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An intensely private, bookish woman meets a charming but aimless man who is the least accomplished sibling in a dynastic political family. They fall in love and marry, then the man begins a rapid political ascent: first serving as governor, then as a president who presides over an increasingly unpopular war. Sound familiar? While American Wife is technically a work of fiction, it is a thinly veiled account of Laura and George W. Bush’s courtship and rise to the top of American politics. Even before the book’s release this month, author Curtis Sittenfeld already had garnered major buzz in the blogosphere.

Published just in time for the fall elections, the book depicts the first wife as a woman with quietly moderate values who underwent an illegal abortion as a teenager. Sittenfeld burst onto the literary scene at age 29 with her bestseller, Prep, which was selected as one of the New York Times top 10 books of 2005. Following that success, she soon established a reputation as a novelist and essayist prone to speaking her mind in various high-profile media outlets. She caused a minor dust-up when she skewered chick lit in a 2006 Times essay, raising the ire of chick lit queen and fellow best-selling author Jennifer Weiner (Sittenfeld says the two are now friends who even read each other’s drafts).

In 2004, Sittenfeld wrote an essay for Salon.com proclaiming her love for Laura Bush. In the piece, Sittenfeld declared: "I’m a 28-year-old woman, a registered Democrat, and a staunch enough liberal that I take would-be epithets such as ‘flaming,’ ‘knee-jerk’ and ‘bleeding-heart’ as compliments. I believe that George Bush’s policies are at best misguided and at worst evil. And yet I love Laura Bush. In fact, there is no public figure I admire more." Sittenfeld went on to explain the basis for her ardor, based largely on Laura Bush’s indifference to clothing and array of liberal friends.

Fast-forward to 2008. Speaking to BookPage from her home in St. Louis, Sittenfeld says despite her personal politics, her new novel is not a screed against the current president, but rather an attempt to understand a famous yet largely mysterious American figure.

"I don’t think the world is looking to me for opinions on the Bush administration," Sittenfeld says with a laugh. "The book is obviously inspired by Laura Bush, but it’s not about Laura Bush. It sort of examines the questions around her. She’s just incredibly intriguing to me. Even though she has this high approval rating, people don’t know much about her."Funny and self-deprecating, Sittenfeld conveys a warmth and light-heartedness that seems at odds with the serious subjects she so often chooses to write about. In fact, she is so down-to-earth she doesn’t even tell people what she does for a living.

"I don’t think I’ve ever said I’m a novelist, because it sounds pretentious," she says. "I say freelance writer because it dissuades people from asking more questions. I just don’t think it’s that interesting!"

Recently married, Sittenfeld was preparing for a delayed honeymoon in British Columbia, followed by a book tour to support American Wife. She seems eager to talk both about the book and its inspiration, saying she was struck by the perception that Bush is a "stiff proper person—people often say she’s a Stepford wife, but she’s actually an intellectually engaged person."Indeed, in American Wife, Alice Lindgren is a voracious reader, strong-willed and slyly funny. The only child of devoted parents, she grows up in middle-class suburban Wisconsin. At 17, Alice causes a car accident that kills her classmate, Andrew Imhof, an event that mirrors a similar real-life incident: 17-year-old Laura Bush in 1963 ran a stop sign and killed a classmate. Alice is devastated by the accident; her blossoming romance with Andrew is cut short, and she is plagued the rest of her life by wondering "What if?" After an ill-advised series of encounters with Andrew’s grieving older brother, Alice finds herself pregnant. Her grandmother guesses the truth and whisks her off to Chicago for an abortion. Later, Alice tries to put the whole chapter of her life behind her.

The following years of college and career as a school librarian are a quiet time for Alice. She dates a series of unremarkable men before meeting Charlie Blackwell at a party. Sittenfeld describes the future president in this memorable passage: He was undeniably handsome, but his bearing was cocky in a way I didn’t like: He was just over six feet, athletic-looking, and a little sunburned, with thick, dry, wavy light brown hair of the sort that wouldn’t move if he shook his head. He also had mischievous eyebrows and a hawk nose with wide nostrils, as if he was flaring them at all times. This lent him an air of impatience that I imagined enhanced his stature in the view of some people—implying that he had other, more interesting places to go, that his attention to you would be limited.

With his good looks and self-assured demeanor, Charlie sweeps Alice—the perfect wife for a politician, he thinks—off her feet. They marry within months, and Alice soon quits her job to raise their daughter and support her husband’s burgeoning political career. But in the ensuing years, Charlie’s drinking and lack of focus threaten to ruin their marriage.

American Wife is a sparkling, sprawling novel that’s at its best when it delves into the smallest details of Alice’s life: her first visit to her future in-laws’ self-consciously rustic summer compound; coping with her husband’s alcoholism; her conflicted feelings about being married to a born-again Christian with White House aspirations. A ridiculously gifted writer who has in the past had a tendency to lean on her talent with prose to the detriment of a strong plotline, Sittenfeld has harnessed her talents perfectly in American Wife, producing an exhilarating epic infused with humor, pain and hope.

One question remains about Sittenfeld’s latest work: Will Laura Bush, a well-known bookworm, read American Wife? It’s a question many will be asking about this potentially explosive new book, but your guess is as good as the author’s.

"I would think not," Sittenfeld says. "She’s the focus of a lot of attention, so I’m sure she’s used to it. I think it’s possible, but I would guess she won’t. Someone who knows her or works for her will read it and give her the gist."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

An intensely private, bookish woman meets a charming but aimless man who is the least accomplished sibling in a dynastic political family. They fall in love and marry, then the man begins a rapid political ascent: first serving as governor, then as a president who…

Though he's no stranger to the bestseller list, TV and radio personality Glenn Beck ventures into new territory with his latest book, The Christmas Sweater, a heart – wrenching holiday story drawn from a painful episode in his boyhood.

Beck's two previous books, including the New York Times #1 bestseller, An Inconvenient Book, deal with the political and social issues he explores on his radio talk show and during his two – year prime – time stint on CNN's Headline News. (The conservative host is moving to the Fox News Channel early next year.)Beck's new book follows the anguished journey of 13 – year – old Eddie, who is bitterly disappointed with his mother's handcrafted gift. When his mother is killed in a car accident shortly after Christmas, Eddie is forced to re – evaluate his life and priorities. Though the tale is presented as fiction, Beck, whose mother died when he was 13, acknowledges that the story was drawn directly from his own life. BookPage recently asked the author to reflect on his holiday traditions and plans.

What was the best holiday gift you received as a child?
The best gift I ever got was the sweater my mom made for me shortly before she died. I didn't know it was the best gift at the time – in fact I hated it. I wanted something cool like the other kids got. I tossed it in the corner of the room and left it in a crumpled mess. Looking back, I realized that the sweater was all my mom could give and that she worked really hard to make it for me. To me it's a reminder of how much she loved me.

Did you have a favorite holiday book when you were young?
My favorite books as a child were magic books. Yeah, yeah – I didn't have a lot of friends. But the worst part is I wasn't even really good at magic either. Aspiring magician with no talent for magic – not a recipe for coolness.

What are your favorite books to give as gifts?
Of course I like to give out the books I have authored – but aside from those I'm the guy that people dread getting books from – because I give them the tough stuff. America Alone by Mark Steyn, The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes and The 5000 Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen. Sure, they may take a couple of months to read – but when they are finally done they will have a really firm understanding about what is going on in the world – and how we can avoid repeating the mistakes of our past.

What are you reading now?
At the moment I'm reading Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. If I ever had another career it would be in teaching (scary to many, I'm sure) because I feel that slowly but surely our nation's history is being carefully edited to fit an agenda. I don't want to let my children grow up getting an education that's left out key parts of our nation's history, so I'm reading as much about history and education as I possibly can.

What books are you planning to give as gifts?
I'll probably buy people books from some of my favorite fiction authors – Ted Bell, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Daniel Silva and others like them. I feel many of these authors are taking real news events and intertwining them with fiction – and that's the best kind of entertainment. You can learn about what is going on in the world yet be completely entertained at the same time.

What would you like to get from Santa this year?
Actually, I'm very blessed – there's nothing I really need. For me, Christmas is a time to be with family and also volunteering out in the community and helping those who are less fortunate. That's the best gift I could ever get – the feeling that comes when you've helped someone you have never met, that lonely person in need. Nothing compares to helping someone else. No gift could ever feel better. Well, a 100 – inch plasma would come pretty close.

 

Though he's no stranger to the bestseller list, TV and radio personality Glenn Beck ventures into new territory with his latest book, The Christmas Sweater, a heart - wrenching holiday story drawn from a painful episode in his boyhood.

Beck's two previous books,…

As the current administration sputters to an end and a new leader is elected, Americans may find it instructive to look back at the controversial presidency of Andrew Jackson. The man known as Old Hickory developed a sometimes inspirational, sometimes dictatorial style of leadership, in which the legislative and judicial branches were regarded as meddlesome impediments to the executive's grand designs.

"It would be both glib and wrong to say that the Age of Jackson is a mirror of our own time," Jon Meacham writes. "Still, there is much about him and about his America that readers in the early twenty-first century may recognize."

In American Lion, Meacham concentrates on Jackson's two terms in Washington, from 1829 to 1837. During that period, the president from Tennessee shattered the economic power and political influence of the Second Bank of the United States, prevented South Carolina from breaking with the Union, reined in federal expenditures on roads, bridges, canals and other infrastructure (electing instead to pay down the national debt), approved the brutal removal of Indian tribes from the South, practiced political patronage as a natural right and a sensible process, halted efforts to insinuate more religion into government and demanded that other nations treat America with the respect he thought it deserved. In short, he made friends ecstatic and opponents livid.

Meacham, who's the editor of Newsweek, discusses his search for Jackson's presidential soul as he walks to his office in New York, after having dropped off his four-year-old daughter at preschool. "The White House years were so tumultuous," he says. "I found them at once distant and incredibly familiar. It's somewhat depressing, actually, to be a journalist who writes history because you realize that everything has happened before."

This is Meacham's third book-length foray into American history. His other works are the critically acclaimed Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation.

Around 2003, Meacham recalls, he noticed there was a flurry of popular histories about America's founders, notably Ben Franklin, John Adams and George Washington. This set him to thinking about exploring Jackson's legacy. "One of the things that occurred to me as I read those wonderful books," he says, "was that Jackson had—oddly for such a dominant figure—receded from the popular imagination. I thought he was a character worth spending five years with, and I've never been disappointed in that."

Although he had not systematically studied Jackson up to that point, Meacham says he "knew the basic outline" from having read Robert V. Remini's and Arthur Schlesinger's classic works on America's seventh president. "So he was a familiar figure," Meacham says, "but not someone with whom I was obsessed."

It took some adroit scheduling on Meacham's part to work on the Jackson book while simultaneously carrying out his duties for Newsweek. "I'm able to read during the week," he says, "but I can't write during the week." That being the case, he did his writing during the summer at his house in remote Sewanee, Tennessee. (A native of Chattanooga, Meacham earned his degree in English literature from the University of the South at Sewanee.)

"I take a month each summer and go to Sewanee," he says. "I'm very rigorous. I sit down [to write] and won't get up for 10 hours. I'm able to get a working draft out of that." When he returns to New York, he edits and fine-tunes his manuscript. That's how American Lion was wrought.

"It seemed to me that trying to figure out how the modern presidency came into being was a useful exercise," he ventures. "I tried to think of new ways to tell the story." One approach was to focus a lot of attention on the White House roles of Andrew and Emily Donelson, Jackson's married nephew and niece (who were first cousins to one another). Because Jackson's beloved wife, Rachel, died between the time he was elected president and the time he was sworn in, he chose the artful and ambitious Emily to be his official White House hostess and Andrew as his private secretary.

Emily's sense of propriety—some might say prissiness—put her at odds with the flamboyant and allegedly adulterous Margaret Eaton, the wife of Jackson's secretary of war and close adviser, John Eaton. This clash vexed and diverted Jackson through much of his tenure. "The Donelson family [of Nashville] became increasingly interesting, and I was able to find new letters that I think added detail and insight into how Jackson operated."

Meacham found the new letters through meeting with the Donelsons and other Jackson descendants during the course of his research. In writing his book on Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Meacham says he discovered that "presidential families often have things they don't think are that important but which can be. What I learned from that was always ask the question. So I simply said, 'Are there any scrapbooks? Are there any boxes? Is there anything at all that you just think is something you have to move around the garage from time to time that's of any conceivable interest?'Ê" Many of those he spoke with did have such material and gave him free access to it.

"I've yet to do one of these projects where, if you look hard enough, you won't find something," he says. "It may not be paradigm-shifting, but every little bit helps."

Jackson, who never knew his father and lost his mother at the age of 14, cherished the notion of family. Once he became president, Meacham concludes, he tended to look upon those who elected him as an extension of family. Consequently, he was zealous in their defense and convinced he knew what was best for them. The upshot, the author asserts, was that Jackson became "a permanently divisive figure" who "loved the fight."

Meacham says his next book will probably be on James and Dolley Madison. "I'm reading up on them," he reports. "He is truly the forgotten founder. He doesn't have a statue at Epcot. Is writing the Constitution not enough to get you a statue?"

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

As the current administration sputters to an end and a new leader is elected, Americans may find it instructive to look back at the controversial presidency of Andrew Jackson. The man known as Old Hickory developed a sometimes inspirational, sometimes dictatorial style of leadership, in…

Having your book picked by Oprah for her book club is a heady experience for an author. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of new readers discover your work, you appear before millions of television viewers to receive Oprah's accolades, and you make a whole lot of money.

But according to Wally Lamb, this recognition can be a double – edged sword. Having had his first two novels chosen by Oprah (She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True), the pressure to produce an equally worthy book had Lamb struggling through a year – long case of writer's block. He started and discarded several attempts before finally finding his voice in a new novel titled The Hour I First Believed.

"I was scared to death," laughs Lamb, speaking from his office in Willimantic, Connecticut. "Once the canvas got larger and larger, I was pretty scared I was not going to be able to pull it off and finish it. At one point I talked to my agent and said maybe I should just give this advance money back and scurry back to the classroom and just forget about the whole deal."The acorn which grew into his latest work came to him in a single sentence which his soon – to – be protagonist whispered into his ear: "My mother was a convicted felon, a manic – depressive, and Miss Rheingold of 1950." For the next nine years, Lamb turned this sentence into a 700 – page epic, weaving the real – life tragedy of the Columbine shootings into one man's personal experience of love and loss – a tapestry that stretches back a hundred years, showing how our ancestors can take a greater role in our lives than we might realize."That's exactly what I learned by writing this book. I came to believe that in ways we can never really figure out – because we only knew our grandparents as old people and we didn't know their grandparents – that it's all sort of connected and sets us up for certain kinds of lives. I do believe that we have some control [over our lives], but probably far less than we realize."

This belief is personified in Lamb's central character, Caelum Quirk, a man described by his second wife as "an emotional eunuch." He and his third wife, Maureen, have moved from Connecticut to Littleton, Colorado, in an attempt to save their marriage. Maureen has been unfaithful; the only emotion Caelum seems capable of expressing is anger. However, their efforts to survive these problems are quickly overshadowed by the killing spree of two teenaged boys at Columbine High School where the couple works. Caelum is back in Connecticut, settling his recently deceased aunt's estate, when he learns of the horrendous events. Maureen is at the school; it is only by the slimmest of chances that she is spared. But she becomes a victim of "collateral damage" – the guilt and devastating emotions often felt by those who escape such a hideous experience. She becomes addicted to prescription drugs as a coping mechanism, so the couple move back to Caelum's family's Connecticut farm in yet another attempt to start their lives over.

An important part of The Hour I First Believed is Caelum's family history, which is thoroughly entwined with the women's prison across the street from his farm. His great – grandmother created the prison, taking as her motto, "A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity." Concurrently with writing the book, Lamb was forging his own connection with women prisoners, teaching a weekly writing workshop at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Connecticut. From the first day, Lamb found his students eager to write about where they went wrong, where their lives went out of control. Through their work, Lamb also discovered that about 70 percent of these women were victims of incest – a number born out by national statistics."Through what they write, they free themselves from a lot of that sorrow and a lot of that terrible, terrible guilt that sometimes comes along with being a victim. It's really been a profound experience for me to bear witness to the women and their stories. But also, it's hard because as it comes out of them, it becomes your thing to bear as well."

Lamb was so impressed with the women's stories that he approached HarperCollins about doing a collection of their essays. Choosing selections by 10 of Lamb's students, the publisher released Couldn't Keep It To Myself, promising each inmate $5,600 upon her release for what she'd written. But a week before the book's publication, Connecticut's attorney general sued the writers for the entire cost of their imprisonment, a figure much greater than the modest sum promised by the publisher. An ugly fight ensued, escalating into confiscation of the women's computer disks and, among other things, investigation of Lamb as a volunteer."I thank my lucky stars for '60 Minutes' and the Pan American Center which shed light on all this," Lamb says. "All of a sudden, Connecticut did a backflip and suddenly this program is wonderful and they're really gung – ho on rehabilitation and all that kind of stuff."

The theme of damaged individuals fighting for redemption is a familiar one for Lamb – it's been central to all three of his novels. And while he says he's never sure what will happen to his characters until he writes the end of a book, his personal beliefs would certainly steer him in that direction. As he says in the afterword to this novel, "I believe that love is stronger than hate."With his first two books, Lamb chose titles from old pop songs ("Undone" and "True"). However, in his latest, he took a line from one of America's favorite hymns, "Amazing Grace." "The Hour I First Believed" ends the second stanza, which is about the redemptive power of grace, one of the novel's themes. Lamb says it guided him throughout the nine years he spent writing it."I had that title before I had the book, right from the beginning. It was the carrot before the horse – and of course, I'm the horse."

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

Having your book picked by Oprah for her book club is a heady experience for an author. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of new readers discover your work, you appear before millions of television viewers to receive Oprah's accolades, and you make a whole lot of…

Like other gifted writers of his generation, James McBride has the enviable capacity to enlarge and complicate his readers’ understanding of what it means to be human. McBride amply demonstrated this ability in his first book, the lyrical, transcendent memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996). He proves it again in his first novel, Miracle at St. Anna

"I’m always looking for that connective tissue that binds one piece of humanity to the next," McBride says during a call to his home in New Jersey. "I really live in that gray space between black and white. Because that’s where the truth lives."

Based on a little-known factual episode of World War II, Miracle at St. Anna tells the story of four black soldiers from the segregated 92nd Division during the campaign in Italy in the final year of the war. The narrative focuses mainly on Sam Train, a hulking, otherworldly, Christ-like innocent from America’s Deep South who finds and cares for a traumatized Italian child who was a survivor of a Nazi massacre in the village of St. Anna di Stazzema.

"That was the best part of the book to write," McBride says. "Because you had these two creatures who in many ways typify innocence and yet are so culturally, physically and humanistically different. I loved that relationship."

The inspiration for the novel, as McBride states in his acknowledgements at the end of the book, came from the stories his Uncle Henry, a World War II veteran, told at family gatherings in New York. Because of those stories, McBride says, he was always curious about the role blacks had played in World War II. "After The Color of Water became a success and I had some creative freedom, I decided to write a book about the black soldiers who liberated a concentration camp in Hungary. But it just didn’t work. It wasn’t the story I was put here to tell. Eventually I realized I didn’t want to write a book that just glorified war, because war is not a glorious thing. The whole business was just a futile act of human madness. So I started to research this piece and began to construct my story and seek the characters that would inhabit it, and I essentially became very depressed for several months. From this outrageous hurricane of tumultuous events I had to find something that had some meaning."

To research the book, McBride moved himself and his family to Italy for the better part of a year. "You can’t reach the kind of detailed knowledge you need by reading a book; you have to go there. You have to eat it and live it. My research process is always very extensive. For The Color of Water I interviewed friends that I grew up with because they remembered details of my life as a child that I had no recollection of. In Italy, I interviewed everyone I could."

The result is a vibrant portrait of a rural, war-torn Italy that will be unfamiliar to most American readers. "There’s another world in Italy that is much deeper than what Italians usually allow outsiders to see. The land is just haunted. They believe that God shaped the mountains with his finger and that witches live in the hills. "

In Miracle at St. Anna the Italian villagers and the black American soldiers develop a special bond, a relationship McBride says is based on historical fact. "Every single black soldier I talked to who was in Italy just loved the Italians. German soldiers and white American soldiers disdained the Italians. Black soldiers knew what that felt like. They had enormous compassion for the Italians. They respected them. And the respect was mutual."

McBride, who delivered a beautifully nuanced portrait of racial relations in his memoir The Color of Water, brings the same humanity and understanding to his exploration of the complicated relationships between black soldiers and their white commanders in this novel. "There was a tremendous amount of distrust between the soldiers and the officers who commanded them," he says. "You also had Northern officers and Southern officers who were at odds over how blacks should be treated. It’s easy now to look back on these officers and say they were bad, but we were basically asking these men, normal men, to do an extraordinary thing — greet America’s civil rights movement with open arms while at war. We funneled our civil rights problem into the hands of four or five hundred officers of the 92nd Division. Some of them were up to the task and some of them weren’t."

According to McBride, the two military campaigns his four protagonists participate in have been viewed as failures by military historians because black soldiers cut and ran, refused to fight or became disorganized. His own research and recent work by military scholars have challenged this assessment

But McBride’s purpose isn’t really to rehabilitate reputations or glorify war. "I wrote the book because I think war is a bad thing," he says emphatically. "I plan to make that very clear whenever I talk about the book." And, indeed, the novel is sometimes brutal and tragic; McBride’s warriors suffer.

They also transcend. A deeply religious man, McBride says he wanted Miracle at St. Anna to also "speak to the miracles that happen if you believe in God. I sort of skirt the mythical. I just scrape the top level of suds off the beer mug, just enough that you can suspend your disbelief for a moment."

Reflecting on his own life, McBride says, "I’m at the point where I realize that the only things keeping me from being wormfood are the tiny molecules dancing around in my body; to me that’s a kind of miracle.

"I’ve come to believe there’s no such thing as control or safety," he says. "I love America. My family is a living example of what is possible in America, and so am I. But American society has become in many ways the moral equivalent of cardboard. We have all these fancy gadgets that keep us materially comfortable. We feel we have the technology to make other people suffer and keep ourselves immune from suffering. But there is no safety. . . . That’s why everyone is so upset right now. No one is immune from suffering. We will all suffer someday. So the deeper question is how do you want to live? We can live in fear. Or we can live as sharing, caring people. In that way, I think it’s a good time for Miracle at St. Anna to come out."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Like other gifted writers of his generation, James McBride has the enviable capacity to enlarge and complicate his readers' understanding of what it means to be human. McBride amply demonstrated this ability in his first book, the lyrical, transcendent memoir The Color of Water: A…

Like a cultural cartographer, poet and novelist Jay Parini charts the major literary islands that expanded to form the landmass of the American psyche in Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America.

His landfalls include Of Plymouth Plantation, The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Souls of Black Folk, The Promised Land, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, On the Road and The Feminine Mystique.

No mere desert island collection of personal favorites, this baker's dozen met a higher standard as what Parini calls "nodal points" that either moved nascent intellectual currents forward or changed the direction of American life and thought. "This is an X – ray of the American spirit," Parini says. "These books either consolidated ideas long in place or shifted things and caused a pivot in the road."

Only a few of Parini's selections were obvious, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "I would say that book invented the American language," Parini says. "Twain had such an ear for how Americans talk that I really think he transformed how people actually spoke to each other. It's also a book about race in America, the westward journey, about lighting off for the territories and independence. It's everything. It is the great American novel."

Others took Parini completely by surprise. "I never thought I'd include Baby and Child Care by Dr. Spock. I kept asking people what they would consider the most important books in their life, I must have asked about 100 people, and over and over again, people said, 'Well, the book that changed my life was Dr. Spock because I kept it by my bedside and raised my children by going back to it and back to it.' It transformed the way children are raised in America."

Some choices, such as The Federalist Papers, helped shape our vision of America almost without our knowledge. "There's a great book that nobody has read. It's endlessly cited and often misquoted and misunderstood," says Parini. "So much of what we think is in the Constitution is not in the Constitution, it's in The Federalist Papers."

By contrast, it was only by sheer accident that the manuscript of Of Plymouth Plantation, a journal of Pilgrim life written by William Bradford between 1620 and 1647, was discovered in an English library after being lost for 200 years. Had it not been reintroduced in 1856 and enthusiastically embraced by a nation on the cusp of the Civil War, it's highly possible that President Abraham Lincoln might not have felt compelled to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

Important American fiction, including Moby – Dick, The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, didn't even make Parini's appendix list of 100 more books that changed America, where instead you'll find The Sears, Roebuck Catalog, The Whole Earth Catalog and Jane Fonda's Workout Book. Don't novels change nations?

"They don't," Parini says. "Nobody reads novels and has their life transformed. They work on the consciousness, but very slowly; they don't have earthshaking effects."

An exception: Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

"Road novels are a big part of American novels," Parini says. "The idea of two buddies getting in their old jalopy and taking off cross – country for California and just experiencing the pleasures and terrors and adventures of the road is a real American story."

That the most recent title in the Promised Land short list is Betty Friedan's 1963 feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique speaks volumes about the modern ambivalence toward the written word. "It's frightening but true," says Parini. "For example, how many people write real letters anymore? Publishers endlessly complain about the fact that novels no longer sell very well. There really is not much audience for real books anymore."

Which makes guidebooks like Promised Land all the more relevant today.

"We are the United States of Amnesia. It's like when you have an Alzheimer's patient that you're talking to and you have to keep supplying memory as you're talking to them. That's one of the things this book is doing, supplying the memory of a nation, re – igniting the memory of a nation."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Like a cultural cartographer, poet and novelist Jay Parini charts the major literary islands that expanded to form the landmass of the American psyche in Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America.

His landfalls include Of Plymouth Plantation, The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,…

God is a plump African-American woman with a broad smile who knows Her way around the kitchen; Jesus is a Middle Eastern man sporting jeans and a tool belt; the third component to the trinity is a wiry-looking woman who "was maybe of northern Chinese or Nepalese or even Mongolian ethnicity" although it's difficult to tell because "she seemed to phase in and out of his vision."

A bare bones description of the plot to William Paul Young's novel, The Shack, sounds more like a Monty Python skit than a serious story. And after getting turned down by 26 different publishers, no novel could have seemed less destined for success. However, this little book is packing a huge wallop with millions of readers around the world, and sparking a great deal of controversy along the way. Some Christian theologians have attacked it as heresy. Others are singing its praises from the pulpit. It all makes Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk from Gresham, Oregon, grin as broadly as his depiction of God does.

"One of the things I would love to ask one of these [detractors] is 'What exactly is it that you're afraid of?' " Young says during a call to a hotel room in Denver, where he's scheduled to do a book signing. "Are you afraid that we're going to start worshipping large African-American women? Are you afraid people are going to stop reading Scripture or that they're going to mistake this book for Scripture? What part of 'fiction' do you not understand? Overall, I think the controversy is a great thing. I get a couple of hundred emails a day, saying this book has been a way for people to move deeper or back into a relationship with God. I really believe that this is something God has stirred up."

Mackenzie Philips, Young's protagonist in The Shack, has spent the past four years grieving the apparent murder of his youngest daughter, whose body has never been recovered. One cold winter day, he receives an invitation to return to the isolated shack where the girl's bloody dress was found. The invitation is from God, who chooses to manifest Him/Herself to Mack as a genial black woman. Over the course of a weekend, participating in a kind of spiritual therapy session/group retreat, Mack learns to rid himself of his Great Sadness and embrace God's grace and love through his conversations and experiences with the Holy Trinity.

The 54-year-old Young willingly discusses his own personal "shack."

"The Shack is a metaphor; it's my soul. . . . It's where you store all your addictions, all your secrets in this house of shame. It's everything you don't want anybody else to know exists. And it's held together by lies. I had a thin veneer of perfectionism and performance covering up an ocean of shame."

It was a veneer that blew completely apart on January 4, 1994, when Young's wife, Kim, discovered he was having an affair with one of her best friends.

"The Shack is a metaphor . . . It's everything you don't want anybody else to know exists."

"All I had left was the shame," he recalls, "and I had to make a decision to either kill myself or face Kim. So I chose Kim. For the first two years, she beat the crap out of me, every dig, coming after me. The intensity of her fury, that anger—that drove me to the edge to feel every single piece of garbage in my history. Then it took another nine years to heal up. So that's 11 years of experiences that Mack gets in one weekend at the shack."

Initially, Young had no plans to write a book. Then Kim asked him, as a gift to their six children, to write down the lessons on spirituality and life he had come to believe in so strongly—lessons that were very different from the ones he had learned from his rigid missionary parents or while he was studying theology.

"She said, 'Put in one place how you think, because you think outside the box and it's really wonderful.' I wanted to do a story because story has a way of communicating with the heart. I'm not thinking anybody else is gonna read this. So I can do whatever I want, try and communicate the things that are most intensely real and precious to me," he says.

When Young finished writing The Shack in 2005, he had 15 copies printed at Office Depot, which he gave as Christmas gifts to family members and several close friends. Soon those friends were asking if they could share the book with others, and Young began to believe his novel could have a larger audience. His pals Bobby Downes, Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings helped him rewrite the book. When no publishers were interested, Jacobsen and Cummings formed Windblown Media to publish The Shack themselves. Their first print run was 10,000 copies in May 2007, and after Young and the book were featured on a few podcasts, they managed to sell about 1,000 copies. 

"So those 1,000 went out and in 10 days I'm getting emails from Australia and Africa and Ireland, and New Zealand and Canada—people whose lives were getting royally messed with in a very good way through the book," Young says.

Over the next six months, The Shack went through three printings almost solely through word of mouth. "We spent less than $300 on marketing and promotion through the first 1.2 million books. So anybody who hears about this almost always says, 'This has to be a God thing.' "

Windblown Media now has a cooperative agreement with Hachette Book Group, which makes things much easier—Young's son, Nicholas, doesn't have to take book orders or ship them out of a rented warehouse, for example. Hachette is also spearheading the campaign for a greater international market. The book's popularity continues to grow, with more than 4 million copies in print; The Shack has had the top spot on the New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list for most of the past six months.

Money from the book sales means Young no longer has to work three jobs to make ends meet. But the financial rewards mean less to him than the joy and insights many readers say The Shack has given them.

"What this book has given me is an ability to look from the outside into thousands of people's lives; people who are so hungry for authenticity of relationship that this book just blows open their hearts. All of a sudden I'm finding myself in a place with a platform that I never prayed for or asked for or thought about. And I'm comfortable because I didn't put me here. Every bit of this is the grace and the affection of God."

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

A bare bones description of the plot to William Paul Young's novel, The Shack, sounds more like a Monty Python skit than a serious story. And after getting turned down by 26 different publishers, no novel could have seemed less destined for success. However, this little book is packing a huge wallop with millions of readers around the world, and sparking a great deal of controversy along the way.

Love, it is said, is the magic that turns our world. But sometimes that world’s axis seems to tilt, revolutions wobble and love goes awry. Since February is the time when we pay special court to Cupid, BookPage asked one of the world’s leading experts on love and attachment, Dr. Helen Fisher (Why We Love), to discuss how personality typing, based on human brain chemistry, can help us find—and keep—an enduring love. “This research is new ground for me,” Fisher admits during a phone interview from New York City. “I have attempted to explain other aspects of love, but this work touches the human heart where it lives.” And where the heart lives—or more specifically, gets fired up—is in the brain.

Fisher, a biological anthropologist and research professor at Rutgers University, has a passion to understand human connection—a fascination partly driven by her own biology as an identical twin. Her new book, Why Him, Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type, embodies that penchant, having its genesis in the Internet. In 2004, Match.com executives contacted Fisher for input on a new website that would help people find long-term partners. They asked, “Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another?” She answered that no one really knew; however, in light of the crucial evolutionary choice that mating represents, Fisher surmised that this important decision could not be ruled by mere human whim. “I suspected that psychologists . . . had not looked for the underlying biological mechanisms that direct our romantic choices."

Does personality actually influence who we love? Fisher decided to find out. She examined the biology associated with personality traits, namely, the powerful chemical systems of dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen. Out of this scrutiny, four basic personality types emerged (the Explorer, Builder, Director and Negotiator), as well as the underpinning for a new book and a consultancy with another website, Chemistry.com, for which she designed the personality typing questionnaire.

Are you impulsive, a risk-taker? Perhaps you’re an Explorer. Traditional? Orderly? Then Builder might apply. If you’re exacting and competitive, have a seat in the Director chair. Do you value compassion and creativity? Then you could be a Negotiator. Fisher’s book entices readers to take her personality test and know themselves better. Most of us are a blend of primary and secondary types and, according to a mate choice survey Fisher conducted with Chemistry.com members, certain types attract—and repel—one another. “Two Builders might bicker over the right way to mop a floor,” she says, “but if they can do damage control, they’ll be fine. But a romance between two Directors? Not so good.” No worries, though, as the book includes an in-depth analysis of each match combination plus sage advice, in a chapter entitled “Putting Chemistry to Work,” on naturally balancing the strengths and flaws unique to each pairing. "A good match, says Fisher, depends upon much more than genetics, though we do “inherit much of the fabric of our mind.” We are not, however, helpless victims of our DNA; there are myriad factors, which Fisher dubs “The Funnel,” that guide attraction: timing, proximity and familiarity, physicality, needs and values, and your love map, which is “a largely unconscious list of traits you will eventually seek in him or her.”

Since I had a love expert on the line, I had to ask for Fisher’s take on our new president and first lady. “I am totally fascinated by them!” she exclaims. She figures (and, hey, Dr. Fisher is good—she had this reviewer pegged instantly as a Negotiator-Explorer) that they are both Explorers with differing secondary types that work beautifully together. “Michelle, I believe, is an Explorer-Director to Barack’s Explorer-Negotiator, and is the ‘rock’ of the family.”

“Men and women are very different in many ways, but the good news is that we were built to work together.” And Fisher is enthused about the power of the Internet—hence her work with Chemistry.com—to facilitate romantic togetherness, especially in these days when a sense of local community seems to be waning. “How we look for love is changing,” she says, “and I hope that I’m helping people find someone to love.”

Alison Hood, a confirmed Negotiator, hopes to become more of an Explorer this year.

Love, it is said, is the magic that turns our world. But sometimes that world’s axis seems to tilt, revolutions wobble and love goes awry. Since February is the time when we pay special court to Cupid, BookPage asked one of the world’s leading experts…

Paula Danziger owes a slice of her success to a pizza party. Her popular books about Amber Brown were inspired by a phone conversation with her then seven-year-old niece, Carrie, who was obviously upset.

"She was a crazed person," Danziger remembers.
"Aunt, we're having a pizza party at school," Carrie told her.
"Calm down," Danziger said. "You've had pizza before. What's really going on?"
"It's a going-away party for my best friend, Danny," Carrie confessed.

The result of that exchange was Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon, about Amber and her very best friend Justin, who is about to move. The feisty, pigtailed heroine has taken on a life of her own ever since, and young readers can now find this title in paperback. The latest installment is Amber Brown Goes Fourth, in which Amber enters fourth grade and looks for a new best friend. Next month Amber Brown Wants Extra Credit will be published, and more of her adventures are in the works.

Danziger's niece, now 13, is sometimes embarrassed by her literary counterpart, especially her hair. Carrie notes that the Amber shown on the cover of the paperback editions "has split ends," and, frankly, "shouldn't be wearing those stupid pigtails in the fourth grade."

In response, Danziger may grant Amber a haircut in a future book. Unfortunately, the new do will be "a bad one," she adds. Of course, Amber has always been wise beyond her years. Danziger originally envisioned her story in picture book form, but during the revision process discovered that it needed an older voice. As a result, the novels are chapter books for beginning readers, an audience often neglected in the publishing world.

Even Danziger has a literary counterpart in the series in the form of Amber's pal and confidante, Aunt Pam. The second book, You Can't Eat Your Chicken Pox, Amber Brown took off after Danziger invited her niece to London and Carrie came down with—well, you guessed it.

Despite the many real-life details tucked into the fiction, there are important differences between Carrie and Amber. Carrie's parents remain happily married, while Amber's have divorced. What's more, Amber is an only child; Carrie has three brothers, who have given Danziger literary fuel for other books.

While much lies in store for Amber, Danziger has vowed never to write about her niece after she graduates from sixth grade. "It just gets too complicated after that," Danziger says. "It's already complicated enough. In the book I'm writing now, she's much angrier than I ever thought she would be."

In contrast, the author comes across as a warm woman overflowing with ideas and energy. She divides her time between New York City, Woodstock in upstate New York, and London. She takes time out from writing to host a monthly literary segment for a BBC children's show called Live and Kicking. (Her popularity is secure in Great Britain. She was nominated for the British Book Award for children, but native Ann Fine, of Mrs. Doubtfire fame, edged her out.)

Perhaps some of Amber's newfound anger is rooted in Danziger's childhood, which had its share of complications, described in the well-received 1974 book that launched her career, The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, about 13-year-old Marcy Lewis.

"[The book] is very much my growing up," she says. "At age 12, I was put on tranquilizers when I should have gotten help," she continues. "There was nothing major and awful, I just didn't feel [my family] was supportive and emotionally generous. My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother is very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood."

Danziger sums up the subject with one of her trademark quips: "I always say that the family would now be called dysfunctional; back then we were just Danzigers."

One of the things that's seen her through good times and bad is her sense of humor. She even names many of her characters after favorite comedians, such as Ernie Kovacs.

The origin of Amber Brown's name, however, is a joke between fellow writers. When author and illustrators Marc and Laurie Brown-the creators of a multitude of best-selling books about Arthur the Aardvark and his sister D.W.-were expecting a child, Danziger suggested that they name their baby Amber.

"Then everyone would call her Crayola Face," Danziger told them. Instead, the Browns named their daughter Eliza, and now she receives advance copies of the Amber Brown books for critique.

Before turning to writing, Danziger was a junior high school teacher. While her students provided plenty of raw material for the beginning writer, she strongly recommends that anyone interested in the craft take acting lessons, as she did, on the advice of a teacher.

"They're wonderful for anyone who wants to learn about characterization and motivation," she explains. "No matter what age you are, if you want something more than anything else, but can't have it, to me, that becomes a plot."

As for her own plots, she says, "I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book; you just tell the best story you know how to tell."

An important mentor was poet John Ciardi, whose children Danziger babysat during her college years. After learning of their sitter's literary interests, Ciardi and his wife took Danziger to literary conferences.

"He taught me a lot about language," she remembers. He suggested that she analyze one poem by underlining the funny lines in red and the serious lines in blue. By the end of the poem, Ciardi said, you get purple.

"That's what I always write toward," Danziger says, "that mixture. I think that's why Amber Brown works: the books are funny and sad, and that's what people respond to."

Danziger's titles alone are often enough to catch the attention of adults and young readers alike. Take, for instance, Remember Me to Harold Square and its recent sequel set in London, Thames Doesn't Rhyme with James. Although written for an older audience than the Amber Brown books, they have the same witty humor and quick phrasing that appeal to kids today.

Of course, appealing to kids and appealing to their parents is not always the same thing. Danziger has noticed this at book signings for Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice? Some parents have told her they would never buy such a book for their child; others say they can't wait to get it in the hands of their son or daughter.

"You know [the latter] are probably pretty good parents," Danziger says, "because they've got a sense of humor and they're not afraid."

Alice Cary has interviewed many writers for this publication.

Paula Danziger owes a slice of her success to a pizza party. Her popular books about Amber Brown were inspired by a phone conversation with her then seven-year-old niece, Carrie, who was obviously upset.

"She was a crazed person," Danziger remembers.
"Aunt, we're having a pizza…

A baby brother gets all the attention. A weekend visitor acts conniving and rude. A little girl gets lost. Kevin Henkes’ picture books and novels are a celebration of the ordinary, written and illustrated with extraordinary aplomb.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Wisconsin native and resident describes his childhood and adult life as ordinary, saying: "It’s amazing how certain things in everyday life can turn into a book, and the people who inspired it never know it."

Such is the case with Henkes’ latest creation, Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse in which Lilly, one of his indomitable mouse heroines, receives a spectacular present from her Grammy: a purse that plays music when opened, along with "movie-star sunglasses" studded with rhinestones and hung on a chain. The accessories are the perfect complement to Lilly’s trademark red cowboy boots and a crown.

Inspiration for the story struck several years ago when Henkes was on a book tour, waiting in an airport. He believes he was in Boise, Idaho, when he spotted a girl with a pocketbook just like Lilly’s.

"She was driving her father crazy," Henkes says. "It was one of those moments when the light bulb really goes off. I thought the pocketbook would be perfect for Lilly. So I got on the airplane and began writing."

In the plot that evolved, life is pretty wonderful for Lilly. In addition to her new purse, she loves school and idolizes her hip teacher, Mr. Slinger, who greets the class with "howdy," not hello, wears "artistic" shirts, and believes rows of desks are boring. Instead of rows, Lilly’s offbeat instructor suggests: "Do you rodents think you can handle a semicircle?"

Mr. Slinger is definitely cool. That is, until he is forced to take Lilly’s purse away, after she refuses to stop showing it off and disturbing the class. And thus a new mouse predicament is born. Lilly doesn’t take any challenge lightly, as readers discovered in Julius, the Baby of the World, in which she torments her baby brother by proclaiming him the "germ of the world." (Henkes was inspired for this one when his niece didn’t like her new role as an older sister.)

Lilly is part of an entire Henkes Mousedom, whose inhabitants can also be found in the Caldecott Honor winner Owen; Chrysanthemum; Chester’s Way; Sheila Rae, the Brave; and A Weekend with Wendell. None of Henkes’s mice, by the way — even the quieter ones — could ever be described as meek. While some characters reappear in several books, Lilly has yet to cross paths with the fearless Sheila Rae, who would definitely be a worthy match.

"They haven’t officially met," Henkes says, "but I think about [such an encounter] a lot. It seems like there’s a lot of possibility there. And I get letters from kids asking when they’ll meet."

Henkes’ fondness for rodents doesn’t stem from personal experience. He has never had a pet mouse, only uninvited house mice. In fact, his first four books featured people. As his writing became more humorous, he decided animals would help tap into this fun, so he used rabbit characters in Bailey Goes Camping, in which a young rabbit is left behind when his older siblings go camping. Next, he switched to mice in A Weekend with Wendell, and also in Chester’s Way, in which Lilly makes her debut.

"I liked Lilly in a way that I had never liked a character of mine before," he says. "I thought there was more about her to tell, so I stuck with it."

Older readers know yet another side of the creator, whose novels include Protecting Marie (just published in September), Two Under Par, Words of Stone, and The Zebra Wall — books that Henkes says feel like "very separate worlds" from his picture books.

"I’ve always thought of myself as an artist," he says, "but now I’m beginning to like the writing more — although it’s nice to go back and forth."

Henkes describes his novels in terms that apply to all of his books: "quiet family stories that mirror my life as a child pretty closely."

Henkes was the fourth of five children, for six years the baby. No, he didn’t torment his youngest sibling as Lilly does Julius, but says he clearly remembers feeling jealous.

The Henkes clan made regular visits to the library, where Henkes fell in love with many works, chief among them the illustrations of Crockett Johnson, Garth Williams, the works of William Steig, and a book called Rain Makes Applesauce, by Julian Scheer, illustrated by Marvin Bileck.

He and the other kids in his family also took art lessons at a nearby museum. But it was Kevin’s older brother, not Kevin, who was considered the artist of the family.

"I was frustrated," Henkes says, "because he is six years older than I am and could always draw and paint more realistically. And he always took the nice, fine brushes, while I got stuck with the fat, scraggly ones."

Their paths eventually diverged, however. The older brother now owns a print shop. Kevin continued to draw and paint. And lest you wonder where his characters get their confidence and tenacity, listen to how his career began: At age 19, Kevin gathered "his life savings" and spent a week in New York City, showing his portfolio to his favorite children’s publishers.

"I was convinced," he says, "I would come home with a book contract." He started making the rounds on a Monday, and by Tuesday morning had a contract with Susan Hirschman at Greenwillow, his first choice of a publisher. Yes, even ordinary lives are not without their crowning moments.

"I was excited," he says, "in a way that maybe I haven’t been since in my book life. It is still a very big deal when Susan calls."

Now, however, the person most likely to call is his 14-month-old Will — Henkes’ and his wife’s very own baby of the world. Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse is dedicated to Will. Henkes shares child care shifts with his wife, a painter, each working about four hours a day in separate studios, both in spare bedrooms. Although Henkes works fewer hours than he did before becoming a father, the books keep coming. When we spoke, he had just finished a novel, Sun and Spoon, to be published in the fall of 1997. For his next project, he’s mulling several ideas, including another Lilly book, another Owen book, and a novel.

"I need to just let things simmer for a while," he says, "and see what’s going to come to the surface."

Alice Cary is a writer in Groton, Mass.

A baby brother gets all the attention. A weekend visitor acts conniving and rude. A little girl gets lost. Kevin Henkes' picture books and novels are a celebration of the ordinary, written and illustrated with extraordinary aplomb.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Wisconsin native and resident…

Hemlines go up and down; carbohydrates are in, then out; Southwest decor is hot, then not. But as Valerie Gray, executive editor of MIRA Books, SPICE Books and Red Dress Ink, tells BookPage, “The romance genre has never gone out of fashion.” She predicts that in the current economic situation these books “will be more popular then ever.” Why? Because they make the reader feel good—a sort of comfort food, one might say, to get people through difficult times.

Though romance as a whole is well rooted, it can be classified into subgenres that ebb and flow in popularity. For the past few years, stories with otherworldly elements have flourished, and Shauna Summers, senior editor at Bantam Books, says, “Paranormal doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.” However, reader buzz and the talk at writers’ conferences are about stories that some are calling “big romance”—contemporary novels that closely mirror real life and real women. Summers says these stories have “layered characters” and a “complex conflict,” while Abby Zidle, senior editor at Pocket Books, describes them as “romance/women’s fiction crossovers” that convey “intense emotional drama.”

Building big romance
Some of these crossover stories take place in highly detailed community settings. MIRA author Robyn Carr has gained popularity and reader loyalty through her stories set in fictional Virgin River (Second Chance Pass, A Virgin River Novel is out this month), just as Debbie Macomber, another best-selling MIRA author, has readers longing to visit Cedar Cove and Blossom Street, two of the locales for her most recent series. Gray says these books give readers the “community of their dreams.” Though most people do not live in a location like those depicted, they want to believe such “places of safety, family values . . . and neighborly nosiness exist.”

But big romance doesn’t necessarily require a small-town setting. Some are more urban, like the contemporaries by best-selling author Lisa Kleypas (her third, Smooth Talking Stranger, comes out in March 2009). Though the characters are still rooted in reality, in this type of novel, the hero and heroine’s dilemmas, not the community, are the star attraction. Lucia Macro, vice president and executive editor of Avon Books, describes these stories as “hard-hitting, with characters facing life changing events and/or moral dilemmas, so the books aren’t all sweetness and light.”

Looking ahead
What’s driving this upsurge of realism? Zidle posits that it’s the “natural evolution of the genre, adding that “paranormal came up so strong that if you aren’t a reader to whom that appeals, you’ve maybe been feeling a little left out.” No longer, according to the editors we contacted. All expressed growing interest in big romance, and Tara Parsons, an editor at HQN Books who works with contemporary favorite Susan Mallery, says that the “authors’ fantastic writing and storytelling” deserve credit.

Yet the trend toward books in which “real women struggle with real problems and relationships” as described by Zidle, is spurred by more than a reaction to paranormal romance’s popularity. Macro reminds us that in life today “we are attached to devices—iPods . . . BlackBerrys. . . . Even our  ‘friends’ are just tiny photos on Facebook.” The increasing popularity of these types of romances makes it clear that readers long for more intimacy. Those who love the place-based books get to feel like a community member who belongs, while in other contemporary stories it’s enough for the reader to identify with the heroine and see her own happy ending reflected in the character’s. That sense of connection with at least one other person, and the hopeful belief that love has the power to overcome difficult conflicts and troubling times, is why romance will never be out of style.

Hemlines go up and down; carbohydrates are in, then out; Southwest decor is hot, then not. But as Valerie Gray, executive editor of MIRA Books, SPICE Books and Red Dress Ink, tells BookPage, “The romance genre has never gone out of fashion.” She predicts that…

Stereotypes seem almost inevitable when someone tries to portray the relationships that existed 50 years ago between black people and white people in the South. Usually they swing from the extremes of Mississippi Burning to Driving Miss Daisy. So it’s a bit surprising—and refreshing—that Kathryn Stockett, who wasn’t born until years after that time, manages to capture something close to reality while avoiding most of the pitfalls in her first novel, The Help. Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, The Help is told through three voices: Aibileen, an older black woman who has been taking care of white families since she was 13; Minny, a younger black woman who finds it difficult to curb her sharp tongue around her white employers; and Skeeter, a privileged white girl fresh out of college, who wants more from life than marriage to the first presentable young man her mother can produce.

Stockett, a Mississippi native who now lives in Atlanta with her husband and five-year-old daughter, says the idea of writing the book first came to her as an antidote to homesickness. She was working for a magazine consulting firm in New York City, but frequently found her thoughts turning to the South and to Demetrie, the black woman who cared for Stockett when she was growing up. Finally she asked her bosses if she could take a month off to write about these memories. She laughs when she remembers the response.

“They said, ‘You’re not in Mississippi anymore, Kitty.’ They thought that people in Mississippi were a little more leisurely about jobs. I said, no, really, I don’t want to be paid. I just want to take a month off because I want to hunker down and write this story. And something happened—it was so nurturing and wonderful to hear Demetrie’s voice again. I think that’s really what drew me to the story, to hear her talking in my head 15 years after she had died.”

Although Stockett wasn’t born until 1969, seven years after the events depicted in her book, she said she not only had a wealth of information provided by the stories Demetrie had told her, but also from her parents and her 98-year-old grandfather.

“Demetrie worked for my grandmother and my grandfather, starting in the mid-50s, and my grandfather has the most remarkable memory. He doesn’t just remember details, he remembers dates. He remembers the temperature on that day; he’s kind of a savant that way. So I had a pretty good research tool right there in the living room with me.”

Stockett re-creates an environment that will be all too familiar to the people who lived through it: a time when “colored” people could cook food for white folks, but couldn’t sit down and eat with them. When a colored maid could wash the family’s dishes, but had to eat from her own plate because of the “germs” she might pass to her employers.

And heaven forbid that the black maid use the same bathroom as her white “family”! This is the event that opens the novel and that first opens Skeeter’s eyes to the injustice of this terribly skewed system. After listening to her friend, Hilly, present her plans for a “Home Help Sanitation Initiative” to their bridge group, Skeeter follows Aibileen, the maid, into the kitchen.

“Do you ever wish you could . . . change things?” [Skeeter] asks. And I can’t help myself. I look at her head on. Cause that’s one a the stupidest questions I ever heard. She got a confused, disgusted look on her face, like she done salted her coffee instead a sugared it. I turn back to my washing, so she don’t see me rolling my eyes. “Oh no, ma’am, everthing’s fine.

Skeeter may have had her consciousness raised a tiny bit, but it takes a long while before she can treat Aibileen as a person, rather than a colored person. Likewise, it takes a lot for Aibileen to learn to trust Skeeter. A key element of the book is Stockett’s use of language. The rhythms of the dialect are nearly flawless, due in no small part to the author’s refusal to use the “gonna,” “cain’t,” “sho-nuff,” spellings too many writers fall back on when trying to establish a sense of regionalism. Stockett credits this to her creative writing teacher at the University of Alabama.“She taught me a lot of things, but she taught me one rule and that was, as long as it’s a word in the dictionary, you can use it. So I had to be really creative in figuring out how to write idiom. As long as it didn’t set off the Spell-Checker, that was the rule—I could use it.”

Not all of the characters discriminated against in Stockett’s novel are black. Celia Foote is a white girl from the wrong side of the tracks who married well, but can’t break the barrier her background presents. Stockett felt she was important to the story, too.

“Just because you’re white and good looking and rich doesn’t mean you’re going to walk in the door of the Junior League,” she says. “I felt like if I was going to be talking about Southern women, I couldn’t leave out the fact that sometimes, they love to snub their own kind.”

While it was a daunting task to tackle stereotypes and successfully make her characters human, it took even more courage to write about this time and these issues as a white woman—something Stockett said she never forgot.

“You have to be careful what you say and how you say it, because people are really sensitive about this. We loved them [the black household workers] and they were part of our family but we didn’t ask them to sit down at the table with us. That just wasn’t done. Not that they were dying to sit down with us anyway, but there was a pretty well defined set of rules. And you knew what the rules were and you knew if you were breaking them.”

Breaking rules forms the core of The Help, an idea summarized in what Stockett says is her favorite sentence of her first novel: “Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, ‘We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.’ ”

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

Stereotypes seem almost inevitable when someone tries to portray the relationships that existed 50 years ago between black people and white people in the South. Usually they swing from the extremes of Mississippi Burning to Driving Miss Daisy. So it’s a bit surprising—and refreshing—that Kathryn…

Housecleaning often results in unpleasant surprises—astonishingly large dust bunnies, lower back pain and the like. For Kathryn Fitzmaurice, however, a tidying session led to something else entirely: a decision to leave her teaching career and focus on writing full time.

In an interview from her Southern California home, where she lives with her husband and two sons, the author tells BookPage that her grandmother, science fiction writer Eleanor Robinson, “passed away 21 years ago and left me a huge box of unfinished work. She wrote on the box, ‘Give these to Kathy—she’ll know what to do with them.’ ”

For many years, Fitzmaurice says, “I’d go by it and think about trying to follow in her footsteps. I kept putting it off because I was afraid to really see if I could it.” Then, three years ago, “I was cleaning out the house and, looking at that box, I thought, I want to try it!” Although quitting her teaching job was “a really scary decision,” it was a sound one: Fitzmaurice soon signed a two-book deal, and her first novel for young readers, The Year the Swallows Came Early, lands in bookstores this month.

A few weeks after the book’s release—March 19, St. Joseph’s Day, to be exact—hundreds of cliff swallows will arrive at the San Juan Capistrano Mission from Goya, Argentina; they will remain in California until their October return flight.

“That’s 7,500 miles one way,” Fitzmaurice marvels. “They’ve been doing it for centuries, fulfilling their inner biological destiny. It’s one thing that’s always the same, a promise that will never be broken.”

Unbroken promises are something that Eleanor “Groovy” Robinson (named for the author’s grandmother) longs for as The Year the Swallows Came Early begins. The seventh-grader witnesses her father’s arrest, only to learn that her mother called the police. Although Groovy’s small family is a loving one, her father’s carefree yet unreliable nature has finally led him to do something that could jeopardize Groovy’s future. Groovy is a thoughtful child who dreams of attending culinary school. She practices cooking at home and at the nearby Swallow restaurant, where she joins her schoolmate Frankie in working for his stepbrother Luis.

Fitzmaurice skillfully captures the sound and feel of children’s conversations—the banter between Groovy and the brothers, with its underlying fondness, feels genuine and sweet. So, too, do Groovy’s interactions with the sassy Marisol, a neighbor girl who is determined to become a famous artist and is supportive of Groovy’s dreams of a life filled with creative pursuits.

That sense of possibility, of a world wide open, infuses the book; even as the characters are hurt or confused by the strange, sometimes incomprehensible turns their lives are taking, they cook and draw and look forward to the swallows’ arrival.

The author says she enjoys writing for the middle-grade age group (8 to 12) because of that sense of wonder. “I love it, because children that age still believe things can really happen. They have hope and faith built into them . . . not that you necessarily lose that after age 12, but I love the spark at that age where everything is possible, still.”

One possibility that’s central to The Year the Swallows Came Early is that of forgiveness. As Fitzmaurice notes, “Forgiveness is hard, and sometimes you have to do it again and again. It can slip away.”

She adds, “I would hate to sound didactic. But maybe, if someone could see it’s possible to make the choice to forgive someone vs. to keep on being angry—it’s so exhausting, and it takes away from the good things in your life even if you’re not aware of it.” With forgiveness, as with writing, Fitzmaurice says, “You can’t push it—you have to wait until it’s there.” She writes between 4 p.m. and 1 a.m., in an office that has on its shelves volumes by or from her grandmother, including a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems.“ In the front cover, she wrote, ‘Dearest Katherine, Emily Dickinson is a revered poet. Perhaps one day the same will be said of you. Love, Grandmother Eleanor.’ I made a copy and framed it,” Fitzmaurice says. “It shines from the wall, giving me hope and a map toward someone I can maybe become someday.”

Linda M. Castellitto housecleans and writes in North Carolina.

Housecleaning often results in unpleasant surprises—astonishingly large dust bunnies, lower back pain and the like. For Kathryn Fitzmaurice, however, a tidying session led to something else entirely: a decision to leave her teaching career and focus on writing full time.

In an interview from her Southern…

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