Facebook Twitter Instagram

Norah Piehl

YA FictionYA

Breaking the barriers of segregation

Review by Norah Piehl

As the first African-American student in the history of Draper, a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, 16-year-old Rob Garrett has the chance to break barriers, just like his heroes Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis. Intelligent, determined and ambitious, Rob is also eager to work hard and prove himself: I would have to fend for myself, and I was thrilled by the prospect. Accustomed to feeling constantly threatened by whites back home in segregationist Virginia, Rob is surprised to find little overt prejudice directed at him. Instead, Rob witnesses the boys’ abusive treatment of his friend Vinnie, whose New York City background, Italian heritage and severe acne make him the brunt of cruel jokes. Rob succeeds at Draper, making the honor roll his very first semester, and begins to feel safe in his new environment. When he makes a Thanksgiving trip to Harlem and encounters Malcolm X and other black activists, though, Rob begins to wonder whether he’s becoming too complacent. After he learns of his friends’ plans to stage a sit-in at Woolworth’s back home in Virginia, Rob becomes ever more eager to figure out how to combine his activist and academic desires.

New Boy is a work of fiction, but it is based on the early life of its author, Julian Houston, now a Massachusetts Superior Court Justice. Houston’s depiction of racism during the 1950s is brutally honest. The n-word is used frequently, and an attack on demonstrating college students is described in painfully vivid detail. The novel does a fine job of explaining for young readers the political and social issues that divided not only blacks and whites but even the African-American community itself. New Boy’s personal, emotional account of segregation and racism would be an excellent choice to read after studying the period in social studies or history classes. With a likeable narrator making tough decisions, New Boy is bound to elicit lively discussions. Although the ending of the novel leaves many questions unanswered, readers will be hopeful that Judge Houston will pen more novels about this promising, principled young man.

As the first African-American student in the history of Draper, a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, 16-year-old Rob Garrett has the chance to break barriers, just like his heroes Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis. Intelligent, determined and ambitious, Rob is also eager to work hard and prove himself: I would have to fend for myself, and […]
YA FictionYA

A class trip turns into a race for survival in Florida’s Everglades

Review by Norah Piehl

Sarah wasn’t sure what she was looking for when she signed up for a class trip to the Florida Everglades. An opportunity to finally make some friends at the new school where she’s an unpopular scholarship student? The possibility of learning more from her favorite teacher? A chance to try her hand at photography with her dad’s fancy camera? No matter what she was seeking originally, Sarah finds much more than she bargained for when, in an attempt to escape her superficial cabin mates, she fakes an illness and instead heads out on an airboat captained by Andy, a boy she’s just met.

When the airboat capsizes, however, Sarah must overcome her fears of snakes, spiders, gators and the zillion other dangers that lurk just below the surface of the scummy water or hide amid the razor-sharp sawgrass. Walking 10 miles back to land may not seem like such a big deal, but it sure is when those 10 miles are through knee-high muck, when you don’t have food or drinkable water, when mosquitoes constantly pester you and lightning storms threaten.

Andy seems like the consummate swamp rat, skilled and confident, chiding Sarah for her city girl’s fears. But as they spend more time together, Sarah discovers that she has her own skills and strengths, too—ones that may become necessary to keep them both alive.

Some readers might be puzzled to discover in the novel’s final pages that the main characters’ races (which have until then been discussed only obliquely and somewhat inconsistently) precipitate one of the novel’s major conflicts; after the kind of life-or-death moments Sarah and Andy have already shared, this drama seems somewhat imposed and unnecessary.

Like many adventure and survival novels for teens, Lost in the River of Grass is also a coming-of-age story, as Sarah gains immense knowledge about herself and her capabilities in a short, intense time period. In addition to outlining this profound personal growth, author Ginny Rorby also introduces readers to the bizarre, almost otherworldly environment of the Everglades, a place readers may even beg to visit—but not without a big can of bug spray and some sturdy waterproof shoes.

Sarah wasn’t sure what she was looking for when she signed up for a class trip to the Florida Everglades. An opportunity to finally make some friends at the new school where she’s an unpopular scholarship student? The possibility of learning more from her favorite teacher? A chance to try her hand at photography with […]
YA FictionYA

Rachel Cohn

Interview by Norah Piehl

Imagine spending a week totally unplugged: no iPod, no Facebook, no e-mail or voicemail or text messages. It may sound impossible, but that’s exactly what popular author Rachel Cohn (co-author of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist) did, and she lived to tell the tale. Cohn’s “technology detox” taught her a lot about just how reliant we’ve all become on the technology in our lives, not only for information but also for connection. “What I learned is that it’s very lonely,” Cohn says. “We’ve gotten so used to having that phone in our hands and having all that information at our disposal, but all of a sudden you feel so isolated.”

Cohn, a self-confessed couch potato, tackled her technology detox as a way to understand the heroine of her newest novel, Very LeFreak. Veronica (known as Very) is a first-year student at Columbia. She sleeps cuddled with her laptop across her chest and her iPhone in her pocket so that she’ll never miss a phone call, text message or e-mail. The major accomplishment of her freshman year is creating The Grid, a social networking site for her dorm, but when the flash mobs and parties organized on The Grid start getting out of control, Very’s previously promising future at Columbia is suddenly in doubt. Meanwhile, Very’s got some pretty big issues in her past that she’s never really acknowledged. If she turns off all the noise that surrounds her, she might have no choice but to really listen to her own heart.

At least that’s what Very’s friends and family hope when they drag her, kicking and screaming, to ESCAPE (Emergency Services for Computer-Addicted Persons Everywhere), a treatment center in the wilds of Vermont, which seems a million miles away from New York and from the technology she’s had to leave behind. And ESCAPE is no mere flight of fancy, as Cohn explains, noting that there is a technology addiction treatment center called ReSTART in Washington state. “This is being looked at as a real addiction now,” she says, “in the same way we talk about drug addiction or alcoholism.”

Very’s time at ESCAPE might prompt her to deal with the past—and perhaps to open herself up to love. But how does Cohn characterize her own complicated relationship with technology? The author, whose writing is well known for including musical references, used to listen to music—loudly—whenever she was writing. “I don’t anymore, oddly,” she remarks. “As I’m aging, I can’t stand all the noise. Once I get past the opening sections of a novel, into my comfort zone, though, then music is on in the background.” For Cohn, who listens to the Berkeley, California, university radio station, the absence of KALX was one of the starkest silences during her break from technology: “The DJs feel like family in a lot of ways, and not having them here felt wrong, too quiet.”

Now that Cohn’s plugged back in, she’s grown more appreciative—and more thoughtful—about the role of technology in our lives. Readers, too, might be inspired to view technology differently after reading Very’s outrageous but thought-provoking story. “Go online for a specific reason, because otherwise it’s just a gigantic waste of time,” advises Cohn. “Limit it. Go out and live at the same time.”

Norah Piehl writes from Brookline, Massachusetts. For her interview with Rachel Cohn, she tried out a new piece of technology—a headset for her cell phone.

Imagine spending a week totally unplugged: no iPod, no Facebook, no e-mail or voicemail or text messages. It may sound impossible, but that’s exactly what popular author Rachel Cohn (co-author of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist) did, and she lived to tell the tale. Cohn’s “technology detox” taught her a lot about just how reliant […]
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Pam Muñoz Ryan

Interview by Norah Piehl

Most people are satisfied to come back from a vacation with a few souvenirs, perhaps a tan and some fond memories. Award-winning author Pam Muñoz Ryan, on the other hand, returned from a recent trip to Chile with the idea for her next book. “Inspiration for books arrives in different ways,” she says in an interview from her home in Southern California. “In this case, it was like a confluence of rivers.”

In preparation for her trip, Ryan had brushed up on the biography and writings of several Chilean authors, including Pablo Neruda, the beloved poet whose work she had read as early as high school. While in Neruda’s native country, she visited two of his childhood homes and became fascinated by tales of his early life. Then, shortly after her return home, she met author and illustrator Jon Muth, who told her a story about Neruda that became, in many ways, the centerpiece of her beautiful new novel The Dreamer, which centers on the childhood of the budding poet.

In the story, the painfully shy young Neruda (known as Neftalí) finds the courage to exchange small gifts with another young child, a stranger, through a hole in the fence that separates their properties. Neftalí receives a beloved toy sheep, and offers up a remarkable pine cone that had already sparked his own imagination. The encounter, and the human connection and imaginative power it conveys, highlight the themes of Neruda’s early life as well as his later writings.

Stories like these inspired Ryan’s own imagination and sent her to the library, where she read biographies about Neruda and also became reacquainted with his writings. “Living with the poetry day in and day out,” Ryan says, “I became particularly fascinated with the Book of Questions and I became intrigued with the idea of integrating questions into my own book.”

Ryan’s novel does incorporate many questions—“Is fire born of words? Or are words born of fire?”—that will rouse young readers’ own inquisitive natures. She hopes that these questions will “allow readers’ imaginations to extend the text beyond the page.” As she wrote the novel, she imagined a reader, a daydreamer or “closet poet,” who might be inspired to jot down his or her own verses and images in the margins of her book.

As is fitting for a novel that relies so heavily on visual details and concrete images, The Dreamer is generously, almost magically illustrated by award-winning artist Peter Sís, whose delicate, pointillist drawings help enhance Ryan’s dreamlike, magical realist world. For Ryan, working with Sís was a true collaboration, a dream come true in many ways: “I’ve been a huge fan of his work for many, many years,” she says. “I remember many years ago going to a museum in Chicago and never even imagining that he would illustrate something of mine one day.”

Ryan, who has published numerous picture books, points out that writing an illustrated novel is a fundamentally different process than writing a picture book for younger readers. “A picture book is a marriage of art and words,” she observes. “When you write a picture book, you write with a more limited palette. In the case of the novel, the words were written first and his illustrations just added a whole new dimension.” Each chapter of Ryan’s novel opens with a Sís triptych that illustrates images, objects and moods that will play key roles in the chapter to follow. Larger-scale drawings also vividly illuminate the fanciful wanderings of young Neftalí’s wholly original imagination, accompanied by lyrical passages of text: “I am poetry, lurking in dappled shadow. I am the confusion of root and gnarled branch. I am the symmetry of insect, leaf, and a bird’s outstretched wings,” Ryan writes.

Young readers—and, in many cases, their parents and teachers—who come to Neruda’s work through Ryan’s fictional portrayal may wants to read more of Neruda’s original poetry. Ryan recommends that young readers start with his Odes, especially his “Ode to a Bicycle” and “Ode to a Lizard,” and, of course, with the Book of Questions. Several of Neruda’s own poems, as well as information about collections of his poetry, are gathered at the back of Ryan’s novel.

Poetry, too often, can be seen by middle-grade readers as opaque, abstract, difficult. In The Dreamer, Ryan expertly utilizes Neruda’s own excitement about nature, his enthusiasm for language and his unbounded imagination to inspire young readers’ inner poets. By giving them her own “book of questions,” Ryan prompts children to consider their own answers, and by doing so, perhaps write the world, as Neruda does, through their own unique perspectives.

Norah Piehl is a writer and editor who lives near Boston.

Most people are satisfied to come back from a vacation with a few souvenirs, perhaps a tan and some fond memories. Award-winning author Pam Muñoz Ryan, on the other hand, returned from a recent trip to Chile with the idea for her next book. “Inspiration for books arrives in different ways,” she says in an […]
YA FictionYA

Jennifer Donnelly

Interview by Norah Piehl

Jennifer Donnelly’s 2003 young adult novel, A Northern Light, told the true story of Grace Brown’s 1906 murder from the point of view of fictional Mattie Gokey. By intertwining the two young women’s stories, Donnelly created a complex and emotionally resonant tale that won critical accolades, several awards (including a Michael L. Printz Honor and the UK’s Carnegie Medal) and, most importantly, the adoration of legions of readers. Now she returns with Revolution, a story that again explores the connection between two young women—this time across the span of hundreds of years. Using the French Revolution as a historical backdrop, Donnelly brings together Andi, a 21st-century teenager grieving the death of her brother, and Alexandrine, who was a companion to the last dauphin of France.

In an interview with BookPage, Donnelly gives us some insight into her characters, the artists that inspire her and the tragic true story at the heart of Revolution.

It’s been seven years since the publication of your first young adult novel, A Northern Light. In the meantime, you’ve published two adult novels. Why return to YA now?
Ha! You flatter me extremely by assuming any professional decision I’ve ever made has been thought out. I’m driven very much by ideas that grab hold of me and won’t let go, and characters who take up residence in my head and won’t leave until I’ve gotten their stories down. The problem is, those characters don’t always willingly relinquish their stories. It takes a great deal of time to understand people like Andi and Alex, the main characters in Revolution, and to do them justice.

Andi is a complicated and, at times, not particularly likable heroine. Was she a challenging character to write?
She was challenging to write. Not because she’s not likable—I happen to like her very much—but because she is in such great pain and I very much felt her pain. She’s also a thousand times cooler than I am, and probably wouldn’t hang out with me if I hadn’t created her, so I kind of had to rise to that.

Both Andi and Alexandrine have vivid, lively voices. How did you go about creating distinctive, believable voices for these two girls living hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart?
Thank you. That’s a huge compliment. They just came, these girls. I realize that’s kind of a lame answer, but I don’t know how to explain it any better. Andi and I sat in the same room together for years and got to know each other quite well. Alex was walking down a cobbled Paris street and turned and beckoned to me, and I followed.

What drew you to writing about the French Revolution?
A story I read in the New York Times about 10 years ago: “Geneticists’ Latest Probe: The Heart of the Dauphin.” It showed a picture of a glass urn with a small human heart in it. The article said that the heart, which had been kept in the Basilica of St. Denis, in Paris, had just undergone DNA testing and had been found to be the heart of Louis-Charles, the lost king of France, the youngest son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

The article explained that after the execution of the king, Louis Charles was taken from his mother—at the age of eight—to be re-educated in the ways of the revolution. The child was brutalized, and as threats to the revolution grew, he was locked away in solitary confinement. He was kept in terrible conditions, grew ill, lost his mind and eventually died—at the age of 10.

I was horrified and moved to tears by this. I wondered how the idealism of the revolution—Liberty, Fraternity and Equality; the best, most noble human aspirations—devolved into such cruelty. I wondered what kind of world allowed it, and still allows it. And I wondered how are we supposed to live in such a world. I was very tortured by these questions and needed an answer, so I set about trying to get one the only way I know how—by writing a story.

Is it difficult, when writing a historical novel, to balance truth and fiction?
It’s not so difficult to balance the two. As Robespierre said, history is fiction. Ask three people for an account of an event, and you’ll get three different accounts. What Andi, and the reader, gets is Alex’s account. She exists within a factual historical timeline, of course, and must conform to it, but her thoughts and opinions on what is happening during that timeline are entirely her own. She, like her uncle, is not so thrilled by the Revolution. She’s not inspired. She’s pissed off. The revolution is going to make her free, yes . . . but free to do what? Free to go back to Paris and starve after she’s been living well at Versailles?

What kind of research did you do for this book?
I did a great deal of academic research—reading Schama and Carlyle and many other historians of the Revolution, for example. Looking up old maps in Paris archives to reconstruct the streets my characters walked down. Reading texts of letters from prisoners condemned to the guillotine. Viewing as much art and as many artifacts from the period as I could.

I also did a lot of non-academic research. I visited Paris and sat in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal at night, hoping for a glimpse of Orleans’ ghost. I tooled around in the catacombs. Went to Versailles. Spent time in grocery stores and market stalls. I sat by the Seine and in cafes and parks and at the Louvre, and watched Parisians for hours, studying their faces and gestures, observing the way they eat and talk, absorbing the attitude.

Did any of your own ideas about the Revolution change after researching it?
I would say that many of my political ideas hardened. The violence and bloodshed of the Revolution is staggering to me, and after studying the rise and fall of the various revolutionary factions, particularly Robespierre and the Jacobins, I believe more strongly than ever that power corrupts and that often those who most want power are the ones who should least have it.

I also grew to have sympathy for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They were foolish and callous rulers. They made dreadful mistakes and refused to learn from them—and ultimately paid very dearly for them. The price wasn’t loss of power and wealth, or even their lives. The price was going to the guillotine knowing that their defenseless children were in the hands of brutal, ruthless people, and that they could do nothing to protect them.

For readers who are inspired to learn more about the French Revolution, where would you recommend they go next?
I would start out with Simon Schama’s most excellent Citizens and Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History. If you’ve got some time on your hands, that is. Mark Steel’s Vive la Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution, is a quicker read, and a whole lot funnier.

Music plays a huge role in the novel. Do you listen to music for inspiration or while you write?
Music inspires me greatly. I listen for inspiration, and comfort, and to be astonished and delighted. While I was working on Revolution, I listened to Segovia, Radiohead, Beethoven, the Beatles, Nada Surf, Pink Floyd, the Decemberists, Mozart, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bach, Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed and many more.

Andi’s new Parisian friend is clearly named after Dante’s guide to the underworld, the poet Virgil, and parts of the novel are named after sections of The Divine Comedy. Did that poem inform the book in other ways?
The Divine Comedy is one of my favorite poems. Dante is depressed, and on the verge of ending it all, and then along comes Virgil, the writer he most admires, and says, “Come on, Dante, man up. We’re going on a road trip. We’re going to get you out of this.” I mean, imagine it . . . you’re at your lowest point and the artist you most admire takes you by the hand and leads you through Hell, and when you come out, you can “rebehold the stars.” Amazing. I wanted Andi—led into the underworld by her own Virgil—to travel on much the same journey. For better or worse, I went along with them; getting this book written was at times an emotionally crushing experience. But like Andi and Dante before her, when it was over, I could finally once again see the stars.

I love the idea of reaching back to our artistic ancestors, like Dante and Virgil, for help and comfort and guidance. I’ve been sustained by the work of other writers my entire life. Andi is sustained by generations of musicians, stretching from Johnny Greenwood all the way back to Malherbeau. If there’s one thing I really want to get across to readers, especially teenage readers, it’s that this priceless legacy—be it music, or paintings, or books—exists. And it exists for you. If things are bad, reach for it, hold on to it, and let it carry you.

Jennifer Donnelly’s 2003 young adult novel, A Northern Light, told the true story of Grace Brown’s 1906 murder from the point of view of fictional Mattie Gokey. By intertwining the two young women’s stories, Donnelly created a complex and emotionally resonant tale that won critical accolades, several awards (including a Michael L. Printz Honor and […]
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Kristin Cashore

Interview by Norah Piehl

Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue is a big book in every sense of the word. It’s the lead book on Penguin Young Reader’s spring list, and it weighs in at nearly 550 pages. Most importantly, though, Bitterblue deals with hefty themes and emotions, which not only leave an impact on readers, but took a toll on the author herself.

This is the third in Cashore’s critically acclaimed Seven Kingdoms series for teens—after the bestsellers Graceling and Fire—and it’s hard for the author to leave this fictional world behind. “It’s actually really sad,” she says by phone from her home near Boston. “I’m having a hard time letting Bitterblue go, and I feel like I really need to, because in order to have any equilibrium whatsoever during a book release, you need to kind of unhook yourself from the book. But I don’t want to let her go, and I feel bad that she doesn’t need me anymore.”

It’s no wonder that Cashore has grown fond of her title character. Her novels, although set in a complex, politically charged fantasy realm, are primarily about the characters that inhabit this world. “The books I love are the ones where I can really believe in the characters and get into their stories and their relationships,” she says. Some of her characters—like Katsa (the heroine of Graceling) and the title character of Fire—are “graced” with special gifts. In Katsa’s case, it’s the Grace of killing. In Fire’s case, it’s the ability to read minds—a trait Cashore admits was especially difficult to wrap her head around as a writer.

Although she is of royal lineage, Bitterblue has no particular Grace, and that’s what made her both a pleasure and a relative ease for Cashore to write. “She doesn’t have these amazing superhuman skills, and consequently I felt like I could relate to her a bit more,” Cashore says. “I’m not saying I’m very like her, but it was just easier to get into her mindset than it was with Katsa or especially with Fire.”

"The books I love are the ones where I can really believe in the characters and get into their stories and their relationships."

Although Bitterblue is not graced with any magical powers, she does have a strong moral center, an unquenchable curiosity and a desire to right injustices. This becomes especially important when she—as a young ruler still counseled by the advisers to her late father, the evil King Leck—begins to look outside the walls of her castle and ask questions about her subjects: the people who still tell tales of Leck’s reign of terror in the pubs each evening, the people who are still suffering from the atrocities Leck committed years before. Often taking personal risks and setting out in disguise in order to escape her sequestered existence, Bitterblue becomes more and more horrified as she learns of the man her father was and of the ruin he left behind.

Cashore—who first introduced Leck as a character in Graceling, which is set nine years before Bitterblue—admits that she was taken aback by the dark directions Bitterblue takes. “When I wrote Grace­ling,” she says, “Leck was just my villain. I never realized what I was getting myself into. Now I feel like I wrote Graceling and Fire to work myself toward Bitterblue. Gradually I realized that this has to be the book where this girl deals with this horrible person who, until this book, was actually kind of fun to write. It was not even slightly fun to write the prologue in Bitterblue or any of the sections told from Leck’s point of view. It was very oppressive, and depressing, and upsetting to write.” Leck’s journal entries, in particular, were difficult for Cashore to write and will be difficult for many readers to read; Cashore’s willingness to deal with atrocities head-on, however, is what makes the novel both powerful and relevant to the real world.

Bitterblue is a mystery of sorts, as Bitterblue tries to uncover and then repair both her own personal history and the history of her people. It’s also a reunion, as favorite characters—particularly Katsa and her companion Po—turn up repeatedly, much to readers’ delight. But, as in Cashore’s previous novels, Bitterblue is not a typical fairy tale with a happy ending. When asked about this, Cashore admits, “I had to tell the story how it happened, and I hope people won’t be too disappointed. I don’t love conventional, tidy endings as a reader. This is a story that happened; I wasn’t as in control as people think I might have been.”

Readers who are disappointed at where Cashore leaves things at the end of Bitterblue, however, can take heart. According to Cashore, “there’s a very good chance that my readers will be seeing these characters again.” But not in Cashore’s next novel—which she says will not be a fantasy. She feels confident, however, that readers will see more of the Seven Kingdoms fantasy world—and some of their favorite characters—in at least one more book.

But what about readers who, like Cashore herself, feel a sense of loss when they finish immersing themselves in Bitterblue’s world? Cashore has plenty of suggestions for fans who are looking for some great novels to tide them over until the next Seven Kingdoms adventure. She recommends Megan Whalen Turner’s Attolia series, Melina Marchetta’s books (both her fantasy novels and her contemporary stories) and the novels of Diana Wynne Jones, Tamora Pierce and Philip Pullman. Cashore also advises readers to look up the old-fashioned adventure novels of Mary Stewart: “They’re dated now, but a woman always ends up in some romantic part of the world, and there’s mystery and adventure and romance, and they’re just a lot of fun.”

Mystery, adventure and romance are also in store for readers of Cashore’s Seven Kingdoms novels, along with a healthy dose of political intrigue, moral complexity and characters that readers will love getting to know.

Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue is a big book in every sense of the word. It’s the lead book on Penguin Young Reader’s spring list, and it weighs in at nearly 550 pages. Most importantly, though, Bitterblue deals with hefty themes and emotions, which not only leave an impact on readers, but took a toll on the […]
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

David Levithan

Interview by Norah Piehl

With books like Boy Meets Boy and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (co-authored with John Green), David Levithan has gained a reputation for writing emotionally charged, ultimately positive portrayals of gay teens. In his latest book, Two Boys Kissing, Levithan offers a story that is both very personal and also historical, as it positions today’s gay youth within the historical context of the gay men and boys who came before them. Levithan answered a few questions for BookPage about what inspired him to write this “panorama of queer teen life now.”

You’ve said that there was a real-life event that inspired the story of your characters Harry and Craig, who are attempting to set a world record for longest kiss. Can you tell us a little more about that true story?

Yes! In September 2010, Matty Daley and Bobby Canciello, two teens from New Jersey, broke the world record for longest continuous kiss as a way of drawing attention to inequality. A few weeks later, Matty emailed me to tell me he’d thought of Boy Meets Boy during the 32 ½ hours he and Bobby kissed. I of course had to hear all about it—and that’s when (with Matty’s permission!) the idea for Two Boys Kissing started to take shape.

You also explore a number of other stories in the novel. Were those similarly inspired by real-life situations, or perhaps by stories your young fans have told you?

None of the other stories really tie so tightly to real events. A few days after Matty and Bobby completed their kiss, another New Jersey teen, Tyler Clementi, killed himself. Although I don’t tell Tyler’s story in this book, that juxtaposition of tragedy and triumph is certainly present, and Tyler was very much on my mind.

One of the most striking things about the novel is its unusual narrator(s). Where did you get the idea to narrate the novel in the collective voices of a generation that lost their lives to AIDS?

I have Michael Cart to thank for that. He asked me to write about the current queer generation for an anthology, How Beautiful the Ordinary. In thinking about what I wanted to say, I realized that I hadn’t really written about the generation that came before mine—my uncle’s generation, which was devastated by AIDS. So I wrote the story of the generation before mine talking to the generation after me . . . and the voice stuck with me. So when I realized this book was going to be a panorama of queer teen life now, it made sense to see it from their point of view. I didn’t even realize I was using a Greek chorus until my editor told me I was.

The story you bring up in the afterword about your uncle is a poignant and personal one. How do you view your generation’s connection to the generation of gay men who came before you?

I think we are lucky to be alive. I think we should be grateful for avoiding most of the suffering that came before us, and the most genuine way to express that gratitude is to not forget everything they went through in order for us to be where we are. It already feels like a different world to me, and I can only imagine what it feels like to someone 20 years younger than me.

For today’s young people, the truly frightening beginning of the AIDS epidemic, before the advent of effective treatment, probably feels like ancient history. What would you want today’s gay youth to know about the generation who narrates your novel?

The whole novel is my answer to this question, isn’t it?

Your novels have been celebrated for portraying teen homosexuality as a fact of life rather than as a “problem” to be dealt with. And yet some of the characters in Two Boys Kissing are dealing with pretty big challenges. What hurdles do gay youth stlll face today? Do you see any of these struggles changing any time soon?

You are still facing off against so many societal norms, and that can sometimes (not always, but sometimes) take a toll. And I think that while the advent of the Internet is remarkably liberating in many ways—you no longer feel you’re the only one—in other ways it has fueled a different kind of loneliness. So that needs to be navigated. But, of course, it’s getting better all the times, and as the haters die out, we don’t feel nearly as hated, and the difference will take less of a toll.

Your first YA novel, Boy Meets Boy—which was something of a landmark in YA publishing—celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. How has the publishing landscape changed over the last 10 years, in terms of LGBT characters or themes in books for teens?

I think writers now have a confidence to write as truthfully as they want about these themes and teenagers. There’s much less inner censorship, just as there is less outer censorship (although there still is some of both). LGBT YA lit still needs more diversity, but we’ve come a long way when it comes to both reflecting reality and creating reality.

It’s refreshing for young people coming to terms with their own sexuality to see such a range of fictional versions of themselves in your novels. Were there any books you remember reading as a boy or young man that enabled you to see yourself in that way?

The homage to David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes in Boy Meets Boy is not accidental. Reading that novel blew my mind when I was in high school—not just because of the gay subject matter, but because he’s such a marvelous writer. That opened many doors to me.

What other (fiction or nonfiction) books or resources would you recommend to young people exploring their sexuality?

The great thing is that there are so many books to choose from—I hardly know where to begin, and any list of authors is going to feel woefully incomplete. So I’ll just say that looking at the ALA’s Rainbow List and the list of Lambda Awards finalists is always a good start in finding quality queer lit for teens.

What’s next for you?

Touring!

With books like Boy Meets Boy and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (co-authored with John Green), David Levithan has gained a reputation for writing emotionally charged, ultimately positive portrayals of gay teens. In his latest book, Two Boys Kissing, Levithan offers a story that is both very personal and also historical, as it positions today’s gay […]
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Leslie Connor

Interview by Norah Piehl

Leslie Connor has never shied away from tackling tough topics in her books for young readers—including issues that seem strictly grown-up, such as incarceration, depression and economic instability. Integrating such real-world problems into her fiction requires a deep understanding of a child’s point of view.

“My sense with middle grade books is that life is really being done to these kids—the adults are in charge,” Connor says during a call to her home in Connecticut. “But maybe for that reason, [kids] can sort of deal with it. You only know what you know. . . . You don’t fully know what’s wrong, and so you cope with what’s there.” Connor is the author of several books for middle schoolers and teens, and has even authored a picture book. In her latest novel, The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle, Mason Buttle is doing his best to cope. Ever since Mason lost his mom and grandpa six years ago, his grandma and uncle haven’t had as much energy to maintain their “crumbledown” farmhouse, and the beautiful family apple orchard has been gradually sold off to developers. Mason’s biggest tragedy, though, was the death of his best friend, Benny, in an accident for which he fears he is blamed by Benny’s dads—and by police investigator Lieutenant Baird.

Mason desperately wants to tell the truth about what happened that day in the tree house, but his brain doesn’t work like most people’s; when he tries to tell a story, his mind gets all tangled up. “My story is mixed,” he says. “Some things are past things. Some are right now.” He has trouble with reading and writing, too. Mason knows he’s not stupid—despite what his bullying neighbor might say—but how can he make other people believe the truth that’s in his heart?

Even though it’s firmly grounded in a child’s hopeful perspective, The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle could’ve been a dark, heavy tale. Fortunately, it is lightened by Mason’s distinctive, honest voice. Mason is buoyed by the important people in his life, including his grandma, who’s always happy to make him banana milkshakes; Ms. Blinny, the school social worker who introduces him to new technology that helps him overcome his fear of storytelling; and his new friend Calvin Chumsky. Calvin and Mason are opposites in many ways, but their individual skills and different ways of viewing the world balance one another perfectly.

“Calvin and Mason both have something to offer each other. I think that can happen for real,” Connor says. “I remember hearing two kids playing on the beach, and one of them knew the physics about waves and everything, and the other one was just pretending to dive with sea monsters—seeing and understanding the world in two totally different ways, but being friends regardless.”

“A lot of kids could be learning more or better outside. . . . It is who they are.”

Connor also views her novel as participating in the “No Child Left Inside” movement, which encourages environmental education for children; while Calvin may be perfectly happy to play indoors and work on his tablet, Mason only comes into his own and thrives when he’s outdoors. “I do feel that a lot of kids could be learning more or better outside, because it just suits them better,” Connor says. “It is who they are.”

Mason and Calvin’s complementary talents are most on display when they solve problems and tackle challenges together, whether that means outsmarting neighborhood bullies or transforming the crumbledown’s derelict root cellar into a cozy hideaway inspired by the prehistoric caves of Lascaux in France. Sanctuaries are important in Connor’s novel, whether it’s a tree house, an underground den or the safe haven of Ms. Blinny’s office.

“I was constantly making those types of spaces for myself,” Connor says of her own childhood. “There were always kids building forts and linking them together. I love that sense of building things and creating spaces, and I know that these days, kids mostly are doing that only at the computer. I sense a little bit of a loss there; building things with your hands is really important. I think we’re all fort-builders at heart.” Now, Connor says, she creates her “forts” by building worlds and characters in her novels.

Along with everything else that’s happening in this rich, rewarding story of friendship, loyalty, justice and new beginnings, it’s also a wonderful dog novel. Mason absolutely adores Moonie Drinker, the dog next door (who happens to belong to Mason’s nemesis), and Moonie loves Mason right back. Mason’s bond with Moonie Drinker—along with his intimate knowledge of the family apple orchard and his facility for building things with his hands—helps Mason gain confidence and courage when he needs it most. Connor, who has three rescue dogs of her own, modeled Moonie Drinker after her dog Atticus: “He’s just a really happy dog. Dogs are just like people, in that they come with different personalities—serious, moody—and he’s just a really happy dog. He seems to know when to offer comfort, too.”

Moonie Drinker, Calvin and Mason will remain in readers’ hearts long after they finish The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle. Even Connor admits that she’s particularly fond of her protagonist: “He’s very close to my heart somehow.” Readers lucky enough to get to know Mason will certainly feel the same.

 

Norah Piehl writes from Belmont, Massachusetts. Her childhood hideaway was a walk-in closet so big that, rumor has it, a previous owner rented it out to college students as a bedroom.

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

Author photo by J.F. Connor

Leslie Connor has never shied away from tackling tough topics in her books for young readers—including issues that seem strictly grown-up, such as incarceration, depression and economic instability. Integrating such real-world problems into her fiction requires a deep understanding of a child’s point of view.

YA FictionYA

Kate Alice Marshall

Interview by Norah Piehl

Kate Alice Marshall’s young adult debut, I Am Still Alive, is a searing story of survival and self-reliance. When 16-year-old Jess Cooper discovers that her father has been murdered in the cabin they share in a remote area of Canada, a nail-biting and tense story unfolds as Jess fights to survive the elements and get some vengeance. 

You describe the area around Jess’ dad’s cabin so vividly—is it based on a place you’ve actually visited?
The lake and the woods are a composite of a lot of places. Some I’ve visited, hiking and camping, but most were drawn from memoirs, travel narratives and a handful of documentaries. The exact geography and layout of the lake and the woods are completely invented, but the sights and sounds and feel of the place were all drawn from real-world sources.

Jess keeps herself alive, in part thanks to using the pages of a really terrible thriller novel to start her fires. As a reader and writer, was it hard to think about burning a book, even to survive?
Not at all, actually! A book is an object; a book is not the story within it. Context and culture imbue the object with meaning and value, but it isn’t sacred in itself (or we wouldn’t pulp vast numbers of returned books every day). Book burnings are horrific in large part not because of the destruction of the physical object (though in cases where there are not other copies in existence, that’s a great loss in itself) but because of the destruction, real or symbolic, of what they represent—ways of thinking, types of people, ways of life. Jess’ act in burning the book is the opposite of that. She’s preserving something of value, at the expense of one copy out of tens of thousands of a paperback. She hasn’t destroyed the story, or anything it represents; she’s destroyed paper and ink, and saved everything that she is and that she represents.

But I do think she should write the author a nice thank-you for his help.

Jess confronts so many challenges—from natural elements to hostile humans—and she’s also wrestling with the terrible feeling that even if she does survive, she has no family left to return to. When developing her character, how did you balance out that hopeless feeling with the will to survive?
The core of Jess’ character always boiled down to one fundamental truth: She is worthy of survival, in and of herself. Her reason to survive isn’t that someone is waiting for her, or that she has something to go back to. It’s that she has value. She is worth fighting for, even when everything has been taken from her. She is enough. That gave her a streak of ferocity and determination that meant that even when things are at their worst, even when she falls into despair, she’ll pick herself back up again and keep fighting.

Jess’ story is made even more challenging due to her physical disability. Why did you choose to introduce this element into the story?
Jess’ injuries and disability were part of the story from the very early stages. Before I started writing, I decided that Jess would have injuries lingering from the accident that killed her mother, leaving her with both physical and emotional wounds. From there, it was a matter of following through on the consequences of her disability in every aspect of the story—her relationship with her father, her approach to survival, her limitations and her strengths.

Let’s say you were dropped into Jess’ story with the same supplies she’s got in hand—how long do you think you would survive in her shoes?
Not long, I think. I don’t have quite the grit that Jess does, and she has some advantages I lack—at least a little bit of experience with a bow, for instance, and her father as tour guide at least for a few days. I’d certainly have better odds after writing this book than before, though!

There are so many great survival stories that will appeal to teen readers—and now, thanks to you, there’s another one! What other wilderness or survival novels have you enjoyed reading and would recommend to young readers?
Most of my old favorites are for younger audiences. I read Hatchet (and its sequels) and My Side of the Mountain over and over as a kid, which is why I’ve always wanted to write a survival story of my own. The Martian isn’t YA, and Mars is a little different than Canada, but it definitely provides that same thrill of watching someone problem-solve their way to survival in a deadly environment. And I’m really looking forward to reading Notes from My Captivity by Kathy Parks.

Jess’ mantra becomes “Smart, Not Strong.” How would you say that motto has played out in your own life or experiences?
Jess’ mantra is really about recognizing your strengths and your limitations. I can’t say I’ve ever particularly been in a situation where my physical strength (or lack of it) was important to the outcome, but I’ve worked hard in my life to know myself. That means recognizing what I’m good at, as well as where my failings lie, and using my strengths to get around my weaknesses.

What are you working on next?
I’m always working on a lot of things all at once. In addition to my game writing, I have two YA novels in the works—a mystery/thriller and one that’s very dark and spooky. I just wrote a middle grade novel on a bit of a lark that I’m hoping to polish into shape soon, and I have a fantasy novella coming out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. So I’m keeping busy!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of I Am Still Alive.

Kate Alice Marshall’s young adult debut, I Am Still Alive, is a searing story of survival and self-reliance. When 16-year-old Jess Cooper discovers that her father has been murdered in the cabin they share in a remote area of Canada, a nail-biting and tense story unfolds as Jess fights to survive the elements and get some vengeance.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Katherine Arden

Interview by Norah Piehl

Vermont is a place where the boundaries between past and present are porous. And at no time is that more evident than in autumn, when ghosts are on everyone’s mind.

“One fun thing about Vermont is that you can be running through the woods and just stumble over a random graveyard,” says Katherine Arden, who lives near Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest. “They’re everywhere, and there’s a very powerful sense of history because people have been farming this part of the country since the 1700s.”

Arden’s name may be familiar to adult readers who are fans of her novel The Bear and the Nightingale and its sequels in the Winternight trilogy (the finale is set to publish next year), set in a magic-infused version of medieval Russia. Her first middle grade novel, Small Spaces, is similarly epic in scope, but it is also deeply imbued with the landscape and traditions of Vermont. “I had so much fun filling the novel with the things I see every fall near my home,” she says. “Corn mazes, scarecrows, haunted houses—these are part of the fall landscape here.”

Small Spaces opens when 11-year-old Olivia (Ollie), a book lover who’s recently lost her mom, comes into possession of a mysterious old book, also titled Small Spaces. As Ollie reads the creepy old story of a family torn apart by loss and regret, she begins to recognize references to local names and places. Readers may begin to see other connections between Ollie’s life and the ominous scenes that play out in the book. “A strange and disturbing family history offers a parallel to Ollie’s own experience of dealing with loss and gives a weight and perspective to her journey,” Arden notes. “History does teach us things, especially if you read it seriously and intentionally—and Ollie learns to make different choices than a previous generation did.”

But those lessons are hard won, especially during Ollie’s class field trip to a local farm. She starts to suspect that something is very wrong, especially when their school bus breaks down as a dense fog descends. And are those scarecrows getting closer?

Ollie decides to strike out on her own instead of waiting for trouble to catch up with her. Arden suggests that Ollie’s bravery comes partly out of her experience with loss and grief after the death of her mom: “Ollie’s loss makes her feel so separate from her classmates. They don’t understand what she’s been through, and so she no longer cares what they think. She’s able to make decisions and take actions independent of her classmates, which is something that’s very hard for a middle schooler.”

Ollie isn’t alone in her journey, as she is reluctantly accompanied by her new friends Brian and Coco. Like Ollie, Arden enjoys breaking down middle school stereotypes, or “boxes,” in the characters she’s created. “I wanted to come up with characters who aren’t so easily defined,” Arden says. “I also wanted to change how boy-girl friendships are depicted. In books, so many kid trios are two boys and a girl. I wanted the guy to be the odd person out.”

Without giving too much away, Ollie, Brian and Coco are in for more than a little horror as they flee for their lives and eventually try to make a bargain that will save their classmates. Readers are likely to find Small Spaces to be the kind of book that will, as Arden suggests, “make them scared to get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.”

“Even if things are ominous, as long as they resolve in a way that’s uplifting and satisfying, I don’t really feel like I have to restrain myself.”

So how scary is too scary when it comes to spooky stories for young readers? “It’s great to read scary books when you’re young,” Arden says. “It’s a way to deal with fears in a safe environment. It’s kind of fun to be that afraid, and to know that you can always close the book.”

Other than ensuring that she didn’t paint any truly gruesome scenes or disturbing images, Arden didn’t hold herself back when it came to creating a terrifying mood. “Tension and dread are fine—the problem [is] if you make it not be OK at the end,” she says. “Even if things are ominous, as long as they resolve in a way that’s uplifting and satisfying, I don’t really feel like I have to restrain myself in the narrative. It’s a safe fear.”

Arden says she enjoyed incorporating elements of some of her favorite books into Small Spaces, from subtle nods to portal fantasies like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Chronicles of Narnia to a Japanese folktale called “The Boy Who Drew Cats,” which provided direct inspiration for the repeated advice in the novel: “Avoid large places at night . . . keep to small.” Like Ollie, Arden admits she was a voracious reader from a young age. “I remember that feeling of the real world just not existing while I was in the pages of a book,” she says.

With the novel’s condensed time frame, Vermont setting and young characters, the writing process of Small Spaces presented a different set of challenges to Arden than she’s previously faced—differences that helped her grow as a writer. “Writing this book was pleasurable,” she says. “Changing pacing, tone, mood, everything—it helps keep you fresh as a writer, and it can be inspiring, giving you scope to play with ideas you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.”

It’s lucky for readers that Arden enjoyed her first foray into middle grade horror, because Small Spaces is the first in a quartet that will continue the stories of Ollie, Coco and Brian. Each book will be tied to a different season and to different iconic locations in Vermont. Small Spaces is the fall book, of course, and the winter book (which Arden is writing now) is set at a “down at the heels” ski resort that happens to be haunted.

Arden won’t say much about what happens next, except that “mayhem ensues.” In the meantime, Small Spaces is sure to provide plenty of shivers of its own.

 

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

Author photo by Deverie Crystal Photography.

Vermont is a place where the boundaries between past and present are porous. And at no time is that more evident than in autumn, when ghosts are on everyone’s mind.

YA FictionYA

Julie Buxbaum

Interview by Norah Piehl

Julie Buxbaum’s new YA novel balances a story of first love with a look at the ripple effects of 9/11 for today’s teens.

Hope and Other Punchlines is a sweet and funny romance set at a summer camp. But its main characters—unlikely camp counselors Abbi and Noah—happen to live in a New Jersey town that lost dozens of its residents on September 11, 2001.

And even though that tragedy happened nearly 16 years before the events in Buxbaum’s novel, their community still lives in its shadow. Seventeen-year-old Abbi definitely feels like she can’t move past it. Although she can’t remember it, she became a symbol of hope after a photo of her as a baby being rescued from the World Trade Center day care became famous around the world. Abbi’s fellow camp counselor, Noah, is an aspiring journalist and political comedian, and he wants to interview all of the survivors captured in the iconic picture of Abbi—but he may have his own personal reasons linked to the tragedy for doing so.

We caught up with Buxbaum by phone from her home in California to ask her what it was like to write a 9/11 novel for a generation that wasn’t even born when it happened.

OK, I have to ask: Where were you on September 11, 2001?
I was in Boston in law school. And my husband—who was my boyfriend at the time—was in London, and he’s the one who called me and told me to turn on the television. And it was this moment when the world suddenly shifted: We were in one world that morning and a completely different world when we went to bed that night.

These memories are so vivid for those of us who were old enough. Was it strange to realize that by writing a novel about 9/11, even one that’s essentially set in the present, you were writing about something that today’s kids learn about from history books? 
That was the entire purpose of writing this book. It was born out of a tweet written by a teen I really admire. She always has really smart things to say, but in this tweet, she was basically complaining about having to learn about 9/11 every year on the anniversary. When I saw her tweet, I burst into tears, and it occurred to me that although those events seem to me like they happened yesterday, my readers were babies or not yet even born. It’s ancient history to them. So I wanted to find a way to make 9/11 accessible and digestible to this generation, for whom 9/11 feels like what Pearl Harbor feels like to me.

Writing a character like Noah, who’s an aspiring comedian, is a good way to inject some
humor into what could otherwise be a bleak story. Was it hard for you to balance the funny and tragic parts of your novel?
It was hard, but one of my goals for the book was to make people laugh, not just to make them cry—and sometimes both in the same paragraph. I find that in real life, people can be funniest in their darkest moments. It’s a way that we can cope with those difficult times. So I wanted to explore that in the book. And more importantly, I wanted to make a statement about how we use comedy to endure pain.

What were you trying to explore about memory and what we remember, and why?
I lost my mom quite young, which is something I return to again and again in my fiction. But one of the things that I think about constantly is about how a big loss can feel so traumatic, but over time we lose our memories of the small moments that make up our days. Memory—what we lose and what we retain—haunts me and is a theme I return to repeatedly in my writing and in my life, especially my life as a parent.

I had heard about the pretty terrible rate of sickness and death that persists among people who were at the World Trade Center site, but I really hadn’t understood the extent of it. Why did you decide to work this health issue into the novel?
I think it’s really important for people to remember, especially since it’s not consistently covered in the media. This is one of those tragedies that has reverberated around the globe in countless political ways, but the actual explosion and its aftermath continues to perpetuate sickness and death among survivors—there are thousands of types of cancers directly linked to 9/11 exposure. And I worry that because we don’t talk about it, people just don’t know. There’s this feeling that we have moved on, but those who are still coping with the physical or emotional effects can’t move on.

Your characters model different ways of coping with trauma and grief. What do you want readers to take away from their resilience?
I think everyone processes loss and trauma differently, but it’s all hugely damaging. And it’s interesting to think how lives change course as a result of those defining moments. In some cases, they propel us forward, and in other cases, they propel us backward. Losing my mom was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but I also think it changed who I am as a person—partly in some wonderful, miraculous ways. I would trade anything to go back and have it be different, of course, but I can’t discount that I am who I am because of those experiences. 

We caught up with Julie Buxbaum by phone from her home in California to ask her what it was like to write a 9/11 novel for a generation that wasn’t even born when it happened.

YA FictionYA

Deb Caletti

Interview by Norah Piehl

Sydney Reilly, nearly 16, is reluctantly spending the summer in a San Francisco beach-side mansion with her mother, Lila, a once famous actress whose star has dimmed, and Lila’s latest boyfriend, Jake, a realtor-turned-art dealer who is both charismatic and controlling. Each chapter of Girl, Unframed opens with an excerpt from an evidence list, suggesting criminal stakes to the story, but Caletti keeps tensions high and readers guessing as to the crime, the victim and the perpetrator until the very end.

Can you talk about the unique structure of Girl, Unframed?
The format of the book is, very literally, Sydney speaking to someone else. I thought her story would be most powerfully told using her own voice, confessional and intimate. The first person limits you to what a character has observed or overheard, but that sense of being a witness felt right. Keeping each line as conversational as possible meant reading a lot of it aloud as I went along. 

I loved the pieces of evidence included at the beginning of each chapter. Was that element always a part of the book?
I’ve used chapter headings in other books—facts about the heart in A Heart in a Body in the World, quotes from a fictional research book in The Nature of Jade, true stories about seeds in The Last Forever. I love the interplay between the “real” world and what’s happening in the book—the way the bits of information add layers of meaning, as well as suspense and humor. With Girl, Unframed, I was maybe three or so chapters in when I decided to add the evidence. This time, it was less about metaphors and meaning and more about adding unease and questions, mostly the biggest question: What happened that night?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Girl, Unframed.

Did any real-life events inform the story? 
This book was the biggest, strangest, most uneasy merging of truth and my subconscious—more so than anything I’ve written. Girl, Unframed is loosely based on a true story: the murder of Johnny Stompanato, the husband of actress Lana Turner, by Lana’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, in 1958. What actually happened that night is still a mystery. Lana’s daughter was a teen at the time, and Lana, who was one of the biggest Hollywood stars back then, was a sex symbol/femme fatale. I’d kept an article about it in my “book ideas” file for years, and finally, the need to write it rose to the surface. 

But it was only after I started writing that I realized why Lana’s news clip had been in my file all those years, and why I made the creative choices I did. The story of Girl, Unframed has connections to my own family history I hadn’t been consciously aware of when I began. Both sides of my family have ties to San Francisco, but on my mother’s side, right during Lana’s time, there was criminal activity, dangerous relationships—and intergenerational trauma and narcissistic beauty, too. Writing can be weirdly and uncomfortably insistent like that.

The relationship between Sydney and Lila is central to Girl, Unframed. How does it change over the course of the book, and why? What drew you to explore a relationship like theirs? 
I wanted to explore familial trauma, internalized misogyny and the way that people who are objectified can go on to treat others like objects. And as with all of my books, I was drawn to those themes out of a need to understand how they have played out in my own life. In my family history, going back many generations, ideas of beauty as currency, beauty as power, beauty as the only thing you had to wield in the world led to a nest of complications with sometimes dark ramifications. Many women and their daughters (and sons!) deal with the effects of this legacy. I hope readers will understand that objectification can come from many—and sometimes unexpected—people, and for very complicated reasons. Sydney eventually has to set her own firm boundary. 

Your last book, A Heart in a Body in the World, was about a young woman who was literally and figuratively running away from a tragedy in her past. Girl, Unframed is, in many ways, about a girl who’s increasingly afraid of what her future might hold. How did you work to make what Sydney eventually experiences feel both inevitable and surprising?
I like to write from a place of emotional truth, and I also try to be as accurate as possible about the psychology of my characters, in terms of how different personality types commonly relate to the world and other people. The truth is, when you’re in a relationship with someone like Sydney’s mom in real life, their actions do feel both inevitable and surprising. I think everyone has encountered this—that certain person who does something shocking, and, because of your history with them, you think, “Of course she would do that!” but also, “Wow, how could she do that?” I tried to give the reader their own history with Sydney’s mom, so they’d experience this, too.

I wanted Sydney, especially as a young woman, to recognize that she was already large, and larger still after the things she survives.

Sydney imagines some life-changing “IT” that’s going to mark the beginning of her adult life. Do you remember feeling this way as a teen?
Oh, I definitely remember feeling that way. It’s such a great feeling—expansive and hopeful, the knowledge that your whole life is stretched in front of you, and that maybe something is about to magically arrive to make you different and somehow larger. I wanted to show the evolution of that feeling, how the world can bang it up and bruise it, but the best “IT,” your own personal power, is there all along. I wanted Sydney, especially as a young woman, to recognize that she was already large, and larger still after the things she survives.

Something Sydney begins to navigate and confront in this book is the tension between the shame and pride she feels when others sexualize or objectify her. What advice would you give someone who is navigating these complicated emotions?
This is so hard. I’m not sure if I have even resolved those feelings myself. But I would want to tell them that their body and the decisions they make about their body are theirs. Whole, and beautiful, and theirs. 

I loved the way the novel uses real works of art to prompt Sydney’s evolving perspective on how women are both objectified and commodified. Did writing Girl, Unframed change the way you look at or think about art, or about particular works of art?
I love art and art history, and so I was already familiar with many of the paintings and the backgrounds of the artists I mention. I did learn new details, though. I often still think about a fact about Willem de Kooning that I mention in the book: When he was painting women, he’d often start with the mouth. He’d cut a woman’s lips from a cigarette ad in a magazine, and then paste them on a canvas and paint around them. He didn’t know why he did it. But it’s haunting to me, the way the mouth was such a problem for him.  

Girl, Unframed name-drops so many well-known artists. Who are some of your favorite visual artists? Did you uncover any new favorites as you worked on the book?
I have a longtime fondness for the dream-like stories of Marc Chagall and a weakness for any of David Hockney’s modern art swimming pools. I also really love architecture, as well as huge, bold installation-type art like Yayoi Kusama’s, or especially, the moment-in-time experiences, like Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosion events, or Agnès Varda’s and JR’s huge documentary photos, or Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped landmarks. I did discover Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party while researching the book. It’s considered to be the first epic feminist artwork.

Good dogs deserve a place in my books, even if they’re not the greatest readers.

I enjoyed the novel’s San Francisco setting, and I think readers will enjoy the opportunity to discover its quirks and beauty spots through Sydney’s eyes. Did you visit there to research the book? Were you familiar with the city before you began writing? What are some of your favorite things to do, see or experience there?
San Francisco is deep in my DNA, as I mentioned. My dad’s grandparents actually fled the 1906 fire that came after the earthquake, carrying only their wedding photo, similar to the wedding photo in Girl, Unframed. My parents both grew up in the city, and later, the Bay Area, where I also spent my early childhood until we moved to Seattle. We took many, many trips back, too, so, yes, I was already familiar with it. From the criminal history of my relatives on the waterfront, to my mother’s childhood memories of the Sutro Baths, there are family stories everywhere in and around the city.

I love many of the places in the book: the beaches, the Cliff House, Camera Obscura, the waterfront. As a kid, I was fascinated with Alcatraz. Also, some favorite places not in the book: The Palace of Fine Arts, Little Italy (lots of dinners there), and Fort Point, a fort from the 1800s, basically right under the bridge, where you can still climb around the old creepy structures and get all windblown and feel the force of the sea smashing against rocks.

One of the funniest—and most emotional—aspects of the novel is Sydney’s growing relationship with Max, Jake’s long-suffering dog. Does Max have any real-life inspirations?
I just love dogs, and I’m grateful for them. They’re so real and funny and understanding and tolerant. They are never bothered by our bad singing, horrible fashion choices, mistakes and failings. They stand by. I think pets often get forgotten in fiction, when they’re such important “people” in our lives. Max in Girl, Unframed gets his name from my beloved, sweet, “I do everything 100%, including love you” grand-dog, Max. But he gets his largeness and wildness and steadiness from our now-gone beloved beast, Tucker. He was the big guy I would rest my head on. Good dogs deserve a place in my books, even if they’re not the greatest readers.  


The canine inspirations for Max: Deb Caletti’s dogs, Max (on the left) and Tucker.

 

Author photo © Susan Doupe.

Deb Caletti discusses body image and the complicated mother-daughter relationship in her latest novel, Girl, Unframed, which keeps tensions high and readers guessing.
YA FictionYA

Nina LaCour

Interview by Norah Piehl

In Watch Over Me, Nina LaCour’s first novel since her 2018 Michael L. Printz Medal-winning We Are Okay, 18-year-old Mila is placed as an intern on an idyllic farm after aging out of the foster care system. Mila becomes unsettled when she discovers that the farm is haunted by ghostly figures and tokens from her old life begin to appear. BookPage spoke with LaCour about haunting, healing and feeling at home in ourselves.

Mila’s story stands in stark contrast to tropes about the foster care system as neglectful or abusive. Why did you choose to tell a different story?
I wanted to write a loose retelling of The Turn of the Screw with Mila as the character of the governess. I ended up straying far from that original idea, but at the time I asked myself what it would look like to move Henry James’ novella into a contemporary setting and to add more expansiveness to the story—more characters, a wider range of emotion and more context.

As I explored these ideas, I remembered reading a San Francisco Chronicle article about a couple who had adopted a large number of children out of the foster system over a period of many years; it sparked the inspiration for that part of the story. I wanted a lot of love in the story because there was a lot of darkness, too. My aim was to write the story of people who had endured horrible things but who had arrived at a place where they would be cared for while they worked through their individual traumas.

Mila’s growing confidence during her life on the farm is interwoven with increasingly intense memories of why she was placed in foster care in the first place. How did you arrive at this structure? 
The structure was very difficult to get right. I wanted to write a frame novel. I've always loved that structure; some of my favorite Gothic novels are written this way. Frankenstein is a frame novel, and The Turn of the Screw is, too. I thought we'd start with Mila's life as it is now, then we'd enter her past and stay there for the duration of that part of her story, then we’d finally return to the farm for the rest of her journey.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Watch Over Me.

But as hard as I tried, I just couldn't make it work that way. While I loved the concept of the tidy frame, I think the messier, more tangled version is better suited to Mila's story. Memory is messy, trauma is messy. So it makes sense that they didn't fit neatly into the center of the story and would instead need to rise up over and over, surprising Mila, challenging her, making her take notice even when she'd rather forget.

I don't write chronologically—I write all over the place, working on whatever scene is calling to me when I sit down to work—and then I fit everything together, so there was quite a bit of moving those past scenes around from draft to draft. 


I loved the appearance of the book’s very mysterious, ambiguous ghosts. Were they inspired by any particular ghost stories?
The moments in ghost stories I always like best are when the ghosts first appear and cause a reaction in the character. I rarely care as much about what they do next. The 2017 film A Ghost Story was really powerful in that way for me. It was a movie about grief in which a ghost in a white sheet—borderline comical—shows up as a visual representation of Rooney Mara's character's grief.

I wanted Watch Over Me's ghosts to be very real, but I also knew they'd be metaphorical as well. It was tricky to get them right, but I feel like we're all surrounded by ghosts all the time, whether or not we want to look at them. Ghosts of who we once were, ghosts of the people we've lost or lost touch with, ghosts of what might have been if our lives had moved in different directions . . . I was drawn to the idea of these ghosts swarming around, living their own ghost-lives, and what impact they would have on the living residents of the farm. Who would be afraid of them, who would be at peace with them. What all of it might mean. 


The farm’s setting is so atmospheric—idyllic, isolated, tucked between the hills and the ocean. Was this setting inspired by any real place(s) that you read about or visited or have lived in?
Oh yes, absolutely. I've always lived in Northern California and it's my favorite place in the world. For a while, my wife, Kristyn, photographed weddings and I'd assist her. We'd drive a few hours north from San Francisco to photograph at all these lovely little tucked-away farms that you'd never even know were there. Then when I was doing research for the novel I visited Nye Ranch, a beautiful produce and flower farm in the Mendocino area. It's right against the coastline—one of the most hauntingly beautiful places I've been to—and I was glad when the flower farmer there told me that lots of the area farms are haunted and that she'd seen a ghost at her own farm!

You often write deeply introspective protagonists, and Mila is no exception. What draws you to write about characters with such rich and self-reflective inner lives? Has your approach to these characters changed over time?
I live quite a bit in my own head, I guess! This has always been true for me, so it's the way most of my characters have turned out as well. I had the privilege of working with Yiyun Li when I was in grad school at Mills College in Oakland, California, and she was a visiting professor there. She told our workshop group that she always loved it when she had a chatty narrator, and I have had the pleasure of one of those—Emi from Everything Leads to You. But apart from Emi, my narrators tend to be the quiet, thoughtful, reserved type.

"I think growing up is really beautiful and really hard, and we do it over and over again all our lives."

Mila is maybe my most reserved narrator of all. She is concealing so much of her life and wants so badly to do the right thing, to be good, to be easy and useful and pleasant. In order to be these things for her new family, she has to suppress the more difficult parts of herself. She does a lot of internal navigating in order to be who she thinks they want her to be.

In terms of how my approach has changed, over time I've allowed my characters to be a little messier. I've gotten them into situations that don't have clear answers, because I'm learning that life is full of uncertainty and many shades of gray. 

Mila is at a pivotal moment in her life. She’s just aged out of the foster care system, but she’s also not quite ready for all the responsibilities of being an adult. You depict moments where she poignantly longs to either be older or younger than she is. What do you hope readers take away from Mila’s feelings in these moments?
I think growing up is really beautiful and really hard, and we do it over and over again all our lives. It can be painful, and it's only natural to wish for a time when things felt simple or to look into the future and imagine how it will be when this particular phase of growth is over. Mila longs for both, and seeing herself in contrast to the younger residents of the farm makes the fact that she isn't a child anymore—that she's responsible for healing herself—starker. But what a gift it is to have people by your side, loving you and caring about you while you do that hard work with yourself. Discovering who these people are and growing to trust them is part of Mila’s journey, too. 


Having Mila serve as a teacher and start to recognize her own talents as a budding educator was such a great way to illustrate how she’s straddling this border between childhood and adulthood. Your own background is full of teachers and teaching, in your own personal history as well as in your family. How did your personal relationship to/experience with teaching impact this part of Mila’s story? 
I used to be a reading tutor for kids at a public elementary school in Oakland. I met one-on-one with the same students over the course of the school year. The character of Lee was inspired by the kids I worked with. They were so young and so eager to please, and their emotional wounds felt very close to the surface—and I felt deeply unsure of myself and terribly unequipped to help. I cared, and I tried my best, and I got some things right and many other things wrong. Teaching is fraught that way, for me. I love it, but sometimes I look back at some of my teaching decisions and wish I could do them over.

"We all have wounds. We all carry damage. It makes us fully human."

Another incredible teacher I studied under at Mills College was Ruth Saxton. She taught a class on pedagogy with a teaching practicum that went along with it. She brought so much wisdom to her classes but she gave us so few answers. I used to wish she'd give us more, but in retrospect I realize that she was modeling how to teach. Teaching is so often an act of meeting the student where she is and offering her the resources and encouragement she needs in order to get to the next step. It's more about asking questions than it is about delivering knowledge. Mila inherently understands some of that, which is why Terry, the father figure of the family, considers her a gifted teacher. 

At one point, Mila says, “Maybe the fear doesn’t ever actually go away. Maybe we have to keep on working.” What advice or encouragement would you give to teens doing that kind of work?
I would say that as much as I'd like to tell them otherwise, for most of us our wounds won't ever heal completely. But also, that it's OK. That we own it—whatever it is—and we can use it in all sorts of ways. We can use it for art. It can be a source of empathy and strength. We all have wounds. We all carry damage. It makes us fully human. The sooner we realize that we're responsible for ourselves, that we're strong enough to look at the things we've lost, the things we've done or that have been done to us, the mistakes or missteps we've made, the sooner we'll begin feel at home in ourselves. 

Let’s end on a lighter note: I found the scenes at the farmers market, where the atmosphere is such a contrast to the world of the farm, so appealing. Do you shop at farmers’ markets? If so, what do you love about them? What’s your favorite fruit and vegetable? Is there something you especially love to make or cook with the produce you purchase?
I do! I love the pleasures of seasonal produce and the way farmers markets show the progression of a year, especially because here in San Francisco where the climate is mild year-round, we don't have the stark changes of season that other places do.

I love the pomegranates and squashes and citrus and bitter greens of winter; the persimmons and pears of fall; the berries and artichokes of spring; and, best of all, the tomatoes and eggplants and basil and stone fruit of summer. I love arriving at a farmers market and finding that strawberries have arrived.

Meeting friends at the market and lugging our big bags of produce around, chatting over coffee about how we are and what we'll be cooking later—that’s one of the simple pleasures of life that I miss so much right now, in the time of COVID-19 and as wildfires rage across my home state. But I know we'll get to do it again, and it will be even sweeter when it happens.

In Watch Over Me, Nina LaCour’s first novel since her 2018 Michael L. Printz Medal-winning We Are Okay, 18-year-old Mila is placed as an intern on an idyllic farm after aging out of the foster care system. BookPage spoke with LaCour about haunting, healing and feeling at home in ourselves.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features