Newbery Medalist Erin Entrada Kelly is having a big year. Following the March publication of her eighth middle grade novel, The First State of Being, she’s releasing a new illustrated chapter book, Felix Powell, Boy Dog. Fans of Kelly’s previous chapter book series featuring Marisol Rainey will instantly recognize Marisol’s friend, Felix Powell, and both new and returning readers will delight in how Kelly leans into magical realism as she plays out a fantasy many have likely had: What is it like to be a dog?

““I really wanted to explore more of Felix’s world and I just thought it would be fun if he, and by extension readers, could experience what it’s like to be a dog,” says Kelly.Early on in Felix Powell, Boy Dog, Felix and his dog, Mary Puppins, are playing with a blanket he picked out at a thrift shop, when the blanket transforms Felix into a dog. Kelly admits, “When I was a kid, I always daydreamed about being a bird, and I still kind of do!”

Kelly calls writing for younger middle grade readers “palate cleanser” projects, explaining that there are “all kinds of complications of being a middle schooler, and Felix is only 8 years old. It was nice to live in that 8-year-old world where they’re still very full of wonder.” But sheestablishes early on that Felix isn’t like most 8-year-olds, either in words or actions. To start, he can speak to Mary Puppins even before turning into a dog himself.

Kelly loves writing about kids who aren’t like others because “I think that one of the hardest parts of childhood is when you feel like you’re different from everyone else.” She recognizes that, especially in school, “difference is not always treated with the respect, compassion and excitement that it should be. It brings me joy to be able to write about kids who do feel a little different, in whatever way they feel different, because it’s like writing a letter to my young self and . . . to all kids who feel like they don’t quite fit. It’s celebrating young people who go against the grain because those are the people who will change the world later.”

Kelly spends a lot of time imagining her readers, and she recognizes the importance of “representing all different kinds of family dynamics.” In the book, she beautifully and simply explains that “Felix’s mom couldn’t take care of him anymore, so Nan adopted him.” Kelly says, “It makes me happy to think there might be a kid reading it who lives with their grandmother or grandparents and thinks, ‘Oh, I live with my grandparents too!’ Just that moment of connection, even if it’s like one second as they’re reading the book, is so important, because the more connections we can make like that, the more impact we have on children’s lives.”

Kelly has a unique way of thinking that transfers over to her characters. In an intense emotional moment, Felix describes his rising frustration as feeling like a “human boy with a grumpy mechanic in his body, turning his gears.” Kelly says that came from her own childhood imagination: “I was so curious about how my body worked, and of course, I didn’t understand all the science behind it. So I would imagine there are these little workers in my body, and they were grinding the gears and pushing out the tears and making me laugh and making me eat.” Although cushioned with humor, the scene presents a very real example of how emotions can get the better of us, which is Kelly’s way of offering a moment for readers to know that they’re not alone in saying “things they don’t mean when they’re angry or frustrated.”

“Just that moment of connection, even if it’s like one second as they’re reading the book, is so important.”

Her love of dogs is apparent throughout Felix Powell, Boy Dog. She explains that a lot of the book “came from observing my dogs. I used to actually be on the board of the Humane Society of Southwest Louisiana,” and it was an easy choice for her when it came to picking what animal Felix should turn into in this book. “I just find them to be fascinating and, in many ways, perfect little creatures, in my mind anyway.” However, she teases, “my hope is that it continues as a series as he changes into various [other] everyday animals.”

As an author who writes a lot of varying books within the juvenile fiction classification, working on something for younger readers is what Kelly calls a “palate cleanser” to working on her upper middle grade books. She says there are “all kinds of complications of being a middle schooler, and Felix is only 8 years old. It was nice to live in that 8-year-old world where they’re still very full of wonder.”

Kelly also enjoys illustrating her own books—as she did with Felix Powell, Boy Dog—because it “activates a different part of my brain.” Kelly goes one step further by also incorporating graphic novel elements into Felix Powell, Boy Dog: For example, when Felix is telling the story of meeting Puppins, the prose narrative shifts into comic strips that add special emphasis to this “best day of his life” and highlight Puppins—amid a crowd of dogs who all had names—as an unnamed puppy with whom Felix connected right away. Right now, “young readers can’t quite get enough of graphic novels. So I wanted to be able to marry the traditional chapter book with the celebration of graphic novels that we have right now.” She hopes that both the kids who resist reading prose novels, and the parents who resist letting their kids read graphic novels, will be happy to pick this book up.

“I wanted to be able to marry the traditional chapter book with the celebration of graphic novels that we have right now.”

Of course, one wonders if Kelly will ever take the plunge and write a full graphic novel. “I used to say ‘Oh no, I couldn’t draw an entire graphic novel,’ but actually, writing Felix showed me that maybe I could, if I got the right idea.” Kelly admits. “Never say never, huh?”

After your very first novel receives a Newbery Honor and you go on to win two Newbery Medals; after you become a two-time finalist for the National Book Award; after several of your books are adapted for the big screen (not to mention a stage musical and an opera); after you’re named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature; and after your work becomes so commercially successful that you sell more than 40 million copies of your books—after you achieve all of that, what mountains are left for you to climb?

If you’re Kate DiCamillo, the author of such widely adored classics of 21st-century children’s literature as Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux and Flora & Ulysses, you write another excellent novel: Ferris. While many of DiCamillo’s earlier books feature young protagonists who must deal with the loss of a parent or caregiver through distance, divorce or death, Ferris is a story about a child “who has been loved from the minute that she arrived in the world.”

As we chat over Zoom, Ramona the dog snoozing in a chair next to her desk, DiCamillo reveals Ferris’ deeply personal roots. “My father passed away in November of 2019, and my best friend that I grew up with had her first grandchild on December 31 of 2019.” That date was also her father’s birthday. “I was estranged from my father,” she shares, characterizing their relationship as “very difficult.” As DiCamillo looked at photos of the new baby surrounded by parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, she wondered, “What happens if you write a story about a kid that is just so certain and safe” in her family’s love? “Is there a story in that?”

It turns out, there is.

Ferris follows its titular protagonist, Emma Phineas “Ferris” Wilkey, during the eventful summer before she enters fifth grade. She finds herself on the receiving end of an unfortunate new hairstyle from her Aunt Shirley, whose husband has moved out of their house and into Ferris’ family’s basement. Ferris’ father is convinced that raccoons have infested their attic. Her younger sister, the scene-stealing Pinky, has decided that she wants to be featured on a “wanted” poster and has attempted to achieve her goal through petty theft, an incident involving biting and a hilariously unsuccessful stickup at the local bank. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, keeps playing François Couperin’s “Mysterious Barricades” over and over on every piano he can find. And Ferris’ beloved grandmother, Charisse, has been diagnosed with congestive heart failure but seems more concerned with uncovering what a ghost might want—a ghost she insists has been appearing in her bedroom doorway.

It’s great that we’re meeting, but even if we never met, I would be there with you, because it’s not a story until it’s you and me, together.

That may sound like a lot for one novel to juggle, but DiCamillo balances it all with the ease of an expert orchestra conductor. She does it so well that some readers may be surprised to learn that DiCamillo describes the experience of creating a novel as an act of “writing behind my own back” and “always starting not knowing where I’m going to end up.”

Where Ferris ends up is a climactic dinner sequence straight out of a screwball comedy, in which every single one of the novel’s many narrative threads coalesces. Although it will have readers gasping with laughter, the seeds of the scene lie in more turbulent soil for DiCamillo. When she was growing up, the family table “was often a place of terror” because of her father. As she worked on the scene, DiCamillo says that she thought about the concept of “repetition compulsion, how you keep on doing something until it turns out differently.” Eventually, DiCamillo says that she realized, “Well, here we go, this is the same place I end up every time I write a story: everybody around the table, happy, safe and eating. It surprises me every time.”

DiCamillo hopes that, through her work as an author, she’s able to create spaces that feel this way for readers. “So much of good storytelling is leaving space for the reader.” When she meets children at book events, she tells them, “It’s great that we’re meeting, but even if we never met, I would be there with you, because it’s not a story until it’s you and me, together. That’s what makes it a story, is both of us being there.”

Perhaps this is why DiCamillo becomes visibly emotional when she discusses what it’s like to write against a backdrop of rising censorship and book bans in schools and libraries across the country. “If there is any hope for us,” she says, “it is in being able to see and feel for each other, and books are a vehicle for doing that. Stories help us see each other and help us see ourselves.” She even confesses that she can’t talk about this subject “without weeping, because I know from personal experience and I’ve seen it with other kids: The right book at the right time will save somebody’s life.”

It’s a transformative power that every reader has experienced, but a power that Ferris is only just beginning to understand. Throughout the novel, Ferris reflects on the words that her “vocabulary-obsessed” fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Mielk, taught her. (“All of life hinges on knowing the right word to use at the right time,” Mrs. Mielk claims.) As a child, DiCamillo found it incredibly difficult to learn to read and only succeeded thanks to her mother’s tireless efforts. “I knew that’s what I needed, were those words,” she explains. “What Ferris has—those words, that family, that table to sit around—that’s the way I want the reader to feel too. It’s like, you are invited here, to this place. Now look, you have all those words. You have this table. You have this family. You emerge feeling loved.”

Ferris’ grandmother, Charisse, often tells Ferris that “every good story is a love story.” With Ferris, DiCamillo has created a truly great story, and it’s brimming with love.

Photo of Kate DiCamillo by Dina Kantor.