Behind the Book Archives

Behind the Book by Megan Abbott

by Megan Abbott

With her 2012 novel Dare Me, Megan Abbott transformed high school bullying into a startling tale of reckless teenage chaos. In her new novel, The Fever, another group of young women find themselves at the center of pandemonium, as one by one girls fall to a mysterious infection that causes terrifying, gruesome seizures. The author shares how this haunting tale was inspired by a real-life “mass hysteria” outbreak in Le Roy, New York, in 2012.

She’s pretty, fresh-faced. A cheerleader in a hoodie, her nervous smile lurking. But something’s wrong. “I was always so active,” she says, her words broken up by a sharp vocal outburst, her head jerking. “Everyone was always so happy to be around me. I just don’t feel like myself anymore.” Her name is Thera Sanchez, and I first saw her on the “Today” show in January 2012, a time when she and several other female teens in Le Roy, New York—all with similar vocal tics and twitches—were appearing everywhere: the morning shows; CNN; every major newspaper and magazine. All these lovely, panicked girls begging for answers to the strange affliction that seemed to be spreading through their school like a plague. Watching them and their terrified parents, I couldn’t look away.

Within days of first hearing about the young women—18 in all—of Le Roy, I began writing The Fever, which chronicles a mysterious outbreak in a small town. In the novel, we see everything through the eyes of the Nash family: Tom, a high school teacher, and his two teenage children, Eli and Deenie. One by one, Deenie’s friends are struck by terrifying, unexplained seizures, and fear and hysteria spread through the town.

For several months in early 2012, it seemed like the Le Roy story was amplifying in size, with concerned parents, the media and various activists pointing the finger at environmental toxins, the HPV vaccine, rare autoimmune disorders and other potential threats. Ultimately, the medical diagnosis—accepted by most—was that the girls were suffering from “conversion disorder,” a condition in which the body “converts” emotional distress into physical symptoms. Though psychological in origin, the symptoms are involuntary and completely real. When it occurs in groups, spreading from one to the next, it is called “mass psychogenic illness,” or “mass hysteria.”

While The Fever’s plot diverges dramatically from what happened in Le Roy, I was continually reminded of the stakes for these afflicted girls, for their parents, for the community. And that fear in the girls’ eyes, which was so complicated, so haunting and real: What’s happening to me? When will I be myself again? And, perhaps most hauntingly of all, What if no one believes me?

Comparisons to the Salem witch trials appeared (and remain) everywhere, except in this case it was the afflicted girls themselves who were put on trial, accused of faking their symptoms, of being dramatic look-at-me teenagers, of making it all up, as if it were a game. One needs only to survey a few Internet comments on the articles written about the case to get a sense of what the girls faced: “This is how the herd mentality works. These little heifers are enjoying the show they’ve produced for themselves.”

The young women of Le Roy had undergone significant emotional upheavals (a sick parent, domestic abuse) that triggered the symptoms we all saw on TV, but they were being treated as unruly drama queens. Perhaps in some way, their tics made us deeply uncomfortable. And it was easier to minimize them, dismiss them. Place blame.

Last month, The Fever long finished, I began to wonder how it might be for the girls now, reportedly recovered and no longer under the media glare. I contacted Dr. Jennifer McVige, the neurologist who treated 10 of them. We talked for a long time about the experience and the aftermath, but one thing she said has hummed in my brain ever since: “I’d tell the girls, what you’re going through now is so challenging, but you’re going to come out stronger, smarter. You’re going to look back to this time in your life and say, I got through that, I can get through this. I can do anything now.”

It felt like such a parable of female adolescence, writ large. I think back to Thera Sanchez on the “Today” show, to the words she said—which, on one level, could be the words of any teenage girl, any young woman ever. There’s part of her that wants to please (“Everyone was always so happy to be around me.”), part of her that wants to do (“I was always so active.”) and part that feels lost (“I just don’t feel like myself anymore.”). She knows she’s changing, and it’s so hard because it feels like everyone’s watching, judging. And she’s just asking to be heard and understood.

Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of seven novels. She lives in Queens, New York.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With her 2012 novel Dare Me, Megan Abbott transformed high school bullying into a startling tale of reckless teenage chaos. In her new novel, The Fever, another group of young women find themselves at the center of pandemonium, as one by one girls fall to a mysterious infection that causes terrifying, gruesome seizures. The author shares how this haunting tale was inspired by a real-life “mass hysteria” outbreak in Le Roy, New York, in 2012.

World Fiction

World Fiction

The wisdom of old wives’ tales

Behind the Book by Tiphanie Yanique

by Tiphanie Yanique

Born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, writer Tiphanie Yanique spins her debut novel from that country's rich history. The saga of one remarkable family across generations, Land of Love and Drowning draws from folklore as well as real-life events, and the result is a magical first novel. In a behind-the-book essay, Yanique explains how she combined the truth from old wives tales with the facts from history books to create a unique truth.

"The master race in front!” The shouting men barged onto the bus in their uniforms. The passengers shrunk down out of shock and fear as the men broke down the wooden sign that read “Coloreds” at the back of the bus. The men themselves were nonwhite, but their uniforms were those of the U.S. Army. This made what the men were saying very strange and very frightening. The bus driver ducked from behind the wheel and ran into the street.

In the U.S. Virgin Islands there are many stories about the anti-segregation disruption caused by the local men who served in the military during World War II. This one in particular is the story I was told about what happened when some of the men from the so-called West Indian Companies were stationed in New Orleans. My great uncle Sigurd Peterson Sr. and my grandfather Andre Galiber Sr. were both part of this civil disobedience. Sigurd was mostly Danish, but he had a brownish tinge to his skin, either from being born and raised in the Caribbean or because of the remaining diversity in his bloodline. Andre was mostly black, descended from Africans, but there were also Asians and white Europeans in his ancestry.

These soldiers, born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, had never experienced segregation before—certainly not in a formal way. Their shouts of “master race” was newly acquired jargon . . . a racist jargon to be sure, but shouted from their darker faces and Caribbean mouths it was subversive enough to get them put in jail or lynched. But actually, what race were these men anyway? Some of them seemed white. Others looked black. Yet they were declaring themselves to be of the same race.

That the men declared themselves the master race was peculiar because they were of mixed racial background. If they were of the master race, then it meant that everyone could be, perhaps that everyone was. These men tore down the sign of bigotry, but they didn’t erect another. Later, Jesse Owens, the African American gold medalist who at the time served in the state department as a sort of consultant on race relations, was brought in to calm the Virgin Islands soldiers and explain the reasoning behind segregation. The soldiers booed Owens until he had to be escorted out.

"An old wives’ tale is generally thought to come from myth and superstition, and so should be considered with derision. . . . In my family, however, it is the older women who are the historians."

As is the case with many former soldiers, no one wanted to openly talk about the conflicts they had. Sigurd and Andre never offered this story. But there was the story anyway, corroborated by many of the women who knew them. The soldiers had been twice segregated. Not only separated by white and black, they were also set aside in their own West Indian companies, segregated from the other American companies, the white and the black ones. They and their compatriots had participated in a vital struggle. I researched this episode and others in books I dug up in the library and found in the bookstores. But I first learned it from the wives, girlfriends and daughters of these men.

Land of Love and Drowning is narrated by the “old wives” of the island. They are the ones who receive and pass on the stories, including this one about the soldiers in New Orleans. An "old wives’ tale" is generally a label given to a story thought to come from myth and superstition, and so should be considered with derision. But worse, an old wives’ tale is one that is often considered false in part because it is told by old women.

In my family, however, it is the older women who are the historians. So in Land of Love and Drowning I made the old wives the authoritative narrators. Other narrators (a male, and two younger women) tell their versions. But it is the old wives who, because of their age, have a long view of the history and, because of their intimate relationships (lovers and mothers), have the deepest understanding of the community. They are not the always the political actors in the novel but they are the recorders. They are the historians.

I wrote many parts of Land of Love and Drowning based on the history I first learned from my grandmother. It is was the story of the male soldiers, my real ancestors, who helped me frame the novel within the political framework of the Virgin Islands becoming American. Virgin Islands soldiers fought aggressively and publically against Jim Crow—and they did so while in U.S. military uniform. These men in my family helped make a small part of history that sealed the Virgin Islands to Americanness. But I needed the old wives to tell me the history to begin with.

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Land of Love and Drowning is narrated by the “old wives” of the island. They are the ones who receive and pass on the stories, including this one about the soldiers in New Orleans. An old wives’ tale is generally a label given to a tale thought to come from myth and superstition, and so should be considered with derision. But worse, an old wives’ tale is one that is often considered false in part because it is told by old women.

A different perspective

Behind the Book by Tracy Barrett

by Tracy Barrett

Poor Cinderella. Poor, sweet Cinderella. Or maybe it's a little more complicated than that. Tracy Barrett's new novel for teens, The Stepsister's Tale, offers a necessary update to the classic rags-to-riches story.

No one is a villain (or a sidekick or a mentor) in her or his own story, and in my recent work I’ve enjoyed exploring well-known stories from the point of view of their secondary characters. King of Ithaka tells part of Homer’s Odyssey from the point of view of Telemachos (Odysseus’ teenage son), and Dark of the Moon is the tale of the minotaur as told by the minotaur’s sister, Ariadne, and his killer, Theseus. In The Stepsister’s Tale, we see the character of Cinderella through the eyes of her hardworking stepsister, Jane Montjoy.

I’ve long been interested in the question of how our point of view colors our perception of events. When my children were little and an argument broke out between them, I discovered that almost always the facts weren’t under dispute: they agreed that he pushed her, for example. But what differed was the motivation: “He was trying to knock me down” vs. “It was an accident.” Each was (usually) convinced that her or his interpretation of the motives was accurate.

But we take Cinderella’s word that she’s persecuted. If we take the bare facts—she isn’t accustomed to working hard and all of a sudden she has to—could there be some reason that her stepsisters were unkind to her? Or is it even possible that they weren’t unkind, and that she misinterpreted what was going on?

Say you know a teenage girl whose widowed father marries a woman with two daughters. The girl and her father move in with the stepfamily. If the girl told you that she had to do all the work and that her stepmother was mean to her and her stepsisters were ugly and bossy, wouldn’t you tell her that stepfamilies take some adjustment, and wouldn’t you suspect that maybe there’s another side to the story?

This was the spark for The Stepsister’s Tale. Jane, the older of Cinderella’s stepsisters, tells of living in grinding poverty with a mother who is in denial that they are no longer the wealthy, high-living family of her girlhood. Jane and her sister do all the work, and when the beautiful and spoiled Isabella reacts with indignation at the suggestion that she pitch in, conflict erupts.

What makes fairy tales so ripe for retelling is that almost always, we rarely know why characters behave the way they do. The villain is evil for no apparent reason. The heroine (or hero) is virtuous. Sometimes we vaguely hear about “jealousy” or “poverty” to explain why something evil is done, but those factors are never explored in depth.

And fairy tales rarely show character growth: Cinderella starts out good and sweet and beautiful, and at the end she’s good and sweet and beautiful. The stepsisters start out as selfish bullies, and at the end they’re selfish bullies. The author of a retelling is tasked not only with figuring out why these fairy-tale people act the way they do, but also with showing their development over time.

I decided to base my retelling on the version of the story most familiar to my readers: the Disney film, which is in turn loosely based on the tale written by Charles Perrault in the 17th century. My aim is for my readers to compare (either consciously or unconsciously) the details they’re familiar with—the pumpkin coach, the glass slippers, the mice, etc.—to the more realistic elements of my story. For that to happen, I have to show the familiar detail from a different angle. I need to tweak it, but keep it plausible, for the reader to get enjoyment from seeing another explanation for something she or he had always taken for granted.

With the The Stepsister’s Tale, Tracy Barrett marks the publication of her 20th book for young readers and her 10th novel. Her first young-adult novel, Anna of Byzantium, received numerous awards and honors, including being named a Booklist Editors’ Choice selection, a Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books Blue Ribbon Book and an ALA Quick Pick. Her other popular YA historical novels include King of Ithaka and Dark of the Moon. She also writes the popular middle-grade series The Sherlock Files. You can visit her online at www.tracybarrett.com and follow her on Twitter: @writingtracy

Author photo credit Jenny Mandeville, Vanderbilt University.

Poor Cinderella. Poor, sweet Cinderella. Or maybe it's a little more complicated than that. Tracy Barrett's new novel for teens, The Stepsister's Tale, offers a necessary update to the classic rags-to-riches story.

Fiction, Inspirational Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction Inspirational Fiction

Reverend Denzelle Flowers meets his match

Behind the Book by Michele Andrea Bowen

by Michele Andrea Bowen

St. Louis writer Michele Andrea Bowen made a splash in the inspirational fiction world with her Church Folk series, which followed the loves and losses of a tight-knit church community in Durham, North Carolina. Her latest release, Pastor Needs a Boo, launches a spin-off of that series, the Pastor’s Aide Club, and matches reader favorite Denzelle Flowers—a former FBI agent turned pastor—with the woman who will be the making of him. In a behind-the-book essay, Bowen explains why she chose Reverend Flowers to kick things off.

I always have a hearty “laugh out loud” moment when I think about how this book came to be. Pastor Needs a Boo is the book behind the books Up at the College and More Church Folk. The main characters in this story (and in the forthcoming books in the Pastor’s Aide Club Series) are the secondary characters readers were immensely interested in throughout the original series of Church Folk novels.

Every time I wrote a new novel, my readers would ask: “Sooooo, what about Denzelle Flowers?” They wanted to know things like “Is Denzelle ever going to settle down with a good woman?” “You know, I always thought he had a thing for . . . what’s her name . . . yeah, Marsha Metcalf.” “What happened to that pastor where the women in his church went wild, like ‘Church Girls Gone Wild’ during one of his Friday night services? Wasn’t that brother Denzelle?”

My readers wouldn't stop asking, “Is Reverend Denzelle Flowers ever going to settle down with a good woman and leave those hoochies alone?”

And “Is Reverend Denzelle Flowers ever going to settle down with a good woman and leave those hoochies alone?”

Who knew that my characters would touch the hearts and funny bones of my readers to the point of them having that good old “church folk” community connection with Denzelle and the other supporting characters like they were their cousins or something? And honestly, I was beginning to ask myself what was going on in Denzelle’s world. I always liked this character—he had a lot of “old school swag” and was very funny with regard to his approach to life.

Denzelle Flowers was the kind of man that a woman writing about love and the perils of the heart could explore, analyze and investigate. Why would a man with such a deep secret desire for true love run from it like it was some kind of sci-fi concocted nuisance? I also wanted to know what kind of woman would make this man stop running. In asking that question, I became more and more intrigued by another supporting character, Marsha Metcalf.

It was so much fun to get all up in Denzelle’s “grille.” Or, to be more exact, I had a good time digging in the brother’s history, finding out what happened to make him so jaded, and how a woman could be the inspiration to turn his life around. I wanted to know why men in a certain age group ran from the very thing that would actually give their hearts the joy they craved in all of the wrong ways. Well, what I really wanted to know, was why would a handsome, smart, smooth and savvy FBI Agent/preacher like Denzelle Flowers always found himself lookin’ for luuuuvvvv in all the wrong places.

Funny thing—that was the secret question on the hearts, minds and lips of my readers. They just didn’t “get” Denzelle Flowers. They couldn’t understand how he could be such good friends with the happily married Rev. Obadiah Quincey and his wife, Lena, and not believe that love really existed, that there really was a “Ruth” out their waiting to connect with her “Boaz.”

Yes, Denzelle Flowers definitely wanted to connect with a Ruth. He didn’t want the modern-day version of a Queen Esther, or a Rahab, or even Lazurus and Martha’s sister, Mary. Denzelle wanted that sweet, dedicated, smart, hard-working and good-looking Ruth. And just like Boaz, Denzelle needed the chance to watch and observe from afar, to act like he wasn’t thinking and feeling what the readers all knew he was thinking and feeling, and to stay safe while his heart did a soft whirring motion every time he witnessed his Ruth—Marsha—laboring in the field of activities created by his church’s Pastor’s Aide Club.

I had so much fun working with these characters and figuring out how to get this pastor from “needing a boo” to grabbing that boo close to his very fragile and needy heart.

St. Louis writer Michele Andrea Bowen made a splash in the inspirational fiction world with her Church Folk series, which followed the loves and losses of a tight-knit church community in Durham, North Carolina. Her latest release, Pastor Needs a Boo, launches a spin-off of that series, the Pastor’s Aide Club, and finds reader favorite Denzelle Flowers—a former FBI agent turned pastor—the woman who will be the making of him. In a behind-the-book essay, Bowen explains why she chose Reverend Flowers to kick things off.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Between medicine and morality

Behind the Book by Gabriel Weston

by Gabriel Weston

Surgeon-turned-author Gabriel Weston made her literary debut with a gripping medical memoir. In her first novel, Dirty Work, she again turns to medicine for inspiration, this time investigating one of its most morally fraught procedures: abortion. In a behind-the-book story, Weston explains why she felt drawn to explore this contentious issue, and why she believes the two sides may be closer together than we think.

What would you do if you had an untellable story? Of what does a doctor’s morality consist?

What surprised me most about writing my first book, Direct Red: A Surgeon’s Story, was the reaction it elicited in some of my colleagues. I had read quite a few memoirs written by men in my profession, and although I was always impressed by their operating achievements, I felt slightly weary of reading heroic tales of life-saving antics, proud accounts of bloody machismo.

What I decided I wanted to put alongside these chronicles was a story of surgical inadequacy. I wanted to describe what it feels like to be a surgeon in those moments when one does not feel in control, when one is uncertain of one’s ability, when one is terrified, when an operation is not going well. Instead of cataloging what a surgeon can do, I wanted to talk about how we feel and what we do when we haven’t got a clue.

After publication, surgeons came to me quietly or wrote to thank me for having said and described things they had felt intensely themselves during their training but had never been able to admit. I was touched by these comments but, even more, I was interested. I started to wonder to what extent we all carry an untold version, the untellable truth of our own existence, folded tightly away within ourselves. I started thinking about what it might mean to keep aspects of our lives secret as well as the implications of suddenly having to speak out.

I started to wonder to what extent we all carry an untold version, the untellable truth of our own existence, folded tightly away within ourselves.

I also started to consider what it means to be a good doctor. Many of my colleagues claimed they were afraid to own up to feelings of uncertainty in case doing so damaged their reputation. I realized that doctors still feel, in some sense, that they should behave like paragons. I wondered where our moral core resides and what it would take to break that brittle image. What would it take for a doctor to go from being considered good to being thought of as bad?

It was from these questions that my main character emerged. Nancy is a woman with an unspeakable story, a woman physician who carries an indelible moral taint. Despite her best intentions and perhaps even by accident, Nancy has become an abortion provider. Her very existence is taboo and yet she is forced, by the circumstances of a mistake made in the operating theatre, to tell her story, to justify her actions not only to an external panel of judges but, perhaps hardest of all, to herself.

I happened upon the subject of abortion for this reason, not because I had any particular political ax to grind. I have never had an abortion myself, nor have I performed one as a doctor. But as soon as I started researching the area, something fascinating struck me. None of the books or articles that I read on the subject seemed to allow for even a degree of ambiguity. Everyone, from whichever side of the fence they were preaching, seemed so sure that they, and they alone, had the right answers. In some ways, it seemed to me that people were being dishonest in their certainty. And whenever I told someone I was embarking on a novel about an abortion provider, the conversation stopped dead. Even my agent and publisher cautioned me that if I wrote the book I intended to, no one would want to read it. It was like a red flag to a bull, and all the encouragement I needed.

It has been my experience, in the process of writing this book, that the thing that makes us all so very uncomfortable when the subject of abortion is raised, is the mysterious compulsion we all feel to have a completely absolute and watertight opinion on the subject. This seems crazy to me. I have stood on anti-abortion picket lines in the Midwest of America, and I have understood exactly why the people who wave their banners are so upset. I have also witnessed countless women gain access to the abortion services that they absolutely deserve. In Nancy, I hope to have created a character who holds all this ambiguity within herself. In writing her, I saw the room for a moral person to feel completely torn between a sense of righteousness and a corrosive guilt.

I saw the room for a moral person to feel completely torn between a sense of righteousness and a corrosive guilt.

First and foremost, what I hope to have written is a gripping, un-put-downable novel. But I hope also to show that even the most extreme positions on this thorny subject may be held within one consciousness, that the enemy camps are pitched much closer to each other than one might think.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

Exchanging friendship with the other side of the world

Behind the Book by Shirley Parenteau

by Shirley Parenteau

Shirley Parenteau's new book for young readers tells the remarkable story of 11-year-old Lexie Lewis. It's 1926, and her class has been raising money to ship a doll to the children of Japan. Lexie dreams of accompanying the doll to the farewell ceremony in San Francisco. This warm novel is based on real events that occurred before World War II, when American children sent more than 12,000 dolls to Japan. In a Behind the Book essay, Parenteau shares the astounding and long-forgotten history of the Friendship Dolls program.

Imagine children all across 1926 America donating pennies to buy dolls for children in Japan. Imagine 12,739 dolls traveling with passports, visas and introductory letters, being greeted by children in Japan with celebration and ceremony.

The story is true, but was lost with most of the dolls in the tumult of World War II.

When I learned of the Friendship Dolls, I was looking for inspiration for a new picture book. I had written one called Bears on Chairs, adorably illustrated by David Walker, which is so popular in a Japanese translation that the bears in the book are now available there as plush toys and other items. I had a greater personal connection with Japan through my daughter-in-law Miwa, who is from Fukuoka.

When Miwa and my son took their daughter to the Girls' Day Festival, or Hinamatsuri, I was intrigued by their photos. Wondering if I could write a picture book about the festival celebrated with treasured dolls, I researched online. One source linked to this website and revealed an amazing story—the Friendship Dolls of 1926.

The project was the inspiration of Dr. Sidney Gulick, a teacher-missionary who had retired after working in Japan for 30 years. Fearing war might break out between the United States and Japan—two countries he loved—he urged American children to send dolls to children in Japan for Hinamatsuri.

All across America, children responded, emptying piggy banks and holding fundraisers. In return, donations from Japanese children allowed their finest dollmakers to create 58 large dolls to send to America. Each wore a kimono in a pattern designed by the empress’ own dressmaker and traveled with tiny accessories as examples of their culture.

Children in both countries continued to exchange letters, but sadly the Friendship Project could not prevent World War II. Fourteen years later, Japanese planes bombed U.S. ships in Pearl Harbor. The dolls became symbols of the enemy in both countries. In America, they were stuffed into storage. In Japan, they were ordered to be destroyed. Of those that survived, many were shattered during U.S. bombings.

I longed to tell this lost story through the eyes of an American girl and to set the book in Portland because I grew up on the northern Oregon coast. A second novel, Dolls of Hope (2015), will tell the story of the dolls from the viewpoint of a girl in Japan.

Happily, many of the surviving dolls have been recovered, beginning in the '70s. About 300 of the 12,000-plus dolls sent to Japan and hidden at great personal risk during the war years are on display. In America, 46 of the 58 Japanese dolls have been located. A list of 38 which can be seen in museums, along with their locations, is here.

In the past 15 years or so, children, communities and organizations in both countries have again begun exchanging dolls.

I wrote Ship of Dolls and Dolls of Hope to celebrate the unquenchable hope of children for international friendship and peace.

Shirley Parenteau's new book for young readers tells the remarkable story of 11-year-old Lexie Lewis. It's 1926, and her class has been raising money to ship a doll to the children of Japan. Lexie dreams of accompanying the doll to the farewell ceremony in San Francisco. This warm story is based on real events that occurred before World War II. The author shares the astounding and long-forgotten history of the Friendship Dolls program.

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

Big brain, bigger fun

Behind the Book by Jon Scieszka and Brian Biggs

by Jon Scieszka and Brian Biggs

Science is far from serious in Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor, the first in a new series from Jon Scieszka and Brian Biggs. Take one kid genius, add two hilarious robots and an archnemesis with a doomsday plan, and you've got the perfect blend of imagination and invention. But with so much hilarity and adventure, how do you choose a favorite scene? We put Scieszka and Biggs to the test.

Jon Scieszka, author

Would it be cheating to say I have two favorite scenes from this first Frank Einstein book? Oh, good. I didn't hear anyone say no. So—my first favorite scene is when Frank first meets the self-assembled robots Klink and Klank. Because we, the readers, get to meet the robots with the same realization Frank has—that these two can help figure out/invent almost anything. Then Klank tells a pretty lame knock-knock joke. That drives Klink nuts. And Frank also realizes that these robots are a bit crazy too.

And my other favorite scene is when Frank and his pal Watson meet the evil kid genius, T. Edison, for the first time. They are all in Frank's Grampa Al's Fix It! repair shop. Edison introduces his sidekick and chief financial officer, Mr. Chimp. I don't want to give away too much, but Mr. Chimp's name is a pretty big clue that Mr. Chimp is . . . an actual chimpanzee. Mr. Chimp has taught himself sign language, accounting, jet engine repair and plenty more skills that we’ll find out about in books one through six.

Oh, and my other favorite scene is when Klank attacks Edison’s Antimatter Squirt Gun. This thing is powerful enough to destroy Einstein and Watson and both robots. And though Klank isn't the smartest robot in the world, he does have the biggest robot heart. And Brian's illustrations show exactly what happens.

Ooo ooo oooo and then every scientific diagram is a favorite scene of mine too! As part of the story, Brian and I get to show atomic structure, antimatter, fingerprints, eyeballs, E = mc² and cows producing methane gas . . .

Brian Biggs, illustrator

Being asked to describe my favorite scene from Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor is kind of hard. There are about a million really fun scenes in the book, and if Jon does one thing well (and he actually does eleven things well), it’s creating scenes in his stories that are fun to illustrate.

Would it be the scene at the beginning of the book where Frank and Watson are trying to build their first robot during a thunderstorm? The dramatic lighting, the maniacal laughter, the all-important introduction to the world of Frank certainly made this scene a good one.

Hmm. Maybe it was the scene at the end that takes place in a giant factory where one of the robots, Klank, has hugged a huge, pink Antimatter Squirt Gun until he and the Squirt Gun explode in a humongous, colorful BLAM! Or maybe it was the small diagram in chapter seven depicting a cow fart. It was sort of hysterical the day that I had to research this drawing and learn all I could about cow methane.

But actually, my favorite scene in the book, as well as my favorite scene that I got to draw, is none of these. When I read Jon’s description of the moment we meet Frank’s nemesis, T. Edison, as he hides behind the old phonograph (a Thomas Edison invention, natch!), and then his ape cohort, Mr. Chimp, climbs down and joins him, I knew that this scene was going to be a joy to compose and create. I’d done some creepy character sketches for T. Edison showing his shifty eyes, weird mouth, and matted hair, and I’d hoped I’d have a chance to use these, and I did. Mr. Chimp is creepy in his own evil-sneer and barefoot way. He’s actually my favorite character in the series, and I knew that this drawing had to get everything about Mr. Chimp and T. Edison across.

In addition to the characters in this scene, I loved drawing Grampa Al’s Fix It! repair shop in the background. You may not know this about me, but I love details. As Jon wrote the book, I often felt like he was writing it only for me to draw. Frank’s science lab and Grampa Al’s shop are full of old musical instruments, unused appliances, broken clocks, funny contraptions, nuts, bolts and unusual tools, and it was fun to both draw the stuff that Jon described but also add my own layer. The red fan on the left is actually a fan I have in my studio, for example.

Bringing all these elements together still would not have worked without getting the mood right in this illustration. T. Edison and Mr. Chimp are really mean guys. They’re threatening to repossess Grandpa’s shop here. The light is coming in from behind, casting a dark shadow across both characters. I hadn’t had the chance to work with light and shadow much before Frank Einstein, and it was a lot of fun to bring this into the drawings, setting the tone for these two characters and their conflict with Frank that will take place over the six books in the series.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Doing unto others—without becoming undone

Behind the Book by Julia Keller

by Julia Keller

Julia Keller's debut mystery, A Killing in the Hills, introduced prosecuting attorney Belfa “Bell” Elkins and the small Appalachian town of Acker's Gap, West Virginia. In Summer of the Dead, Keller's third mystery set in Acker's Gap, Bell faces a new murderer, as well as family challenges and the burdens of the coal mining community.

The opening acknowledgements in Summer of the Dead hint at a heartbreaking story: "Some years ago I met the wise and stalwart wife of a coal miner in McDowell County, West Virginia. She had created a place for her husband under the big kitchen table; because of his many years spent working underground, and injuries to his spine, he was only comfortable in a crouching position. The story has haunted me ever since, and it inspired a key element of this novel."

Keller shed some light on this inspiration and the questions and challenges of caretaking.

A sick old man who lives in the perpetual twilight of an ancient cellar. A wayward sister trying to find herself after three decades in prison. A woman with a serious mental illness who hates being a burden to her husband.

Those people live in and around Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, the setting for my new novel, Summer of the Dead. They happen to be fictional, but in their incompleteness, their neediness, they embody a real-life dilemma of our times: caretaking. How much should we do for others? What do we owe our aging parents, our troubled siblings or spouses or friends, our children in crisis? At what point do our efforts on behalf of others actually do more harm than good—as we rob those we assist of the opportunity to develop their own strengths and inner resources? As a nation, we wonder if a surfeit of government aid might be creating a culture of dependency.

So many people I know are wrestling with these questions in their own lives. They have parents who can no longer live on their own. Or children in their 20s who can’t find jobs, hence return home. And thus when I sat down to write the third book in my mystery series set in a tattered town in the Appalachian foothills, I decided to explore the question that haunts so many of us: When it comes to loved ones in need, how can we strike a balance between helping and also preserving an individual’s dignity?

Make no mistake: Summer of the Dead is a murder mystery, and there are the requisite unsolved homicides and desperate searches for the bad guys (or gals). But as a reader, I’ve always been drawn to stories that are told obliquely, that require us to do more than merely follow the surface maneuverings of a plot. I admire Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (2001) for its superbly drawn characters and headlong narrative—but also for its nuanced analysis of the crushing weight of class differences in a big city like Boston. Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012) is a marvelous piece of crime fiction—and a heartbreaking depiction of the psychological impact of the housing crisis that accompanied the recent global recession, when homes in which people had poured their life savings suddenly were almost worthless. “Broke can lead people to places they would never have imagined,” muses French’s narrator. “It can scour away a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that’s left is teeth and claws and terror.”

A novel always has two stories to tell: What happens—and why it’s happening. That second story is often the more interesting one. In Summer of the Dead, the characters must make agonizing decisions about how much to help those whom they love. If they do too little, they feel selfish; if they do too much, they risk feeling put-upon, filled with bitterness and resentment. And a long-simmering resentment can lead the human soul into some dark and lethal places.

Julia Keller's debut mystery, A Killing in the Hills, introduced prosecuting attorney Belfa “Bell” Elkins and the small Appalachian town of Acker's Gap, West Virginia. In Summer of the Dead, Keller's third mystery set in Acker's Gap, Bell faces a new murderer, as well as family challenges and the burdens of the coal mining community.

Keller shed some light on this inspiration and the questions and challenges of caretaking.

Encouraging teens to effect real change

Behind the Book by Laurie Ann Thompson

by Laurie Ann Thompson

For teens looking to make a difference in the world, Laurie Ann Thompson's Be a Changemaker is an invaluable resource—not just for creating an action plan, but also for mustering up the confidence to take a risk and start something new. "You have the power—now more than ever—to be the change that you seek," Thompson writes.

It's no surprise that Thompson spent her teenage years in search of her own way to make a difference in the world.

Most people who know me now would be surprised to learn that I was a painfully shy child. My parents would often tell me after a dinner out that I could have any treat I wanted, as long as I ordered it myself. I would skip dessert every time, because that was far easier than talking to the server, even when I’d known that server for years.

Because I was so shy, it will probably surprise most who knew me then that I was also an unbearably earnest child. It wasn’t something I ever talked about with anyone, even my closest friends. I longed to discover my purpose in life. I yearned to make a difference, to leave the world a better place than I had found it. Every night, year after year, I would offer up a silent prayer asking for my special talent to be revealed and that I be shown how to use it to do good in the world.

Looking back on it now, I realize how naïve I was. What made me think that special talents just drop into our laps? And why would anyone need one to make the world a better place? What was really holding me back was fear and a lack of confidence. What I couldn’t see then was how many gifts and privileges I already had or how much time I was wasting by not putting them to use doing the good that I could right then and there.

Many years later, as an adult with children of my own, I started writing Be a Changemaker for the adolescent I was then: someone who desperately wants to do something that matters but either doesn’t believe they can or doesn’t know where to start. At that point, I still hadn’t discovered my purpose in life and didn’t feel I had any special abilities, but I’d collected some interesting life experiences. I had grown up in a family of small business owners and entrepreneurs, I had worked at some of the biggest technology companies in the world, and I had co-founded a technology startup with my husband. I’d also volunteered for a number of nonprofit organizations in various capacities over the years. None of those roles had ever felt world-changing to me, but maybe my collective experiences could at least help someone else go out and do their good in the world. I had always enjoyed writing and been told I was pretty good at it, so putting it all into a book seemed like a natural thing to do.

In some ways, it was. I knew my audience, and I already had some knowledge of most of the content. I soon learned, however, that there is a lot more to it than that! I didn’t know anything about the publishing industry, I hadn’t read many books for young adults, and I had never written anything close to book length. I had a lot of work to do.

I went to writing conferences and took classes. I wrote. I got feedback on my work. I revised. I repeated the cycle over and over. In the end, it took me almost 10 years to go from idea to finished manuscript, but I did it. And a funny thing happened along the way . . . I found my purpose. I let it take me down many paths I had never dreamed I’d follow. I allowed myself to make mistakes and be vulnerable, expanding my comfort zone step by uncomfortable step and growing my confidence. I painstakingly nurtured a skill into what some have called a talent.

And maybe, just maybe, I have done my own good in the world.

Laurie Ann Thompson comes from a family of entrepreneurs and small business owners. She has worked at IBM, Intel and Microsoft, and she co-founded a successful internet startup. In addition, she has led a regional nonprofit professional organization and volunteered with Ashoka’s Youth Venture, which supports teens with big ideas. This is her first book. She lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest. Visit her at LaurieThompson.com.

It's no surprise that Thompson spent her teenage years in search of her own way to make a difference in the world.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

A forgotten apprentice gets his due

Behind the Book by Alix Christie

by Alix Christie

A chance discovery of an old biography at The Strand inspired journalist Alix Christie's debut novel, Gutenberg's Apprentice, which tells the story of the invention of moveable type and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. In this essay, Christie explains how her lifelong love of letterpress printing left her uniquely suited to fictionalize this remarkable true story.

I set my first line of metal type in the mid-1970s, under the watchful eye of my grandfather, who had just retired from running America's foremost hot type foundry in San Francisco. For the next 20 years or so we printed books by hand together. There's something incredibly satisfying about making something from nothing, forming letters into words, inking them and stamping them into paper. I was mainly a hobbyist, though: my interest seemed to lie more with the words themselves. My life led away from letterpress toward writing, first as a journalist and then as a writer of fiction. Still, I never really thought that this early love of printing would lead me to tackle the immense subject of its invention in medieval Germany 560 years ago.

Alix Christie and her 1910 Chandler & Price printing press

Like so many stories, Gutenberg's Apprentice began with a chance item I read in the paper: Scholars at Princeton suspected that the world's first printing types were not as sophisticated as they had thought. As an occasional practitioner of the "darkest art", I was intrigued, and squirreled this tidbit away.

A few years later, in New York's venerable used bookstore, The Strand, I stumbled across a forgotten biography of a printer named Peter Schoeffer, who had worked with Johann Gutenberg, and started looking more deeply into the history of the Gutenberg Bible. Very quickly I discovered that there was vastly more to this story than met the eye.

Printing with moveable type, the most important invention since the wheel, had not been the work of just one lone genius. It was a huge undertaking, a collaboration between the inventor, his financial backer and that little-known scribe-turned-printer, Schoeffer. Even more dramatically, this historic partnership had blown up spectacularly, ending in an acrimonious lawsuit in which Gutenberg lost his workshop.

Printing with moveable type, the most important invention since the wheel, had not been the work of just one lone genius.

This invention was an event of such importance, and what happened to those partners so compelling, that I felt it simply had to be told—not as biography or nonfiction, but as a narrative of human ingenuity and passion. I felt incredibly lucky to have the background to understand this technology, which ended the Middle Ages and ushered in the Renaissance, transforming society through mass literacy and ultimately enabling free thought and democracy.

Nobody really knows what went on in that workshop in Mainz, nor exactly how the first metal letters were forged. But I tried very hard to respect the few known facts, and the evidence of the surviving printed books, while imagining the kind of drives and motivations that might explain the tragic ending to this partnership that changed the world. Fiction grants us access to people who, though living in a different age, nonetheless felt much the same emotions as we do; it allows us to subtly investigate the reasons why people do the things they do.

From the start I felt a great affinity for Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg's apprentice, through whom we hear the tale. I saw his story as deeply moving, torn as he was between two father figures: a brilliant master and the financier who had placed him in that Bible workshop. The deeper layers of the novel came with time, as I began imagining the feelings of that young and gifted scribe as he watched his way of life destroyed by new technology. For Peter Schoeffer lived at a time much like our own: he stood on the unsettling edge beween the old ways and the radically new. Five hundred and sixty years later, we are experiencing similarly rapid and profound change. Digital technology is transforming everything we once held sacred, bringing new rhythms, relationships and ways of communicating into our lives. It's both exciting and terrifying, and leads, for me at least, to feelings of ambivalence toward these new magical devices. I hoped that Peter's story would help us to think our own way forward, balanced as he was between the wonder of the truly new and rejection of those "crude words crudely wrought" of metal type.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of this book.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Masquerading as a literary master

Behind the Book by Bradford Morrow

by Bradford Morrow

In his latest novel, Bradford Morrow exposes the dark side of the rare-book world, where literary forgers create fake letters, signatures and manuscripts by famous authors. His richly detailed mystery opens with a grisly scene: A reclusive book collector is found in his studio with his head bashed in and his hands severed. Morrow, a professor of literature at Bard College, explains why he was drawn to this shadowy subject.

The Forgers is a novel I have been unintentionally researching my entire adult life. How so? In my 20s I worked in both used and rare bookshops, even opened my own shop for a time, and have been a book collector ever since I sold off most of my inventory to launch the literary journal Conjunctions. My life has been thoroughly steeped in books. Over the years I’ve done almost everything one can do with a book, having spent time as a tradesman, binder, editor, translator, bibliographer, teacher, writer and voracious reader of books. The world in which The Forgers is set, then—a world of both secondhand bookshops and high-end antiquarian booksellers who deal in valuable first editions—is one I know well. Indeed, writing The Forgers propelled me back to every book fair I’ve ever attended over the years, whether it was in rural New Jersey, at a fairgrounds in California or the annual Antiquarian Booksellers Association fair at the Armory on Park Avenue.

This is not to suggest, however, that I have ever been a literary forger. Far from it. To be honest, I don’t have the strangely impressive array of skills necessary to the task. A master forger must, after all, excel as a calligrapher, a chemist and a con-man connoisseur. Forgers must have a deep, even scholarly, understanding of the author whose handwriting is to be mimicked if they are going to achieve the kind of perfection needed to get their handiwork past eagle-eyed experts. While I spent many months inside the head of my narrator—himself a master forger with a particular taste for manufacturing inscriptions, letters and manuscripts by Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James and W.B. Yeats, and for all his faults a protagonist for whom I have a lot of affection—I don’t find his passion for messing with history to be an altogether admirable one.

And yet literary forgers from past eras have always fascinated me, such as master deceivers William Ireland, Thomas Chatterton and Thomas J. Wise, each of whom has an interesting personal backstory. All were wildly talented, imaginative and flawed. Ireland’s father, for instance, was a Shakespeare scholar and collector, and given there are precious few verified Shakespeare autographs extant, young Will decided to create some others that would enhance his father’s collection. Emboldened, he even penned some “undiscovered” Shakespeare manuscripts and letters to Anne Hathaway and Queen Elizabeth, among others. His high-wire ruse worked nicely for quite a while, although those who venerated authenticity eventually, as they are wont to do, raised concerns. It is his and others’ gnarly paths that my narrator, also named Will, has chosen to follow.

Why forgery? And why a murder mystery in which forgery is the prime focus? At lunch last year in New York, my editor, Otto Penzler, wondered if I would write a short story for a series he publishes at his wonderful Mysterious Bookshop, called Bibliomysteries. I asked him precisely how he defined bibliomystery and he said, simply, it’s a work of fiction in which books are central and a murder takes place. Although I have long been considered a so-called “literary writer,” in recent years I’ve become deeply interested in genre fiction, a neighborhood in the city of literature that is inspiring, rigorous in its architectures and terribly inviting. In part because I consider the best genre fiction, from crime to sci-fi, horror to fantasy, to be every bit as literary as literary fiction, I said yes. I settled on forgery as my theme because I felt the travesties of other misfits—like book thieves, let’s say—offered me a bit less to explore, certainly in terms of technical sophistication.

As I began sketching ideas, writing some pages in search of the right voice, I realized that my forgers would be functioning in the netherlands of the community I knew so well. With that realization, I felt immediately at home.

The next question to address was, what is the most serious deprivation a forger could suffer? Of course he needs his vintage pens and papers, his custom-mixed inks, first editions in which to create inscriptions from long-dead authors, perhaps to other long-dead authors or hitherto unsuspected lovers. Take those away, you interfere with his illicit, to him beautiful, art. But to take away his hands? You terminate it forever. So when I settled on my first line—“They never found his hands”—I was fully underway.

The thing about writing The Forgers is that the further I got into it, the more I understood I needed a larger canvas than that of a short story to explore the lives of these dark, compelling people. That short story commission turned within a matter of months into a novel, and the novel eventually explored far more than murder and rare books. Indeed, much of The Forgers is a love story complicated by death and deception, but also suffused with bibliophilia, a shared love of books. It’s a novel about secrecy, about faith and the fragile nature of redemption. It is also about the very nature of truth, the curious plasticity of reality and how history itself may be radically altered with the stroke of a pen.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Behind the Book: One author’s answered prayer

Behind the Book by Karen Trotter Elley

by Karen Trotter Elley

My nonfiction story, “The Messenger,” is one of 101 miraculous stories of faith, divine intervention and answered prayers selected from thousands of submissions to be included in the Chicken Soup for the Soul: Touched by an Angel book. Now, that’s a miracle! But it almost didn’t happen because I almost didn’t send my story in.

One might suspect a lack of faith, but my reluctance was born more of a deep desire to avoid yet another rejection. Writers never get used to their work being turned down no matter what positive spin we put on it. Publisher rejections are kind of like getting a speeding ticket. You never quite feel as if you deserve it, but they give it to you anyway and there’s nothing you can do about it.

After I put the finishing touches on “The Messenger,” I pressed the send button and breathed a prayer, asking that my story be well received.

I recall attending a Book and Author Dinner several years ago where I was seated at a table with seven other writers. During the lively conversation that ensued, the topic of rejections came up. Emboldened by a couple of glasses of wine, we decided to conduct a contest to see who had received the worst rejection letter. One guy won hands down with a letter stating, “This rejection is for this manuscript and anything else you may ever write.” Ouch!

I simply didn’t want to go there. Then a friend intervened in the form of a forwarded email containing a Chicken Soup for the Soul request for submissions, a communication I chose to ignore. While still stalled in a state of rejection avoidance, I received another message from a different friend, referring to the Touched by an Angel call for submissions, saying virtually the same thing as my other friend, “Karen, this sounds like you.” It seemed to be a sign. I threw up my hands in surrender. After all, I reminded myself, the Chicken Soup for the Soul books initially struggled to see the light of day, repeatedly rejected by publishers a grand total of 140 times.

In the end, the lure of being a published author and sharing my own angel experience won out over any lingering doubts. After I put the finishing touches on “The Messenger,” I pressed the send button and breathed a prayer, asking that my story be well received.

My friends’ persistence, (or was it my prayer?) paid off and my story made it through to the final round. In mid-September, I held the finished product in my hands—Chicken Soup for the Soul: Touched by an Angel had become a reality—a dream realized.

Up until this point, the process had been all about me, about my story and my acceptance; but on that day, as I opened the book for the first time and leafed through the pages, something shifted within me. Suddenly, I felt a connection and kinship with all the other writers and their miraculous stories, and I had a strong inner-knowing that this book is going to make a profound difference in our collective spiritual lives and those of our readers. I’m grateful to be a contributor to the book and for the guidance I received from my messenger.

Prepare to be awed and inspired by 101 stories from people who have been touched by an angel, including these:

• John and Mary prayed for a highway angel when their motor coach broke down in an isolated area in the desert with no cell phone reception. Their prayers were answered in an unusual way.

• Kimberly’s grandmother and a mysterious adviser acted as her guardian angels, shielding her from harm and unwise decisions.

• A drowning boy rises from the pool with his arm held aloft and his hand clasped around the invisible hand that pulled him up through the water.

• When Linda was in the hospital in unbearable pain, a lady stayed with her, doing all she could to help despite the fact that she shouldn’t have been there in the first place and no one else saw her.

• Catherine’s parents, her doctor and the hospital tried to find the man who showed up on her doorstep one blustery night to save her life. They never found him.

• When a van made a left turn directly in front of Jan’s car, divine intervention was the only explanation for her survival.

In each angelic encounter, the message of hope, peace and love is the common thread binding our hearts and souls as one and reminding us to, “Be calm. Don’t worry; everything is going to be all right. Remember that you’re not alone.”

I know that the encouraging, prophetic words I received from a stranger in Jesup, Georgia in 1988 were not just for me, but for everyone—for now, for always, in all ways—“You are in good hands.”

Karen Trotter Elley is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in newspapers and magazines, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, the Tennessean and the Toledo Blade. For more than 12 years, she was on the staff of BookPage as a production designer and writer. Karen lives in Nashville with her husband Michael. Chicken Soup for the Soul: Touched by an Angel is her first book contribution.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

All the voices we’ll never hear

Behind the Book by Scott Blackwood

by Scott Blackwood

The 1991 murder of four teenage girls that inspired my novel, See How Small, has haunted me for 23 years. It struck a deep chord in anyone who lived in Austin, Texas, then—one that reverberates even now.

I was teaching high school in Austin at the time, and my eldest daughter had been born only a few months earlier, so the sudden loss of these girls—Sarah and Jennifer Harbison, Amy Ayers and Eliza Thomas—hit particularly close to home. They were in a very real sense, the “every girls” of the community: They were loved by their parents, belonged to Future Farmers of America, danced the two-step, dated awkward boys, attended midnight movies, had sleepovers and looked out for one another.

Then one evening the unimaginable happened: They were bound, raped, shot and then burned in a fire set to cover up the crime.

Eight years went by as the investigation was plagued by false confessions and false leads. Then, in 1999, a newly launched investigation engulfed four young men who were boys at the time of the murders, roughly the same ages as the girls. After hours of interrogation, two of the men confessed. They soon recanted, but were later convicted and sent to prison for a decade based solely on the confessions.

Still, the parents of the girls must have thought—after enduring the horrific details of the trial—that finally there was a resolution, there was justice, even if at a great price to them personally. Now they could try to move on with their lives.

And then in the summer of 2009, shortly after I began See How Small, both men were released because forensics investigators—using more advanced DNA identification methods—found DNA evidence of two previously unknown male assailants. In short, the two men who confessed couldn’t have been the perpetrators.

So what did this all mean? Investigators and the prosecution had told the same story to the girls’ parents for a decade. The parents reacted as anyone would who’d shaped the arc of their lives around it: They refused to believe the new evidence. The original story of a robbery gone wrong—compelling in its detail if somewhat implausible—had become the parents’ reality, a way for them to make meaning out of atrocity.

See How Small is my attempt to make emotional sense out of inexplicable events by channeling all the voices we’ll never hear.

And what of the girls? Weren’t they more than victims? What about their stories? And what of the incarcerated men (whose boyhoods were now long past) and their families? It had dramatically shaped their lives as well. The murders—known since as the “yogurt shop murders” because of where they took place—remain unsolved. The case is a Texas In Cold Blood of sorts, a challenge to our basic ideas of justice, responsibility, grief, love and even the shape of the stories we tell to make sense of it. The ache in this story stays with you. See How Small is my attempt to make emotional sense out of inexplicable events by channeling all the voices we’ll never hear.

Another inspiration for See How Small was very personal. One day, soon after I began writing the novel, my wife called me at my downtown Chicago office, saying our then 6-year-old daughter had gone missing from school. The police were called, the school grounds searched, the neighborhood canvassed, a helicopter hovered overhead.

While racing home in a cab, I called everyone I knew. Horrific images rose in my mind. Nearby Lake Michigan took on new connotations. Alleyways seemed ominous. Every passerby suspect. How could we have been so oblivious to the dangers?

Eventually, nearly an hour after the first call, my wife called to tell me they’d found her. She’d created a play date with a friend, somehow evaded the school staff and walked three quarters of a mile to a friend’s house. She was safe. But the veil had been lifted, everyday life revealed to be potentially treacherous and wondrous at the same time.

The title See How Small is taken from the voice of the dead girls in the novel, who say, “See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?” This is the central theme of the book: Though its characters are separated by suffering and loss, by the ephemeral, random nature of the world, they can make an eternal human shape out of it, can tell their own stories—full of joys and sufferings—that connect them with each another, and with each of us.

In the end, it’s about transcending loss through accepting loss— embracing all of human experience, and being transfigured by it.

A longtime resident of Austin, Texas, author Scott Blackwood now lives in Chicago and teaches writing at Southern Illinois University. He has won awards for his previous work, which includes the novel We Agreed to Meet Just Here and a two-volume history of Paramount Records.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of See How Small.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

All Behind the Book essays

An unsettling contagion exposes dark fears