blade goes to Konko, he falls for the place and the people, too, even though he’s nervous about what it might mean for his future. And of course, there’s the culture shock: It’s quite different from what he’s used to in Hollywood.

“I was excited by the concise, rhythmic. . . language that captured the emotional woes and wonders of my world in a few words.”

“This is a kid who has everything, and that’s juxtaposed with the complete opposite, with people and a country that have very little materially,” Alexander says. “Would it be realistic, would people care? That was a challenge, and I think we met it. The readers will tell us.”

They really will, too; for Alexander, an important part of his writing and his travels is the back-and-forth with his enthusiastic and vocal young readers.

“I’ve heard way too many times that boys don’t read,” he says. “I never believed that. You’ve just got to give boys a book they’re interested in reading.”

Alexander’s parents were avid readers and educators, so books were big in his home. But “in middle school, I wasn’t interested in books. . . . I was well-read, intelligent . . . but nobody made the connection that I should be given books I was interested in reading.”

In college, “I found my way back to reading through love poems. . . . I began to write poetry as a way to communicate with girls. I was excited by the concise, rhythmic, figurative, sparse language that captured the emotional woes and wonders of my world in a few words. I knew from college on [that poetry] can transform your life. It transformed mine, and I thought, I’ve got to find a way to share it with the world.”

And now he does, through Solo and his other books, his speaking engagements and his work in Ghana, where this summer LEAP for Ghana will finish building a library. There will be plenty more Alexander books, too, including novels-in-verse Swing (about baseball and jazz, written with Hess) and Rebound, the prequel to The Crossover.

“Most of us have forgotten that we love poetry, but it’s how we learn to communicate as children, in rhythm and rhyme and verse,” Alexander says. “It’s my job to remind us how powerful it is, to help us become more confident, find and raise our voices, become more human. . . . I want everyone to know words are cool, books are cool. They’re the most transformative things.”

 

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

Since Kwame Alexander won the 2015 Newbery Medal for The Crossover, he’s been traveling far and wide in a whirl of evangelism for reading, poetry, friendship, self-expression, sports, music and love.

YA FictionYA

John Green

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

After his 2012 novel—the hugely popular, critically acclaimed YA hit The Fault in Our Stars—grew into a global phenomenon, Green discovered that returning to writing was not an easy task. But with Turtles All the Way Down, he found a subject very close to his heart—and brain.

The Fault in Our Stars sold 45 million copies worldwide, was translated into 50-plus languages and was made into a movie. In 2014, the year the movie debuted, Green was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world by Time magazine. Thrilling stuff—but not surprisingly, it became a hard act for Green to follow.

“For a long time after The Fault in Our Stars came out, I wasn’t able to find pleasure in writing, to find an escape from my brain,” Green says in a call to his Indianapolis home, where he lives with his wife and two children. “When I was writing . . . it was hard not to feel the audience looking over my shoulder.”

But Green kept creating and communicating with fans (affectionately called nerdfighters) in other ways, like the two popular video blog series (“VlogBrothers” and “Crash Course”) he hosts with his brother, Hank, and VidCon, a conference for online video creators and aficionados.

And eventually, writing “did start to feel like the release it had always been,” and soon he was crafting what would become Turtles All the Way Down. “When I started working on the book intensely, it was almost impossible for me to write about anything else,” Green says.

Perhaps most importantly, Green felt like he “didn’t have a choice” in the subject matter. The main character, 16-year-old Aza Holmes, struggles daily with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)—which has affected Green’s life since childhood.

“As Aza says in the book, illness is supposed to be story told in past tense—you’re supposed to share your story of how you conquered your demons. That’s not my story,” Green says. “It’s more something I’ve lived with for a long time. It can be so hard to reconcile that, in part because there are such strong cultural voices saying [that] any kind of chronic illness is a weakness, a failure. And that’s just not true.”

It absolutely isn’t, but it’s something Aza contends with, despite having a caring mom and best friend, Daisy. Aza usually tries to handle everything by herself, so it’s hard to pull herself out of spirals of intrusive thoughts—which cause her to turn her focus inward and to feel anxious, which leads to feeling bad about herself. It’s exhausting and seemingly endless.

The spiral motif that’s central to Aza’s story is first referenced in the book’s title, which refers to the philosophical paradox that the Earth is flat and balanced on the back of a giant turtle, which is atop another turtle, and so on and so on. That notion of a never-ending stack of turtles provides an artful, memorable way to envision a line of reasoning that goes on and on without end, spiraling down with no relief or escape—and nicely parallels Aza’s OCD-induced thought spirals that make her feel powerless, out of control and disconnected from her own sense of self.

“You’re supposed to share your story of how you conquered your demons. That’s not my story.”

“OCD can be super isolating, in part because it’s happening within you, so it’s almost impossible to express it in a way to help other people understand,” Green says. “[OCD] can be so consuming that it’s really difficult to even understand there’s a world outside of yourself.”

And sometimes, finding the right treatment can feel impossible, especially if there’s shame and secretiveness involved. “I always felt tremendously embarrassed about my obsessive thought spirals,” Green says. “It’s really difficult to feel something weird about [yourself] that’s sort of disgusting or reprehensible, that you can’t shake.” He adds, “Aza hates being like this, and for much of the book, she really cannot see that she’s not alone.”

In Turtles All the Way Down, Green comes as close as anyone to capturing the thought-spiral experience for readers. Masterfully crafted, skillfully paced, sometimes heartbreaking streams of consciousness draw readers into Aza’s relentless brain and whisk them along as the story ebbs and flows and grows. Will Aza realize that sharing with others what it’s like to be her can help? Or will she retreat from that possibility and return to more familiar territory, courtesy of a mind that seems determined to play the trickster?

That’s not all Turtles All the Way Down has to offer. At the heart of Aza’s story is a weird, entertaining tale of what appears to be your typical find-the-missing-billionaire-and-get-the-$100,000-reward treasure hunt. But the adventure unspools in delightfully unexpected ways, with revelations funny and romantic and bizarre, plus a dose of practicality when it comes to the notion that mental illness is a huge boon to an investigator.

Green has a bone to pick with that. “That’s one thing I’ve always found so strange about the narrative of the obsessive detective,” Green says, referring to a popular trope in literature, film and TV. “In my experience, OCD comes with no superpowers and has made me a terrible detective! When I’m sick, I have no awareness of the world outside myself at all. How could I possibly look at someone’s shirt and figure out what they do for a living? I know that’s not everyone’s experience, but it doesn’t make sense to me at all. I’m just not a very good detective.”

Is Aza? We won’t spoil it, but Green definitely has great fun with the sleuthing aspects of his story. In his trademark style, he also includes lots of fascinating things readers will be inspired to learn more about—from facts about the tuatara (a New Zealand reptile) to hilariously deep dives into Star Wars lore.

There’s also plenty of poetry to learn about and enjoy. Green has always had a knack for crafting phrases that inspire and beg to be shared. Here, he goes a step further, with characters who write poetry and share their favorite poems.

Green says that in writing about OCD, “I really wanted to try to give form or structure to this thing I have trouble accessing via my senses, and one of my favorite ways writers have done this over the centuries is [through] poetry. It’s a way of sense-ifying the ineffable.”

But Green acknowledges that this is only one experience and only one way of representing mental illness. “I don’t want to project Aza’s or my experience on everyone,” Green says. “When you talk about mental health problems, there’s a huge diversity of experiences. . . . I do know the vast majority is treatable, and that there’s real, legitimate cause for hope—that despair is a lie your brain is telling you.” Of course, he adds, “Not any one treatment works for everyone.”

This push and pull, this engaging with the outside world while trying to manage the tempest within—it’s all part of living with OCD. But in that outside world, Green says, there are people who want to understand, learn and help. This is one of the main points he wanted to make with Aza’s story: that she doesn’t have to shoulder this burden in isolation. The effects of OCD touch all of Aza’s relationships, and with the release of Turtles All the Way Down, Green’s relationship with his audience will shift and change anew.

“For the last several years, the book’s been only in my mind, to a large degree, and [now] it isn’t,” Green says. “There’s a bit of a sense of loss in that, and also excitement and nervousness now that it belongs to its readers.”

 

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

(Author photo by Marina Waters.)

After his 2012 novel—the hugely popular, critically acclaimed YA hit The Fault in Our Stars—grew into a global phenomenon, Green discovered that returning to writing was not an easy task. But with Turtles All the Way Down, he found a subject very close to his heart—and brain.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Avi

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Some sample career advice: “Fake it till you make it.” “Dress for the job you want.” “Pride goes before a fall.” Now imagine all that advice smashed together when you’re 13 years old (or maybe 9, you’re not sure) and all alone in the world, and the new job you’re prepping for is king of England.

With The Player King, inspired by a case of truth being way stranger than fiction, Avi (the author of 75-plus books, including Nothing but the Truth and Newbery Medal-winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead) shares with readers the amazing story of Lambert Simnel, a young boy in 1486 who briefly played at being an actual monarch despite having no royal blood, education or anything else that might qualify or prepare him to rule a country.

In a call to his home in Colorado, where he lives with his wife, Avi explains that it was an exciting day some 15 years ago when he came across the scant facts that inspired him to write The Player King. “I read a lot of British history,” Avi says, “and Lambert was literally a footnote. Considering who I write for, what I write and that he’s still a mystery, what could be better than that? . . . I couldn’t dream this up.”

In Avi’s hands, that footnote blossoms into a fascinating, entertaining, historically accurate story set in the late 15th century, at the beginning of the Tudor period. Henry VII has taken the English throne, even though he wasn’t next in line to reign, and angry, ousted politicians and clerics are casting about for ways to regain the power they believe is rightfully theirs.

“My own personal mantra is that writers don’t write writing, they write reading.”

Meanwhile, Lambert toils away as a scullion at Tackley’s Tavern in Oxford. His existence is an unendingly dreary one. He has no idea where his parents are, and he’s always dirty, hungry and getting yelled at, although he does maintain a wry sense of humor: “In short,” our narrator says, “my life was worth no more than a spot of dry spit.” His only joy comes from bakery runs, when he can pause for a moment to watch street performers poke fun at the royal family, and imagine what it would be like to be a player touring the country and having people laughingly bow to him.

Then, in a confusing, bizarre series of events, a friar named Brother Simonds swoops in and tells Lambert he’s not a lowly orphaned scullion—he’s the rightful king of England. At the behest of the Earl of Lincoln, the friar spirits Lambert away (after buying him from the tavern keeper) so he can train the boy to become—or at least pass for—royalty.

Avi’s singular ability to convey multitudes via carefully crafted, often spare phrases is evident throughout The Player King—but especially so at this point in the story, as Lambert marvels at and is overwhelmed by sights, smells and sensations most modern-day readers likely take for granted.

“My own personal mantra is that writers don’t write writing, they write reading,” Avi says. “I think that if you write well, and I sometimes can, you can get an emotional response just to the structure of the words. You create an image, a sense of place and being that goes beyond plot, that goes to the heart of the experience.”

Lambert’s new experiences are unceasing: When he looks out the window of his new home, “A bird flew by . . . below! I, who had spent my whole remembered life in a cellar, as if in a tomb—it made me dizzy to see such things from such a height.”

As he begins to acclimate to his new life, Lambert slowly gains confidence. There’s a different purpose to his days—and a journey ahead that will shock him—but there’s also a strange yet comforting familiarity in still being constantly reminded to obey.

“A key part of the book for me is his rumination on being told what to do,” Avi says. “He can clear a table, and also be a king. What happens when you start to believe [that] yourself? . . . It’s a little like Pygmalion or My Fair Lady, the idea that you can create this image of class and position by manipulating the surface.”

Speaking of manipulation, Avi says, “Most of the writing [of this era’s history] was done at the behest of the Tudors, who wanted to make sure nobody believed this story. And yet, [someone] did write about it, it was real. . . . It’s all about learning about the propaganda, and understanding why they were so fearful of this kid when they were the ones that created him.”

Curious readers will be glad to know that Avi provides further details of Lambert’s history in an author’s note at the book’s end. They’re tantalizing details, to be sure, but Lambert still remains largely a mystery—a story to be believed, but also to be imagined.

“ ‘The writer’s job is to imagine the truth,’ ” Avi says, quoting writer Paula Fox. “I love the idea that one imagines the truth and tries to create that in readers’ heads.”

He adds, “It’s an interesting concept, I think, that one sees more of the world when you read than you do with your eyes. That’s just extraordinary.”

 

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

(Author photo by Katherine Warde.)

With The Player King, inspired by a case of truth being way stranger than fiction, Avi (the author of 75-plus books, including Nothing but the Truth and Newbery Medal-winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead) shares with readers the amazing story of Lambert Simnel, a young boy in 1486 who briefly played at being an actual monarch despite having no royal blood, education or anything else that might qualify or prepare him to rule a country.

NonfictionMemoir

Kelly Corrigan

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Reading Kelly Corrigan’s Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say is like reading a letter from a dear friend whom you can talk to about anything, who makes you laugh when you feel distinctly humorless or who can just sit quietly with you when talking feels like too great an effort.

Not surprisingly, in the 10 years since her first book, the bestselling memoir The Middle Place, Corrigan has become a voice that people really like to hear, whether in TED Talks, her podcast series “Exactly” or in her subsequent memoirs, Lift (2010) and Glitter and Glue (2014). Her latest memoir, Tell Me More, is a collection of essays about 12 phrases that she is working on saying more and have proved central to Corrigan’s life. They can be difficult things to say, like “I don’t know” and “No,” or phrases that are ostensibly easier to utter—but perhaps aren’t—like “Yes” and “I love you.” In every entry, Corrigan unpacks her life with poignancy and humor as she wrestles with relatable issues, from family blow-ups to unruly pets to debilitating grief, and muses on the things that give life levity and beauty.

But beneath every illuminating, empathetic entry in Tell Me More, there is grief and love that ebb and flow for Corrigan’s friend Liz, who recently died of cancer. Corrigan is a cancer survivor herself, and the disease marks a place in each of her books. “I’m 50, and it feels like half the people I know have had cancer,” Corrigan says during a call to her home outside San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, two daughters and their dog. “Frankly, cancer, in the ways I’m dealing with it in the book, is just my version of crisis. . . . Your version might be unemployment, financial setbacks, your parents have Alzheimer’s—you can sub in anything you want. [Tell Me More] is not so much about cancer, but about crisis.”

Cancer played a part in Corrigan’s initial decision to pursue a career in writing over a decade ago. “I’ve always written in a journal to help make sense of my life, and I’m a huge letter-writer,” she says. But her father’s terminal illness provided a new, urgent deadline to begin writing. “Self-publishing was just becoming a thing [10 years ago], so I self-published The Middle Place. The visual of handing my dad a book was enough to motivate me to write it.” The book’s later traditional publication, she says, was the “realization of a lifetime fantasy.”

It also began a transition into a writer’s life, one that’s grounded in communicating stories and learning about others’ lives. That’s a dream setup for Corrigan. “I ask a lot of questions. I’ve definitely been teased by friends for wanting a conversation to go deeper or further.” After all, she says, “That’s why readers are readers: We have some unanswered questions. Every friend I have, I’m asking them hard questions all the time. I want to know how everyone’s doing everything, [about] their relationship with their parents, their biggest fight with their spouse, who they despise at work and why. I want to know! I think that’s more interesting than almost anything.”

Corrigan’s burning curiosity isn’t one-sided, though, and in Tell Me More, she turns that gaze on herself with great skill and insight. During the writing of the book, Corrigan says she “needed and wanted something to hold onto. . . . My father and friend died, and I’m not a much better person for it—I’m still getting sucked into trivial, quotidian bulls**t. I’m still feeling sorry for myself.”

“It’s the ultimate compliment you could give me, that I helped you understand your life better.”

The result is a mix of workaday aggravation and philosophical beauty. For example, the chapter titled “It’s Like This” is about a hectic weekday morning gone maddeningly wrong, but it’s also a meditation on grief, impatience, her daughters’ quirks and the ways she and her husband handle stress. It’s also an excellent representation of how our initial reactions to events might be influenced by something else entirely. As the author writes, “Hidden in the morning’s frustrations, like a rattlesnake in the woodpile, is something else. I close my eyes so I can listen for the other thing—the further-away, much worse thing—in the quiet of my own head.”

When asked why she thinks people respond so well to her, both on the page and in person, she says, “Articulating emotions and notions is something I’ve done before you hear it coming out of my mouth. . . . I think that’s why people say, ‘I wish I could put my finger on it the way you do.’ I say, right, because I’m trying hard to, that’s my job, that’s my profession. I’m very happy to do that for all of us. It’s a total thrill for me, that I’m being useful in this way. It’s the ultimate compliment you could give me, that I helped you understand your life better or put words to something you couldn’t articulate.”

Tell Me More will be perhaps even more overtly useful than Corrigan’s earlier books. Its phrasal chapter headings like “I Was Wrong” and “Good Enough” make it easy for readers to turn to sections that speak to them. “To me, Tell Me More is all the more useful [because of] the way it’s laid out,” Corrigan says. “I could be more subtle about it. . . . But again, a huge impetus for me is to be useful—to make myself useful. I needed to boil it down to something memorable for my own sake.”

During her 20-city book tour for Tell Me More, Corrigan is looking forward to hearing which of the 12 phrases most resonate with readers: “One thing I’m really psyched to hear is what other sentences people are clinging to.” Plus, she says with a laugh, “I’m so grateful anyone wants to talk about my writing.”

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Mellie T. Williams

Reading Kelly Corrigan’s Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say is like reading a letter from a dear friend whom you can talk to about anything, who makes you laugh when you feel distinctly humorless or who can just sit quietly with you when talking feels like too great an effort.

YA FictionYAHorror

R.L. Stine

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Millions of readers delight in R.L. Stine’s delightfully sinister, subversive world, whether they’re teens experiencing his spooky stories for the first time, millennials for whom his books figure prominently in their misty memories of 1990s childhoods or anyone who’s checked out his hilariously weird Twitter feed.

Sure, he’s the acclaimed author of more than 350 books—including the uber-popular Goosebumps series—that feature kids and teens in all kinds of spooky situations. But he’s also a grandfather who started writing picture books (two so far, with Marc Brown, the creator of Arthur) in hopes of making a literary connection with his grandson.

There’s still hope that Dylan, who’s only 4, will read Stine’s books one day, but there’s perhaps not so much hope for Matt, Dylan’s father and Stine’s 30-something son, who has never read a single one of his father’s novels.

“He bragged about it in the New York Times . . . even though he was the right age for Goosebumps and everything,” Stine says during a call to his Manhattan home. “That’s how you get Dad! He knew it would make me crazy.”

Stine doesn’t dwell on it, probably because he got the last laugh: “I wrote a Fear Street book about him called Goodnight Kiss [1992]. It’s a vampire novel, and the main character is based on him. . . . In the very last paragraph, he gets bitten on the neck!”

“I think horror’s funny. It’s part of the appeal for me.”

On the flip side, Stine’s wife, Jane, has read every word of every book, thanks to her role as his editor and life partner since 1969. Obviously, the two have a good thing going: Stine published his first teen horror novel, Blind Date, in 1986 and now has over 350 million books in print worldwide that are beloved by readers of all ages. His new book, the highly anticipated Return to Fear Street: You May Now Kill the Bride, kicks off the revival of his Fear Street series, which has lain dormant for 20 years.

For those new to the Fear Street series, here’s a quick rundown: The books are set in the fictional town of Shadyside, and the teens who live there encounter all sorts of paranormal, murderous and generally terrifying goings-on. Fear Street is named after the Fear family, who have experienced years of strange and spine-chilling misery.

The deliciously creepy You May Now Kill the Bride is centered on two Fear family weddings, one in 1923 and one in the present day. In both eras, there are two sisters: One is a happy soon-to-be wife, while the other hides her interest in the dark arts. Mystery, betrayal and twisty family ties combine in a suspenseful tale that explores whether a family’s gruesome past is destined to poison their present.

Stine says You May Now Kill the Bride “may be the best book I’ve written in a long time. For one thing, it’s two time periods, and it all ties beautifully together. At first it’s confusing—you can’t really figure it out. I like this one.”

And with a title that so blatantly subverts the classic wedding-vow line, readers know You May Now Kill the Bride will be as funny as it is thrilling. Devoted Stine readers won’t be surprised that this horror-humor combo is central to his writing. In fact, Stine wrote humor books for kids and created teen humor magazine Bananas in the 1970s and ’80s, before creating Fear Street.

“I think horror’s funny,” Stine says. “It’s part of the appeal for me.” The author clearly delights in eliciting opposing emotions: “You know when you sneak up on someone and say ‘Boo!’—first, they jump, then they’re scared, and then they laugh. Horror and humor are so close together.”

Stine has clearly had a prolific and varied writing career outside of Fear Street. He says that his prolific output is all about planning ahead, rather than waiting for inspiration to strike.

“When I start to write a book, I know everything that’s going to happen. I do all the thinking in the outline, all the twists and all chapter endings,” he says. “For me, it just makes the writing so much easier.

“The writers who go into a school, do an assembly and say to write from the heart, write your passion, write what you know . . . the kids who listen to them will never write a word,” he says. “I’ve written 350 books, and not one has come from my heart, not a single one. It’s true! They’re all written to entertain people, for people to enjoy and have fun. But you don’t have to write from the heart.”

That sort of pragmatism and drive may come easier to some than others, he concedes, although he’s been this way for as long as he can remember. “[Writing] is the only thing I’m good at . . . and it’s the only thing I wanted to do from when I was 9 years old.”

Telling stories may have been Stine’s destiny, but ironically, the Goosebumps series—with more than 60 titles, plus multiple spin-off series and a TV show—was never part of his plan. “I have terrible instincts!” he says. “My wife and her business partner at Parachute Press said no one’s ever done a scary series for 7- to 12-year-olds, and we should try it. I said no way. I didn’t want to mess up Fear Street. Can you imagine? They kept after me, so I said alright, if I can think of a good name for the series, we can try two or three. Here it is, 25 years later!”

In addition to writing hundreds of scary tales, Stine’s been taking his brand of delightfully sinister entertainment on the road for years, speaking to school groups and fans of all ages.

“I’m so lucky I can go out and talk to people,” he says, adding, “In Green Bay, Wisconsin, we had 1,800 kids come, fourth- and fifth-graders. They filled the auditorium, three balconies, all kids. I got them all screaming at once. It was a great, great sound. The teachers hated it! It was really fun.”

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Dan Nelken.

Millions of readers delight in R.L. Stine’s delightfully sinister, subversive world, whether they’re teens experiencing his spooky stories for the first time, millennials for whom his books figure prominently in their misty memories of 1990s childhoods or anyone who’s checked out his hilariously weird Twitter feed.

Nonfiction

Heather B. Armstrong

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

We’re all familiar with the concept of a reboot, whether it’s a finicky computer, a TV show that trades in nostalgia or a health-centric resolve  to start fresh. Heather B. Armstrong took the reboot concept many, many steps further in a bid to save her own life.

As Armstrong explains in The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live, she recently took part in an experimental medical treatment in which doctors put her in a coma akin to brain death 10 times—a series of reboots meant to calm her brain activity and offer relief from severe depression.

We’ll go ahead and confirm that Armstrong is no longer in crisis. Rather, she’s in advocate mode. As she says during a call to her Utah home, “As much as I want [this book] to help people suffering from depression, I also really want to reach people who don’t understand it.” She adds, “If I can offer the slightest glimpse of where our brains go, that’s what I want this book to accomplish.”

Armstrong’s wildly popular blog, Dooce.com, celebrated its 18th anniversary in February. Around that time, Armstrong also recorded the audiobook of The Valedictorian of Being Dead. “It was such an emotional experience to read it out loud . . . and really brutal. Who wrote this?” she says with a laugh.

There is a sort of beautiful brutality in Armstrong’s memoir, to be sure. She writes movingly, and often with dark humor, about the 18 months of psychic pain that led her to the medical trial: “Even though I wanted to be dead, I needed to get my kids to piano practice the following night. If I died, they would be late.”

That determination to survive her illness while being present and strong for her kids was a struggle that routinely drained her and left her screaming and sobbing in countless phone calls to her ever-supportive mother. “My mother has given so much to all of us,” Armstrong says. “She always picks up the phone, is always empathetic and just so giving.”

But despite Armstrong’s loving relationship with her kids and family, nothing was working. She felt as if her body was “an upright corpse.” She also feared that her ex-husband, who “intended to take away my kids in 2014,” would do so again if she admitted she was suffering so badly.

Her psychiatrist insisted she get help despite these concerns and told her about the study that would change her life. In it, the patient is given IV anesthesia three times a week for 10 sessions. “The study is designed to determine if ‘burst suppression’—quieting the brain’s electrical activity—can alleviate the symptoms of depression,” Armstrong writes. 

She chronicles her journey in fascinating detail, from her eerie experiences after emerging from “the abyss” to an astonishing 10-day bout of constipation, an unfortunate side effect of the drugs. She also includes her parents’ and siblings’ perspectives, as well as the profound experience of the treatment itself. As on her blog, her writing  feels off the cuff, by turns moving and irreverent, always conveying gratitude for the help she received from her family and the medical team.

Such gratitude wasn’t new for Armstrong, but asking for help and allowing herself to receive it was. After all, the book’s title refers to her urge to be the valedictorian of every-thing since childhood, when she became a high achiever to feel some control over a tumultuous family life.

“I was going to be the best,” she says. “I show up and perform; you can always count on me to get the job done. In the process, part of my soul is really hurting.” And so, learning to accept help from her mother and stepfather (who drove her to and from every appointment) “did feel selfish—this time I took away from my parents. For me, needing anything is being super-selfish.”

Throughout The Valedictorian of Being Dead, Armstrong pays a visit to her past. She writes of the legacy of depression that has been passed down from her great-grandmother, who was institutionalized for her mental illness. And she casts fresh eyes on her triggers, from issues with food to toxic relationships to unresolved emotional pain.

“It’s something I’m very hyperaware of, getting into situations that will trigger anxiety and depression,” she says. “It’s surrounding myself with nontoxic relationships or being able to call my mother and say, I can’t drive the kids this week. I have to go against a lot of my personality—I don’t ask for help, I have to do it all myself—and go into uncomfortable places. But I didn’t realize how amazing it is to get help.”

Armstrong hopes to spread awareness about depression and the potential of this new treatment approach via The Valedictorian of Being Dead (which includes an afterword by study creator Dr. Brian Mickey) and her upcoming book tour. “[I wish] people could understand that depression is an illness,” she says. “It has really detrimental effects on how we process and see the world. I want this book to be successful in the sense of reaching as many people as I can. I really feel like it’s the most important thing I’ve done.”

 

Author photo by Angela Monson.

We’re all familiar with the concept of a reboot, whether it’s a finicky computer, a TV show that trades in nostalgia or a health-centric resolve  to start fresh. Heather B. Armstrong took the reboot concept many, many steps further in a bid to save her own life. As Armstrong explains in The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True […]

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