Behind the Book Archives

At the intersection of darkness and grace

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

I’ve heard it said that the opposite of faith is certainty, not doubt. My debut novel, Conviction, grew from the many questions I wrestled with as I came to terms with a world that couldn’t be neatly defined in the way I once thought I believed.

I grew up in the era of youth convention altar calls to prove you were willing to take a stand for God and (hideous) Bible-y T-shirts you were supposed to bravely wear to show you weren’t ashamed of Christ. I’ve always been naturally inclined towards anxiety, and the fear of being rejected by God haunted me. And so back then it felt very easy to winnow people, myself included, into tidy, black-and-white categories: who was good and right and true, who was—and wasn’t—on the side of God. It was a coping mechanism, really—there was a seduction and a comfort in hoping that if I always aligned myself to the right side, I could flatten the world, with all its ragged complexities, into a safe, knowable thing. I could be secure.

I found myself recalling that old longing later, in my adult life, when I watched the country sharply divide itself after several high-profile killings that amplified deep ideological tensions. After Oscar Grant, after Trayvon Martin, I watched people cling violently to worldviews in which they and those like them were unimpeachably right; I watched them work to justify the unjustifiable and I watched them strip away the victims’ humanity piece by piece. And I thought about where I might’ve ended up if I’d never let myself question, where that leads. I started to work with the complicated, difficult characters of Conviction, for whom belief is a matter of survival, and I thought—maybe that leads you to a foggy stretch of highway where there’s no one to witness what happened but you. Maybe it leads you, finally, to an impossible, unthinkable choice.

In Conviction, 16-year-old Braden Raynor must confront everything he held true when his father, an evangelical radio personality, is accused of murder in the hit-and-run death of a Hispanic police officer. I wrote Conviction to explore the ways people endure their own transgressions, how they hide from themselves or look for redemption, and whether they find it. I wrote it to explore the intersection of darkness and grace.

And I wanted to write about other things close to my heart, too, so Conviction is also about fractured families, adoption, rural California; it’s about a terrifyingly flawed and human justice system and cultural and racial schisms in the United States. It’s about baseball, which is Braden’s moral compass and the place he goes to find himself when everything else around him goes to hell.

But at its core Conviction is about a struggle that, to me, still feels complicated and difficult and utterly necessary: how to live in a world where sometimes there’s no right answer, and who you are when nothing is what you’ve always believed.

Kelly Loy Gilbert's debut novel, Conviction, explores questions of faith and family through the nuanced story of Braden, a star pitcher whose world is turned upside down when his father is accused of murder. Gilbert shares her own relationship with religion and belief, her attempts to "flatten the world" and the complexities of her powerful novel.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Edison-Tesla bad blood in new mystery

Behind the Book by Lawrence H. Levy

by Lawrence H. Levy

Lawrence H. Levy's debut mystery takes readers to the late 19th century, where we meet Brooklyn's first woman detective, Mary Handley. She's investigating a murder with ties to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, whose famous feud is even darker than you'd expect.

My debut novel, Second Street Station, takes place in the late 19th century and centers around Mary Handley, a real person who was asked by the Brooklyn police department, when there were no policewomen, to help sleuth a high-profile murder. I crafted Mary into an extremely bright, ambitious yet sensitive woman who wants to fulfill her dream of being a detective and to also prove that a woman can do a man’s job. She constantly does battle with the “powers that be” and has to deal with adversity from every direction. Mary is a wonderful protagonist but, oddly enough, she wasn’t the original inspiration to write my book.

Years ago, I was helping my son with a term paper when I came across the Edison/Tesla feud over the electricity market in the late 19th century. At that time, Edison was and today continues to be an American icon, praised for his brilliant scientific contributions to society, where Tesla is just now becoming recognized for the genius that he was. Edison’s current was DC and Tesla’s was AC, which is still our standard and clearly the superior product. However, whether it was for purposes of ego or just pure greed (probably both), Edison wouldn’t admit this simple fact and went to great lengths to discredit Tesla’s AC. He commissioned Tom Brown to invent the electric chair with AC current and arranged public demonstrations where he cruelly executed animals to prove that AC was good to kill things but not safe for the home. He was able to delay the inevitable dominance of AC current until the early 20th century and made a lot of money doing it. When he died in 1931, he was a very wealthy man.

As I studied more about the two scientists, Edison quickly grew feet of clay. Though he is hailed as the “Father of Invention” and had over a thousand patents to his name when he died, only a fraction of those inventions were actually his own. He had talented scientists working for him and simply put his name on their work when he thought it had some merit. He was also known to have “borrowed” other scientists’ work. At best, Edison was a good scientist, a fabulous businessman and a very savvy promoter. At worst, he was an egocentric megalomaniac, a thief and possibly more. The truth is probably somewhere in between the two, but there is evidence, even in the notes that he left behind in his own handwriting, that he had a much darker side.

Though Tesla was a brilliant scientist, he had little acumen for business, had a combustible temper and was considered eccentric. His passion for his projects and his gullibility led him to make the wrong business decisions. George Westinghouse backed Tesla’s AC current, and when Westinghouse pleaded poverty to him, Tesla ceded his interest in AC, thus giving up millions of future dollars. His “Tesla coil” revolutionized modern communications, his research led to the invention of x-rays, and though Marconi, who was backed by Edison, was given credit for inventing the radio, it was really Tesla’s invention. Though a court decision in the 1940s confirmed this fact, schools today are still teaching students that it was Marconi. Thus was the course of Tesla’s life. As his frustrations mounted, his behavior became increasingly bizarre. He wound up dying penniless in a New York hotel room in 1943, claiming he could talk to pigeons.

Edison and Tesla shared a lifetime personal and professional enmity, which prevented them both from receiving the Nobel Price when they refused to share it with one another. I found these two men’s lives and fates to be fascinating, and they do encompass a significant part of Second Street Station. However, I decided it would be interesting to tell their story in the context of a real murder that occurred at that time. Once I found Mary Handley, I fell in love with her, and I think others will, too.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Truth in Cambodian minefields

Behind the Book by K.T. Medina

by K.T. Medina

Drawing on years of experience in the British armed forces, debut author K.T. Medina delivers a striking thriller that bores into the dark heart of postwar Cambodia, fraught with poverty and superstition. Her heroine descends into the killing fields in search of her husband’s killer—but as Medina reveals in the essay below, evil goes much deeper than murder.

To my parents’ dismay, I was not a normal girl. I dressed in army fatigues, sported a crew cut and used to line my teddy bears up at either end of the lounge and send them into battle. My favorite game was to traverse blocks purely by climbing over fences, cutting through people’s gardens, sneaking through their open back doors and slipping out the front, unnoticed. My mother and father despaired, entirely nonplussed. However, my interest in all things military probably developed from the hours I spent hiding behind the sofa, when I was supposed to be asleep, watching such World War II classics as The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen through my father’s legs.

When I went to university to study psychology, it felt like a natural progression to join the Territorial Army, where I spent time both in the Infantry and in the Royal Engineers, rising to Troop Commander. On leaving university, I joined Jane’s Information Group, the world’s leading publisher of defense intelligence information. It was whilst working at Jane’s, responsible for land-based weapons, that I was inspired to write my debut thriller, White Crocodile. As part of that role, I spent a few weeks in the minefields of northern Cambodia, working alongside professional mine clearers from two clearance charities, Cambodian Mine Action Centre and Mines Advisory Group. I was privileged to get to know both Western and Khmer mine clearers and to spend time talking with Khmers who had lost limbs to land mines. I also visited many of the locations that appear in White Crocodile, including the great swathes of minefields that dominate the region and the Red Cross Hospital for the victims of land mines, where the novel’s fictional Dr Ung saves lives and rehabilitates. There are huge numbers of amputees in Cambodia, including very young children who, in many cases, thought that the anti-personnel mine they found was a toy.

"I wanted to use the power of fiction to take readers on an unforgettable journey to this dark and disturbing place."

Cambodia is a visually beautiful country of emerald green paddy fields and ochre earth; the people are friendly and the majority kind; but its traumatic history, including five years of mass genocide under the Khmer Rouge, depicted in the famous film The Killing Fields, casts an indelible shadow. Cambodia is still incredibly poor and the government corrupt, building presidential palaces and grand government buildings while the majority of the population live in unimaginable deprivation and hardship. There is no social security, and unless people make a living for themselves and their families, they quite literally starve. The presence of six million land mines, buried mainly in the northwest region around Battambang where White Crocodile is set, makes the job of survival even harder.

Off the tourist trail, Cambodia is a heartbreaking place to visit that left a huge and lasting impression on me. On coming home, back to England and the privileges that I enjoy here in the West, I felt very strongly that I wanted to use the power of fiction to take readers on an unforgettable journey to this dark and disturbing place—a journey that would have them wanting to read, without pause, until the very last page.

White Crocodile is also a story about families: love and hatred; kindness and cruelty; the destructive nature of some families and the long-term damage these families can cause. As part of my degree in psychology, I studied the effect of poor family dynamics and abuse on children. The fear and helplessness a child trapped in a severely dysfunctional family feels must be all-consuming, and for me was a very powerful emotion to explore in a novel, as was its flip side, intense love and an overwhelming desire to protect.

I am drawn to people who have a different psychology from my own, whether in terms of mass cultural beliefs, such as in Cambodia where the white crocodile signifies death, or with individuals who, perhaps because of their upbringing or life experiences, display an abnormal psychology. The heroine of White Crocodile is Tess Hardy, an ex-British Army combat engineer and mine clearer who, against her better judgment, travels to Cambodia to discover the truth behind the death of her violent husband Luke. However, whilst Tess is strong, clever and independent, she is also a complex character who has her own very personal demons to deal with.

I have always loved to read and write, and much of my childhood was spent immersed in stories. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series was one of my early favorites, and in common with many other tomboys, I wanted to be George. I am still an avid crime and thriller reader, and I particularly like novels that bring more to me than just a great story. Novels that stay with me long after the last page are those such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, novels that explore real-life trauma through the medium of story and unforgettable characters, and that was my aim with White Crocodile.

K.T. Medina lives in London with her husband and three children.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of White Crocodile.

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

Life after foster care

Behind the Book by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

by Ashley Rhodes-Courter

Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent most of her childhood in 14 different foster homes, a heartbreaking saga she documented in her inspiring memoir, Three Little Words. But for survivors of trauma, the work doesn't stop with a happy ending, and Rhodes-Courter continues her story with Three More Words, her new memoir about life after foster care.

I never imagined that, while still in my 20s, I would be publishing my second memoir. My first book, Three Little Words, was a New York Times and international bestseller that chronicled my nearly 10 years growing up in the foster care system where I lived in 14 different placements—many of them very abusive. I’m excited to say the book is now being made into a major motion picture!

Today, I have a Master’s Degree in Social Work and spend my professional and personal life helping other young people and working to better the child welfare system. My husband, Erick, and I also became foster parents and have cared for more than 20 children. I was inspired to write my second book, Three More Words, because readers had so many unanswered questions from my first book: What happened to my brother? Am I still in touch with my biological mother? Am I close to my adoptive family? Were you ever able to have a “normal” adulthood and relationships? People also assume that things in “the system” have gotten so much better since I was in foster care. However, the stories we encountered and situations we experienced as foster parents were shocking and tell a very different tale.

Three More Words expands on my life beyond the foster care system. I share the joys and heartbreak I have experienced with the family I’ve created, and I openly discuss the efforts I’ve had to make to find peace with my past. In the first half of the book, I navigate the peer pressures of college, juggle relationships with my biological and adopted families, and I meet my now-husband. The second half brings my life and purpose full-circle, highlighting the incredibly powerful—and sometimes painful—stories of some of our foster kids. This February, we learned that one of our daughters, Jenica Randazzo (named “Millie” in Three More Words), age 9, was returned to relatives she had been removed from. She was brutally murdered by her mentally ill uncle living in the home.

My husband and I spoke up when we heard the news, and we were retaliated against by the very system that was supposed to protect me as a child and keep Jenica/Millie from this outcome. We refuse to stay silent because she, and thousands of abused and neglected children in our country, deserve justice. In the first six months of 2015, there have been more than 240 child deaths reported in the state of Florida alone. Many of them were under preventable circumstances.

With Three More Words I hope to inspire young people experiencing adversity or challenging times, and I also want my books to be a call to action. I had a few key teachers, volunteers and eventually a family that gave me incredible stability and opportunities. It is my wish that all young people know such love, dedication and happiness.

Ashley Rhodes-Courter spent most of her childhood in 14 different foster homes, a heartbreaking saga she documented in her inspiring memoir, Three Little Words. But for survivors of trauma, the work doesn't stop with a happy ending, and Rhodes-Courter continues her story with Three More Words, her new memoir about life after foster care.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Debut Fiction

From the dark side of the moon

Behind the Book by Benjamin Johncock

by Benjamin Johncock

As a novelist, I’ve come to realize that the stories I feel compelled to write, the ones that tug at me hardest, have resonated from my childhood. Childhood experience echoes through adult life. The experiences, ideas, themes from my formative years resonate into my adult consciousness and I try to make sense of them through fiction. You see, you don’t choose the story, it chooses you.

When I was about 3 years old, my father would read to me from a book he had about the Apollo missions. It was called Moon Flight Atlas, and it was by Patrick Moore. It was published in 1970 and only went up to the Apollo 13 mission. That mission, dramatized in the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film of the same name, was the focus of this book. I don’t know why my father read this book to me—it wasn’t exactly Goodnight Moon—but he did. He told the story of the oxygen tank exploding on the way to the moon, and explained how little air they had remaining, and what that meant, and about how they had to slingshot round the dark side of the moon to get home, about how there was only a 10 percent chance of them making it back to Earth.

I was utterly captivated, but it wasn’t space per se that fascinated me so—it wasn’t the rockets and spaceships and stars—it was the men. Those men! Lovell, Swigert, Haise! Laconic, focused and utterly cool under pressure. I remember poring over diagrams and little illustrations of Jim Lovell crawling from the Command Module into the Lunar Module (which was used as a lifeboat of sorts) in grave danger, hundreds of thousands of miles from home, staying calm, working the problem. I was a sensitive child, prone to anxiety, and it hooked my young imagination.

In my mid-20s, I developed a severe and debilitating anxiety disorder, with obsessive and intrusive thoughts. It was a hellish few years. I couldn’t even write a shopping list (really: I tried). I could barely function as a human being. But as I started to get better, with help and support and therapy, I started to write again. And I found myself, perhaps unsurprisingly, returning to those men, those childhood heroes of mine—men who could control their emotions (unlike me!), so calm and collected under pressure (unlike me!) and pushing them into fiction—a story which became The Last Pilot.

From the blackest period of my life, I sailed around the dark side of the moon, and I, too, returned home.

British author Benjamin Johncock's debut novel, The Last Pilot, blends fact and fiction in the story of an Air Force test pilot who suffers a devastating loss and throws himself into NASA's fledgling space program at the expense of his marriage. Johncock lives with his family in Norwich, England.

A British author shares the story behind his lifelong fascination with the American space program, the subject of his emotionally resonant debut novel.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Finding your way in a world that’s not your own

Behind the Book by Jennine Capó Crucet

by Jennine Capó Crucet

It’s hard for me to explain this, but Make Your Home Among Strangers came to me almost fully formed one afternoon in March of 2010. I was sitting in a meeting as part of my then-job. Like a lot of unreasonably optimistic people, I gave the brightest years of my 20s to a nonprofit—an LA-based organization called One Voice, where I served as a counselor/mentor to first-generation college kids.

The students we worked with were from low-income families, were about to be the first in their families to go to college, and were also bright as hell.

About halfway through our group meeting, one girl—one tough, brilliant young woman who is very dear to my heart because of how much our lives have in common—started crying and saying she wasn’t really smart enough to go to the ridiculously selective and awesome college that had accepted her. And then, as she went on about her fears and her sense that she was destined to fail, that she should go somewhere “more at her level” for college if she even went at all, the other kids in the circle started nodding their heads and saying that they felt the exact same way.

I was immediately thrown back 10 years to myself at 18, having the exact same fears, and I lost it. All that dark horribleness, that sense of internalized oppression, rose up out of me—I had to excuse myself from the meeting, and I spent maybe 10 minutes pulling myself together in the bathroom of my boss’ house.

It was there that the narrator’s voice came to me—urgent and clear—as I sat on the closed lid of my boss’ toilet, and it was there that I literally started writing this book, in a small notebook I kept in my bag, which I’d had the foresight to drag into the bathroom with me.

Humble beginnings, yeah, but that voice—that of Lizet, the novel’s protagonist—found me every day, yelled at me when I wasn’t working hard enough, pushed me to write and to tell her story. It was a blessing and a curse, actually: to have a book’s narrator make those kinds of demands of you.

Many elements of the novel never changed from how they came to me that day in the meeting: The book is set in both Miami and New York in 1999-2000, around the time the Elian Gonzalez immigration ordeal was unfolding. Like me and like the students I worked with, Lizet is the first in her family to go to college—she’s the first in her family to graduate from high school, too—and she’s struggling enough on campus as it is when her first year gets abruptly politicized both at school and at home.

Along with the political drama Lizet works to navigate, I imagined the book to be this fictional road map of the first-generation college student’s experience, one that shows some of the ugly things race and class differences force on us. I didn’t know it at the time, but on the day I earned my B.A., I’d become part of a surprisingly small percentage of minority students from low-income families admitted to college in the first place to do so—most of us first-gen kids from that demographic drop out, so the graduation rate hovers at a little over 20 percent. Statistically speaking, I should’ve slipped through the cracks in college. I probably shouldn’t have made it to graduation day.

And I would’ve left that campus, I think, had it not been for the fact that I joined a sketch comedy group halfway through freshman year, and the friends I made there are still the best I have. (Something I told my One Voice students over and over again: Join a club based on some interest you’ve always had but that your high school didn’t provide.)

I also constantly hung out in the office of the professor who would become my mentor via her very existence—the writer Helena Maria Viramontes, the only Latina teaching in the creative writing program at the time—and seeing her on that campus made me feel like maybe I could stick around, too. Professor Viramontes gave me books and introduced me to writers she knew I needed to read, and so it makes sense that, years later, I would write the book I’d needed to feel less alone and afraid, a book that speaks to anyone looking to navigate the unknown—a book, it turns out, that I didn’t have much choice but to write.

Miami-born author Jennine Capó Crucet won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize for her story collection, How to Leave Hialeah. Both a compelling cultural critique and a fulfilling coming-of-age story, her debut novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, follows Lizet Ramirez as she tries to make her way in a world that’s very different from the one she was born into. Crucet currently teaches English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

Adventures on a blueberry farm

Behind the Book by Sara Nickerson

by Sara Nickerson

Sara Nickerson's new middle grade novel is full of summery secrets, but the inspiration behind The Secrets of Blueberries, Brothers, Moose & Me is an open book. Nickerson takes us to the blueberry-picking days of her childhood.

When I was a kid I wanted to live inside books. I wanted to test myself, face hardships, survive fever 'n' ague. I read Heidi with bread and cheese in my hand. It was regular sliced bread and Thriftway cheddar, but when I ate it, I felt surrounded by mountain air and sunshine. After reading My Side of the Mountain, I mapped my solo escape to the wilderness and spent hours working to trap small animals with a cardboard box and string. To this day I can’t read Farmer Boy without gaining five pounds.

Around that same time, the time of living inside books, I got my first job. My older brother, wanting better school clothes, came up with the idea to pick blueberries. My younger brother and I, obsessed with the awesome things you could order from the backs of comic books, begged to come along. Our mother, busy with two baby brothers, was not hard to convince. We were living in Olympia, Washington, and the blueberry farm was miles past town. Like the farm in my novel, there were feuding farmer brothers, one on either side of a giant hedge. On that first day we were warned: Never go on the other side. I felt the thrill of a real-life adventure.

"Most of all, we treasured the blueberry field because it belonged to us. We weren’t at day camp or a playground or even in the woods behind our house. We’d moved past the boundary of our mother’s voice."

There were other kids in the field, of course, but also grown-ups. We were out there together, sharing an outhouse, and not the modern kind with hand sanitizer. There was mystery in the blueberry field, and romance. There was a girl who would stick a blueberry in her belly button and do the hula. This job, picking blueberries, was a hot and sweaty torture. My brothers and I hated it, we loved it, we were obsessed by the money of it and made lists of the things we would buy, like colonies of Sea Monkeys and giant inflatable beer bottles. Most of all, we treasured the blueberry field because it belonged to us. We weren’t at day camp or a playground or even in the woods behind our house. We’d moved past the boundary of our mother’s voice. Finally, finally, I had stepped into the pages of my very own book.

The Secrets of Blueberries, Brothers, Moose & Me takes place during that summer when everything changes. Twelve-year-old Missy and her older brother Patrick are on their own, making painful mistakes and amazing discoveries. It’s not the story my brothers are expecting to see. They probably won’t recognize my main characters. They’ll miss the dirt clod fights and the old lady named Bernice, who sat on an overturned bucket and couldn’t stop talking, even when no one was around. They’ll miss the dirty jokes, the ones I couldn’t understand but made a point to memorize for the day that I could. They’ll miss the groups of migrant families, who did this work for real.

What my brothers will recognize is the feeling we had out there. We were part of the big wide world. I remember walking into a grocery store a week after I’d started the picking job. I stood in the produce aisle and thought: This is food. It doesn’t just come from a store. I know where it comes from.

For the kids who live inside books, I hope this one will make them want to go outside and look at dirt, even if it’s between the cracks in the sidewalk. Follow an ant’s crazy path, or try to tell time from the sun. Hold an apple or a blueberry or a peach, even one from a can, and wonder where it came from—where it really came from. And maybe feel a new connection to their very own big wide world.

Author photo credit Ingrid Pape.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Tour guide’s chance remarks inspire a sweeping debut novel

Behind the Book by Alexandra Curry

by Alexandra Curry

For me, the story of Sai Jinhua begins on a summery day in Shanghai. It is the final day of a trip I very much fear will be the last one that I and my husband will take with our two sons, both of whom are poised to leave on journeys that are suddenly, although hardly unexpectedly, becoming their own next chapters.

We are in China—and not in India, Vietnam or Peru, all of which were discussed as alternative destinations. China is my trip, mostly. I’ve lived in Singapore and Taiwan; I’ve studied Mandarin. I’ve always wanted to go to the mainland. The men in my life agreed to indulge me.

On this final day, we are in Shanghai’s Yu Garden overlooking the famous Jiu Qu Bridge that—with its nine zigzag turns—was built to confuse evil spirits trying to cross the lotus pool. I overhear a tour guide talking—talking—talking, and he is a droning irritant until he mentions the 19th-century Chinese courtesan who traveled to Europe as the young concubine-wife of one of China’s first diplomats. I am suddenly interested. He says that she is very famous in China. I know nothing more than this about the person I will come to call “my girl.” I don’t catch her name, or know that she may have been a Chinese heroine in a distant past when China and the West were clumsily, violently getting acquainted—or that some people say she was a traitor, a woman of ill-repute and loose morals who collaborated with the forces of imperialist western invaders.

"What was it like in 1887 for a young woman to leave her home in China and go to a Europe that was strange and disorienting and fabulous?"

Standing there at the edge of the Jiu Qu Bridge and knowing almost nothing about Sai Jinhua, memory leads me to a time and place in my own life when I traveled to the far side of the world, to Singapore, which was and still is a fascinating, multicultural place, a place that is exotic and loud and pungent and delicious—and was also hugely alienating to a young girl from the West. I remember watching life unfold in the streets of Singapore, and in the markets, and in sights, sounds and smells that seeped through the open windows of colonial-era buildings. I remember people everywhere—all with faces not like mine.

Now, all these years later as I hear for the first time about this famous Chinese courtesan, I wonder, what was it like in 1887 for a young woman to leave her home in China and go to a Europe that was strange and disorienting and fabulous—where people all had faces not like hers? So I say to my one-in-a-million husband, if I were going to write a book—which of course I am not because it just is not something I would ever do—this would be the story I would like to tell. And right there by the Jiu Qu Bridge, he turns to me and says, well, why not? Why don’t you try?

These are the first of many improbable things that conspire to turn a tour guide’s fleeting remarks into a novel called The Courtesan. Returning home, I begin to work at learning to write, and to read everything I can find about Jinhua and her era. Chance throws many happy opportunities my way. I join a writer’s group with people who are both talented and supportive of my story. My eldest son moves to Suzhou, China, where I visit him and find, quite by accident, the very house at Number 29 Xuan Qiao Alley, where Sai Jinhua lived with her scholar-diplomat husband. Reading the “bones” of her true story, I find more places in my own story that fit together with hers in fictional ways that are magical to me. For her European odyssey, I decide to place Jinhua and her husband in Vienna, a city where I have spent much time and where I have strong family ties. Researching places for them to live, my mother suggests the Palais Kinsky. It is a place I know well; I studied there for a year—and met my husband there. I later learn that during the early 20th century, the Chinese embassy was actually located in the Kinsky for a number of years.

History drops other tidbits into my lap. Fabulous, true-to-life characters who populated the places Jinhua inhabits in my novel, who might have met her, who have amazing stories of their own: the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who with her fascination for beautiful women would have adored meeting a beautiful, exotic creature from China; Edmund Backhouse, a true eccentric, a brilliant man with profound flaws and more than a touch of evil genius—who lurked in Peking at the time of the Boxer Rebellion and could have been acquainted with Jinhua; Kobelkoff, a man who had enormous physical challenges, who was put on display in Vienna’s Prater for people’s amusement (a common form of popular entertainment at the time)—who clicked perfectly into place as a reminder of Jinhua’s fictional dead father.

Slowly, gradually, Jinhua became a person I knew. She became a person with flaws and vulnerabilities and strengths—and very human relationships. At the same time, the history of her era was fascinating to me, both in its own right and as a context for our modern era. I hope that I have in some small way managed to co-mingle the historically real with what I have imagined and what I myself have experienced in a way that will give readers of The Courtesan a sense of what it was for Sai Jinhua to travel from East to West and back again, and a sense, too, through her eyes, of China’s history with the West.

Born in Canada, Alexandra Curry has lived in the United States, Europe and Asia, and her globetrotting days contribute depth to the various settings depicted in The Courtesan, her debut novel. A graduate of Wellesley College, she now lives in Atlanta with her family.

Picture Book

Picture Book

The value of a good friend

Behind the Book by David Soman & Jacky Davis

by David Soman, Jacky Davis

The best-selling husband and wife team of David Soman and Jacky Davis share a peek behind the scenes of the eighth book in their beloved Ladybug Girl series, Ladybug Girl and the Best Ever Playdate.

You would think, with all the things young kids have to learn in life—putting on jackets, brushing their teeth, not jumping on the dog—something like having a friend would be the easy part. But that isn’t always the case.

Exploring the theme of friendship takes a writer and illustrator through all manner of emotional terrain. The loveliness of a good friend makes one feel understood and appreciated, and with a friendship being one of the very most wonderful aspects of life, it can be very disconcerting if a friendship goes awry.

In Ladybug Girl and the Best Ever Playdate, we looked at Lulu, aka Ladybug Girl, and Finney as they navigate a playdate that doesn’t go well. We knew we needed something that would act as the catalyst for Lulu and Finney’s difficulties. Thinking back on our children’s early playdates, it wasn’t hard to remember how important toys were to them, and what a central role toys played in their social lives. We all remember that feeling of wanting a toy so badly, and the strange mix of feelings we could get if one of our friends had the very toy we wanted. So all we had to do was invent a toy that would, well, quite simply, be the best toy ever. As that is a tall order, we let our daughter make a list of things she would want in a toy, and the Rolly-Roo was born.

In doing the illustrations, the challenge was to find a way to show how Lulu and Finney were not having a bad time, but not really connecting either, and to have that contrast with the fun they have when they really start to engage with each other.

The trouble begins when Ladybug Girl’s focus on the toy gets in the way of playing with Finny.

But when the Rolly breaks and the girls are able to fix it . . . they really start having fun!

Ultimately we wanted to show that the best things in life aren’t things, and that being creative with a friend, even with the inevitable bumps along the way, can provide an opportunity to work things out and to make a friendship stronger and more vibrant.

Sex and dating for teens with developmental disabilities

Behind the Book by Cammie McGovern

by Cammie McGovern

Cammie McGovern's debut YA novel, Say What You Will, told the honest and heartbreaking love story of a girl with cerebral palsy and a boy with obsessive-compulsive disorder. With her new novel, A Step Toward Falling, McGovern once again drives straight to readers' hearts with a tale that alternates between the voices of classmates Emily and Belinda. During a high school football game, Emily witnesses an attack on Belinda, who has developmental disabilities, but doesn't report the incident, and neither does fellow witness and football player Lucas. Both Emily and Lucas are sent to do community service at the Lifelong Learning Center for young adults with developmental disabilities, where they find opportunities to grow beyond their preconceptions.

In a Behind the Book essay, McGovern shares the inspiration behind this unforgettable story.

The idea for A Step Toward Falling really began when Ethan, my 18-year-old son with autism, came home from school and announced that he wanted to ask Alexandra, a friend in his Life Skills class, to the “Best Buddies Prom.” It was a thrilling moment—a giant first that, truthfully, his dad and I never expected. Ethan, who’d never talked about girls before, was interested enough in one to put on a suit and uncomfortable shoes and take her somewhere? It’s a breakthrough! we thought, and then we began to wonder: Was it really? Was it even fair to encourage Ethan—with all his limitations and the frustration born of those limitations—to start a relationship with a girl who was hardly ready to handle one of his meltdowns? Can young adults with cognitive disabilities handle the complicated, messy morass of real dating?

Around the same time, Whole Children/Milestones, a recreation center for children with disabilities that I helped start, began offering a class called “Boundaries and Relationships” for young adults. The idea was to address the very question I was now facing with Ethan—teach students with cognitive impairment about developing healthy relationships and sexuality. Even as a parent who has emphasized widening my son’s world as much as possible, I wondered about encouraging these young adults to enter into relationships and even—gulp!—have active sex lives. Many of them talked about dating movie stars, musicians and characters they knew from TV shows. I wanted to pull the teachers aside and point out the obvious: You’re saying these folks should turn around and date each other? Beyond the most clear-cut concerns related to sex—pregnancy, STDs, sexual victimization—there were also the less clear-cut ones: If their ideal dates are Justin Beiber and Kelly Clarkson, how could they do anything but hurt each other’s feelings?

After talking to the teachers of the class at some length, I began to change my mind. I learned that sex—and all of its awkward logistics—was a very small part of their curriculum. “This class is about how people develop caring relationships,” Brian Melanson, one of the teachers, explained. “It’s about learning the art of back-and-forth conversation and finding shared pleasures. It’s also about learning to appreciate one another and depend on each other. Can most young adults with disabilities learn to do this? Absolutely! Should they? Absolutely!”

Most people might agree with this sentiment but pause at including sex in that picture. Melanson was unequivocal: “If both parties are interested, informed and consenting, then yes, it should definitely include sex. These folks are left out of many stepping stones toward independent lives: going to college, living on their own, even holding a job. Sex is a pleasure that, responsibly undertaken, should be available to them just as it’s available to all the rest of us.” As a parent, I blanched. But I also thought: He’s right.

The more time I spent with this teacher and this group of students, the more convinced I became—especially as I got to know one young woman who became the inspiration for Belinda, one of the main characters in A Step Toward Falling. Admittedly she appealed to me at first because instead of picking a pop singer as her ideal boyfriend, she stood, pushed her glasses up on her nose and announced, “Mr. Darcy played by Colin Firth in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice would be my first choice for a boyfriend. My second choice, I guess, would be Mr. Bingley.”

Wait a minute, I thought. This woman has Down Syndrome and the same fantasy boyfriends as me?

Eventually I came to realize this is what happens when you get to know any group of people you once thought you had little in common with. The walls fall down; the lines blur. As I sat in on a few more sessions of Boundaries and Relationships, I found I had to stop myself from screaming “I know exactly what you mean!” from my observer’s spot in the back as one participant after another struggled to articulate what they found difficult about the dating process.

At one point, I sat with my new friend who turned out to have a little trouble talking about anything except Pride and Prejudice. Still, I marveled at how well she understood Austen’s message. “People shouldn’t judge other people by the way they look or seem at first. That’s what Pride and Prejudice is about,” she loudly proclaimed to a lobby full of her peers who weren’t paying attention. Her social skills might have been off, but her analysis was not.

The more I talked to her, the more I realized how right the teacher of this class was. Drawn toward the romantic ideals they’ve watched for years on movies and on TV, young adults with intellectual disabilities want to participate in the stories they’ve seen play out on screen. Sex is part of that. Without the knowledge of what’s involved and the vocabulary to discuss it, they are far more likely to get drawn into situations where they might be victimized. The statistics bear this out and I wanted my story to reflect this.

A Step Toward Falling begins when Emily and Lucas, two high school seniors focused on their own problems, fail to intervene when they witness Belinda, a developmentally disabled classmate, being attacked. Obligated to volunteer in a Boundaries and Relationships class, they gradually begin to see the ways the differences between themselves and their classmates blur. They come to the same realization I have: Ability and disability is a long continuum that we all have a spot on, and the desires we share in common far outweigh the differences that divide us.

Photo credit Ellen Augarten.

Cammie McGovern's debut YA novel, Say What You Will, told the honest and heartbreaking love story of a girl with cerebral palsy and a boy with obsessive-compulsive disorder. With her new novel, A Step Toward Falling, McGovern once again drives straight to readers' hearts with a tale that unfolds through alternating viewpoints of classmates Emily and Belinda.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

A royal life story, told through the eyes of a sidelined little sister

Behind the Book by Emily Holleman

by Emily Holleman

A large-animal veterinarian, the first female Major League pitcher, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. Like many kids, I had a lot of far-flung ideas about what I wanted to be when I grew up. But what I really wanted to be was my older sister.

Three years my senior, Julia was by definition better at everything than I was. She was taller, skinnier and prettier. She had longer hair and neater handwriting. She came up with better stories, funnier Mad Libs. As we passed into our teenage years, I grew jealous of her boyfriends, the effect she had on men. There was nothing worth doing that Julia hadn’t done better—and first.

And so, when I stumbled upon the name Arsinoe sometime in late 2010, it should come as no surprise that I was immediately drawn to the story of Cleopatra’s forgotten younger sister. An avatar of my childhood and adolescent self, fawning and yearning and aching over her sibling’s successes, she felt deeply familiar. What little can be gleaned about Arsinoe’s life: She metamorphosed from Cleopatra’s close ally (the two fled Alexandria to raise an army against their brother) to the queen’s bitter enemy (two years later, Arsinoe rebelled against her sister). Before I knew it, I was hooked. I wanted to rewrite the famous ruler’s saga, tracing not Cleopatra’s rise and fall but Arsinoe’s: the sisterly bonds fraying and snapping beneath history’s unyielding heft. I envisioned the first scraping of that fray: the moment of their half-sister Berenice’s coup, when their father, King Ptolemy, fled to Rome with Cleopatra, leaving Arsinoe to her fate.

When I first imagined the book that became Cleopatra’s Shadows, it was as a vehicle for Arsinoe’s story, the younger sister’s story. Though the gaps in our experience were vast and obvious—my family, to my great chagrin, has never ruled a dynasty—we shared that acute feeling of abandonment, betrayal. Julia had never left me in a physical or dramatic sense, but by the time I was 8 or 9—Arsinoe’s age when the novel begins—my sister had hit the throes of preteen angst, as keen to shirk familial ties as I was to cling to them. For middle school, for college, for adulthood, younger siblings are by definition always left behind. And so those sentiments came easily, paired with a reimagining of a Hellenistic childhood interrupted, the idyllic days of a princess torn asunder by revolt.

Only later, after the idea for the novel had percolated for some time, did I decide to include a second perspective, that of the eldest sister, the rebel Berenice who seized on local hatred of her father and plotted her way onto the throne. At first, this alternate narrator emerged as a foil: Every protagonist needs an antagonist. And yet, the more I wrote, the more I researched—the body of history devoted to Berenice’s rule is slim, but that concerning Arsinoe’s girlhood slimmer still—the more I became fascinated by the elder sister. A decade before Cleopatra had shunted aside her brothers to rule Egypt on her own, another woman of her family had done the same, sending her own father squalling off to Rome, begging for an army to retake his seat. What brilliant and defiant sort of woman managed that?

I was also intrigued by how family and birth order shaped Berenice’s predicament. Her point of view yielded—for me—a far more alien perspective: the one where life and stability were fragmented by the arrival of babe after squealing babe. As the youngest of four, I was born to my place. No world had ever existed in which I was an only child, no memory where I hadn’t always had a brother and two sisters. Berenice’s identity was rooted in the opposite experience: that of watching her family grow, develop and ultimately collapse. She looked on as her mother’s role was taken by a concubine, as her own was taken by Cleopatra. By the age of 19, Berenice had been dismissed by everyone who mattered at the Alexandrian court—but she refused to accept obscurity. She flailed and fought against it, seizing power at once owed to and stolen from her. Rather than a mirror for Arsinoe, a shadow to the younger sister’s sun, she emerged as a hero unto herself.

The early drafts of Cleopatra’s Shadows were fueled by my urge to explore a likeness, the pathos that I felt for poor, abandoned Arsinoe. And yet the more time I spent in Berenice’s head, the more obsessed I became with her, the other sister, that eldest child I’d never been. I began this novel because I wanted to tell Arsinoe’s story, not Berenice’s. But by the time I’d written the final words, I had come to love both sisters with equal ferocity.

Emily Holleman launches a gripping historical saga with Cleopatra’s Shadows, her debut novel. The Tudor court has nothing on the ruthlessness of the Ptolemaic dynasty, built on alliances as shifting as the Egyptian sands. Holleman, a former editor for Salon.com, lives and writes in Brooklyn. She is currently working on a sequel to Cleopatra’s Shadows.

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

Backstage pass to a debut novel

Behind the Book by Charlotte Huang

by Charlotte Huang

Huang shares the backstory of For the Record and explains how her music agent husband helped structure the story and provide authentic details of life on tour.

By the time I started writing For the Record, I already had years of material to draw from. Since my husband and several of our close friends work in the music industry, I’ve listened to hours of music talk over dinners, gone to probably hundreds of shows, and chatted with and gotten to know many musicians. I felt totally confident that I could write a realistic story about a famous band on tour. However, as I got deeper into the draft, I realized that there were gaps in my knowledge that would require the help of some experts.

Tour routing
This was the easiest hurdle to overcome. Well, maybe not for my husband who actually had to do it. As a music agent, he plans tours all day long for his clients so I thought he’d be able to do it in his sleep. But according to him I tied his hands in impossible ways, worse than any real manager would—“but I want them to shoot a video before this date”; “but I need them to be in Detroit after this happens”; “are you sure they wouldn’t be able to get from here to there in just one day?”—yet somehow, Melbourne has a great tour and I’m still married!

Bus life
I’ve never had to live on a tour bus, a fact for which I am grateful. So I took a friend, who often does have to live on a bus, out to lunch. A lot of the detail and texture about noise pollution, bus etiquette and how to negotiate space come from this conversation and about a billion follow-up texts and emails. I probably owe her another lunch.

Tour logistics
While my husband books the tours, he doesn’t have to go on tour. So for this one, he was off the hook. Fortunately, I’ve killed enough time in production offices, both pre-and post-show, that I was able to base Melbourne’s tour manager’s exacting and rigid ways on firsthand observation. But to get a little more specific, I interviewed a tour manager friend.

On stage
Here was the single biggest hole in my understanding of what it’s like to be in a band. I mean, if you dangled me over a cliff and told me to route a 30-day U.S. tour off the top of my head, I could probably do better than the average person. But ask me what it’s like to get up and sing in front of thousands of people? Obviously I had no clue. So I asked one of my husband’s clients for some insight. My questions were endless: What’s the difference to you between a good show and a bad show? What goes through your head if you mess up? What do you do when one of your band mates messes up? What song do you hate? How do you feel when you have to perform it? Our conversations gave me a much more intimate appreciation of what my main character experiences during the shows.

Talking to people who live the touring life made the experience of writing For the Record much richer. And I can only hope that the same is true of reading it.

Charlotte Huang grew up near Boston, graduated from Smith College and received an MBA from Columbia Business School. She lives in Los Angeles. When not glued to her computer, she cheers her two sons on at sporting events and sometimes manages to stay up late enough to check out bands with her music-agent husband. For the Record is her first novel. To learn more, visit her website and blog at charlottehuangbooks.com.

Enter the glamorous (and not-so-glamorous) world of life in a band through Charlotte Huang's debut YA novel, For the Record. High school student Chelsea has just become the lead singer of the popular band Melbourne, and she's dealing with being on a bus tour with three guys, attracting the attention of heartthrob Lucas Rivers and coping with the sink-or-swim music industry. Huang shares the backstory of For the Record and explains how her music agent husband helped structure the story and provide authentic details of life on tour.

Picture Book

Picture Book

A muted palette for a mime’s sweet story

Behind the Book by Salina Yoon

by Salina Yoon

Salina Yoon is the award-winning author of more than 200 books for children, including Penguin and Pinecone and Found. Yoon's latest picture book, Be a Friend, tells the story of Dennis, an ordinary boy who expresses himself in extraordinary ways—he's a mime! But being a mime can be lonely. It isn’t until Dennis meets a girl named Joy that he discovers the power of friendship.

Yoon shares a look behind Be a Friend, a simple yet emotional story with a muted palette.

I was sitting in bed on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and a notebook, and I scribbled some notes for an idea about a character who only communicates through mime. This was an idea for a humorous illustrated chapter book, I thought. I’d never written anything laugh-out-loud funny, or a book with chapters. It was a stretch. But that morning, I felt like goofing off from house chores and escaped with writing. I’d already thought of the title before I came downstairs: The Silent Adventures of Mime Boy. I chuckled.

On Monday, the character stayed with me. I started to think of a funny storyline for him. But I realized that this child, Mime Boy, would be teased in a school setting. And this broke my heart. There was nothing funny about it, and this wasn’t a chapter book I wanted to write. But the story had to be written.

I could have scrapped the idea right then, but I didn’t. Mime Boy wouldn’t let go. The character had something to say . . . and he needed a voice through pictures and minimal words, because he wanted to mime his story. This story had to be told as a picture book.

I began to sketch poses for his imaginary scenes, and Dennis was born. I was so protective of Dennis. I didn’t want him bullied, or laughed at. I wanted him to simply be who he was, and explore the world through his eyes. And through his eyes, there was happiness and love and playfulness, even though others could not see it (or so he thought). But this did not prevent him from feeling alone and different.

The moment I knew that I had a book was when I had Dennis kick his imaginary ball when he was sad and lonely, and on the next page, someone catches it. Her name was Joy. My heart melted when I envisioned this scene. Someone reached out in a way that he understood. This is a pivotal scene in the book where he finally makes a connection with another child, and this is where he finds true joy . . . the joy from having a friend. The revised book title reflects this theme.

The tone of the story was set. I struggled with an appropriate art style for this book because it was unlike any story I had written before. I could not draw him with thick black outlines like I do with my Penguin series. It would have been too bright, too flat and too cheerful.

I chose to illustrate the book with pencil on paper, because I could not think of anything more intimate than that. I had a deep connection to Dennis. The pencil drawings were scanned, then colored digitally, with a background of tonal antique paper. I looked at old Marcel Marceau footage for inspiration in black and white, and wanted Dennis’ story to be in a timeless world that told a timeless tale.

While the palette was neutral overall, I used the color red to depict the lines of his imagination. This would be the bridge between Dennis and Joy, and eventually, with the rest of the world.

One of my favorite scenes in the book is where the children have their Show and Tell. Most of the kids share their objects and talk about it, but Dennis mimes the metamorphosis of a butterfly instead in various stages.

Dennis discovers that true friends accept each other as they are. Friends don’t expect you to change, and you don’t have to change for them. And friends can open your eyes to a different world, too.

Not everyone can relate with being a mime, but we can all relate to feeling different.

And, like Dennis, with the help of our friends, we too can shine.

Check out the book trailer for Be a Friend:

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Be a Friend.

Salina Yoon is the award-winning author of more than 200 books for children, including Penguin and Pinecone and Found. Yoon's latest picture book, Be a Friend, tells the story of Dennis, an ordinary boy who expresses himself in extraordinary ways—he's a mime! But being a mime can be lonely. It isn’t until Dennis meets a girl named Joy that he discovers the power of friendship. Yoon shares a look behind Be a Friend, a simple yet emotional story with a muted palette.

All Behind the Book essays